What's new in Vantage 1.9.14?

Version 1.9.14 includes a total of 39 new features, bug fixes and improvements! Here are some of the major changes in this release:

Manage Deliveries from the Till Interface

Vantage has always included a screen for managing delivery drivers, and many customers have a dedicated delivery station in their shops. In response to customer feedback, we’ve now extended this to the till interface:

You can access the delivery manager by clicking the operator menu and choosing ‘Manage Deliveries’. From here, you can see deliveries that are waiting and deliveries that are out with drivers, assign deliveries to drivers, and mark deliveries as complete when they are done – all using the touch-screen interface.

Better Website Status Control

In the past, your Vantage website was controlled entirely by your business opening hours. We now offer more flexible control over the open/closed state of your website:

You’ll find these options in the Tools menu, under Website Control Panel. You can force the website to be open or closed, or set your own custom opening hours that are independent from the opening hours of your shops.

There’s also the option to display a custom message, with many useful presets available, to be displayed on your website. This is a great way to keep customers informated about unexpected changes to your schedule, availability of items, or even promotional information!

Scripting Support

With the integration of a new scripting language to Vantage, we’ve opened up a incredible range of possibilities. In this release, we’ve added support for using a custom script to detect when to apply a promotion, but going forward we’ll be adding the ability to write your own scripts to control and customize almost every aspect of Vantage’s behaviour, making almost anything possible. This capability sets Vantage even further apart from competing systems in terms of the ability to tailour precisely to customer’s needs.

Delivery Limits

A new policy setting has been added that allows you to control the maximum number of orders a driver can take at one time. This gives you more control over the experience your customers receive, by ensuring that drivers are unable to take too many orders, causing delays in delivery.

Blocking for Instant Messaging

It’s an unfortunate fact that if you are using our instant messaging features to communicate live with customers from your website, it’s likely you will eventually encounter a disruptive or abusive user. We now offer a button for chat operators to apply a temporary block to these users, so they can concentrate on helping customers with genuine enquiries.

Other Enhancements

The performance of the order details screen has been significantly improved, and now also displays order notes, and comments on actions such as voids.

The user messaging system now includes a ‘Forward’ button, making it quicker and easier to pass on messages to other users.

Stock orders now allow for a target time to be set, so your staff can be aware of when a delivery is expected to be received, or make sure they have everything ready to dispatch on time. Custom notes can also be attached to every order, for additional instructions or information.

What's new in Vantage 1.9.12?

Improvements to Order Manager

The majority of new features for this release can be found in the Order Manager panel.

New advanced search

The Order Manager panel now includes a new, significantly more powerful way of searching for orders. The old familiar search criteria panel is still there when all you want is to quickly look up an address, but when you want to dig deeper into your order database with specific criteria, you can enable the new Advanced Filtering option and choose from a wide range of flexible search conditions.

Save your searches

See that star button in the screenshot above? Whenever you want to keep an advanced search that you've made, you can use this menu to save your searches to easily use them again at a later date. You can store as many as you like, and they are saved to your user account so they'll always be available no matter where you are.

Manipulate all search results at once

When you right-click on an order in the search results, there are a number of actions that you can perform on that order. You can also select multiple orders from one page at once and perform the same action on the whole selection. But what if there are many pages of results? Now, any actions that can be performed on the entire result set are listed under the new 'All Results' button.

Print search results

A new 'Print' button has been added which produces printed output of all search results

Performance Enhancements

Many performance enhancements have been made in this release, but most notably all order list views, including the order search, now load significantly faster and are more responsive.

New Customer Website Functionality

The standard Vantage customer website has received a substantial upgrade, with a selection of new features available. All Vecsoft customers using our standard website template can activate any or all of these features at any time.

Customer accounts

Your customers are now given multiple opportunities to save their address, phone number and other details to their own customer account. They can then log in later and quickly and easily choose past details to save entering them every time they order, making the ordering process quicker and simpler.

What's more, customers can use their account reference when ordering over the phone, in-store, or on our mobile clients, not just online. Customer accounts open up many new possibilities in building better relationships with your customers.

Proof of age entry

Underage customers attempting to purchase alcohol and cigarettes online, only to be refused when the delivery is made or they come to the shop to collect, wastes both their time and your time. Avoid this by requiring customers to enter details of ID that they have before placing an order.

Order tracking

After placing an order, customers can now track its status on the website. The status is updated automatically as you process the order, so there's no need for staff do anything. Having order progress trackable online can reduce time wasted on needless calls from customers calling to check up on their orders.

Stock counts

There's a new user permission to control who can see currently stock levels. When a user without this permission takes a stock count, they will be unable to see the expected stock levels; this makes counts more reliable by removing the possibility of simply copying the expected number.

Store locking

Every time a store is 'locked' or 'unlocked' for receiving new orders, the action is now logged to an audit trail. Tooltips have also been added to the lock indicators in the status bar which show the specific lock details, and which user locked the store.

Welcome to the new Vecsoft Blog!

Welcome to our new blog! Here you can keep up to date with company announcements and events, and stay informed about new features, improvements and fixes to our products.

We'll also be posting informative articles about some of the lesser-known, but extremely useful features of Vecsoft Vantage, and sharing hints and tips about how to get the most from your system.

Most of all though, we'd love to hear back from you, our customers, about your experiences with Vantage. Let us know what's great, and what's not so great - we are always striving to improve our software, and your feedback tells us what we should be working on next!