Over the past four weeks, I’ve been highlighting some of the key new features that we’ve included in the soon-to-be-released Spectra 2013. Today, I want to touch on many of the smaller enhancements that we’ve thrown into the “goodie bag” category. Suggestions for these features all came directly from you, our clients, and many came as a result of last year’s StudioPlus user conference. So, here they are:
- Sunrise and sunset times have been added to the calendar.
- The ability to merge two client records into one has been added.
- We’ve added the ability to convert an appointment to a session, which will be very helpful to Google sync users.
- We’ve also added the ability to link an unlinked appointment to a client, another helpful feature for Google sync users.
- “Primary Assistant” and “Primary Appointment User” fields have been added to filters, letters, HTML emails, and column choosers.
- New options have been added to store email attachments in either the database, a shared folder, or in your Stratus Drive (cloud storage).
- New auto-logoff capabilities have been added. If a workstation is idle for more than “x” minutes, Spectra can automatically log off the current user.
- A new session number option has been added: Last Name + First Name + Number.
- When saving a session, you will now be prompted with a message if the session is On Hold or Cancelled, warning you that the session will no longer appear on the calendar.
- On the session Organization tab, we added “Parent” and “School” as Yearbook Selected By options.
- On the Home page Task panel, we’ve included an option to also show tasks assigned to any department that the current user belongs to.
- On invoices, we added type-ahead abilities to the “Sales Tax” combo, for studios that have many sales tax entries.
- The following options have been added to Studio Preferences. Use these options in combination with Data Entry Validation to force the user to select the appropriate entry.
- Default the “Session Date” to blank
- Default the “Session Booked By” to blank
- Default the “Appointment Booked By” to blank
- Default the “Sales Rep” to blank
- New information has been added to the top of payments, displaying which client or invoice the payment belongs to.
- Status notes have been added to payments to show the history of important modifications that have taken place related to this payment.
- We’ve added new payment tracking abilities to prompt the user for their login credentials whenever a payment is created, modified, or deleted. The user’s initials are then recorded in the Status notes and Audit log.
- New integration has been added with eWay to allow clients from Australia, New Zealand, and the UK to authorize credit cards from Spectra.
- New Audit Trail options have been added to track modifications to clients, sessions, invoices, payments, and appointments.
- When creating a production order, Spectra will now automatically total the detail costs for the invoice and place the total in the purchase order “Invoice Total” field.
- We’ve added a new Studio Preferences option that will automatically set the invoice “Delivered Date” to the current date when all production orders are completed for the invoice.
- Status notes have been added to appointments.
- You will now have the ability to run either the external slide show or the internal slide show when both are present.
- The invoice “Ship-To Address” will now auto-populate the city and state based on the zip code entered.
- You can now manually enter the authorization date on the payment.
- New enhancements have been added to the Spectra Control Center. The Control Center can now be managed from any workstation and will automatically start after an upgrade has been installed. A new feature to display Control Center logs been added.
I hope you’ll find some enhancements in this list that you’ve been waiting for! Keep the great ideas coming!
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Hi Do all these updates apply to Spectra Express???
Thanks Kate
Most of these will apply to Spectra Express! But if the enhancement is related to a feature not in Express, like HTML emails, then the enhancement won’t be in Express. Thanks!
SO good to see Spectra team listening to these requests and implementing change. particularly ■When saving a session, you will now be prompted with a message if the session is On Hold or Cancelled, warning you that the session will no longer appear on the calendar.
This one is really important to have been fixed.
Thank You.
Now Id love to see an option to be able to show all clients ages in studio preferences, or keep them hidden. It makes it much easier on the shoot if we know their ages and work out who each person is.
If the client is willing to give their date of birth, then they arent too sensitive about us knowing what their age is.
I would also love an option to for calender view to be scaled for when viewing on laptop screens as compared to a 24 inch retouching monitor. ie. At the moment the size of the appointment boxes (each colour coded appointment) is the same on both screens meaning that on my laptop I only see a maximum 3 appointments in the day. Wherease the big screen I might see 6 listed in view.
Id like the laptop view to have the coloured appointment boxes smaller so we can see more without having to click on that day or week view. This is important when scheduling further appointments with a client (particularly night appointments which dont appear because the space is taken up with the day appointments)
Thanks for listening Spectra team.
As one that attended last year’s user conference, I’m glad to see the “goodie bag” come true!! Thank you for addressing so many of these issues. There’s always a million, and I know you constantly have other things you HAVE to do (like keeping Spectra compatible with new versions of Mac and Windows OS).
Gordon