nexus 9.5 release notes - etq – nexus...

Nexus 9.5

Release Notes

Contents

1. Overview ............................................................................................................................................................................ 1

2. New Nexus Control Centre .......................................................................................................................................... 2

Tree view menu now searchable ................................................................................................................................. 2

New Control Centre Designer ..................................................................................................................................... 3

A. Adding or removing a tab page in control centre ........................................................................................................... 3

B. Setting Tab key order of the buttons ................................................................................................................................... 4

C. Multi Control selection and editing ..................................................................................................................................... 5

D. Adding a button from the menu ............................................................................................................................................ 5

3. New look Nexus Powerflex Programs ....................................................................................................................... 6

4. Enhanced Contact Management Interface ............................................................................................................... 7

5. Advanced Electronic Document Delivery using Contact Management ............................................................ 8

Overview ............................................................................................................................................................................ 8

Documents the Electronic Delivery rules appled to ................................................................................................. 8

The Electronic Delivery Rule hierarchy ........................................................................................................................ 9

Launching SYSEDMNT for a Specific Debtor / Creditor / Employee ............................................................. 9

A. Configure the rules by Contact ............................................................................................................................................ 9

B. Configure the rules by Program ......................................................................................................................................... 11

Launching SYSEDMNT from Nexus Control Center ............................................................................................ 12

6. Enhanced Security Control over changing Creditor EFT and Bank Details .................................................... 15

7. Multi-line Content from Enquiry Programs now Exportable to Excel ................................................................. 16

8. Over 100 FastReport base templates now exportable to Excel ....................................................................... 18

9. FastReports Raw Data now exportable to Excel .................................................................................................... 19

10. Nexus FastReport Allowing Multiple FRX Designs for the same XSD and XML files................................. 22

NEXUS 9.5 RELEASE NOTES.DOCX Version 1.0 Page | 1

1. Overview

Nexus 9.5 encapsulated a series of new features and enhancements to existing programs with the focus

placed upon the Control Centre, Electronic Document Delivery, Contact Management System and Excel

exportability. This document outlines all the changes that have been released with the Nexus 9.5 programs.

Nexus 9.5 login screen carried on from the Nexus 9 login screen design with the logo updated to reflect the

version.

Once logged in, you will be presented with a much enhanced control centre.


2. New Nexus Control Centre

The enhancements to Nexus Control Centre are aimed at usability improvements. We have endeavored to

make program selection faster, layout change easier and with less mouse clicks.

Tree view menu now searchable

The Nexus Tree view menu was introduced in Nexus 2012 to simplify the program access from the menu. In

version 9.5, the tree view menu has advanced further, with the dynamic search capability added. The tree view

menu can be turned on or off using the View menu or Ctrl+T key combination.

Next to the existing Expand all/Collapse all icon , there is a new search box. Following the behavior of

our search- as-you-type lookup, typing in the search box will highlight any matching word(s) in the entire

hierarchy of the menu, resulting in a narrower selection of programs. Below is an illustration of searching with

the keyword “Period”, and all menu items with the “Period” word in their names being highlighted and listed.


New Control Centre Designer

In Nexus 9.5, the Design tool button is replaced with a menu item Design. You can also use the keyboard

shortcut Ctrl+D to invoke the designer. The designer runs in a separate window in 9.5.

A. Adding or removing a tab page in control centre

Once landed in the Control Centre Designer, you will see your Control Centre in its edit mode. A property

pane is showing on the right, at the bottom of which are two links for you to add or remove a Tab page.

A tabbed page is used to group speed buttons, labels and other relevant resources to keep the Nexus control

centre desk top tidy and organized. This is particularly necessary for Administrators or users with higher

privileges to access many areas of Nexus ERP. For users with limited operations, he/she may only ever need to

access a few speed buttons on one page.

The Property Pane is context sensitive. If you click on the tab bar of the Contral Centre, the property window

will change the property listing to display properties related to the overall design rather than a particular Tab

page. Here you can perform more Tab page related actions such as sorting, naming etc.

Clicking on the … button next to the TabPages (Collecton) field, a TabPage Collection Editor window will pop

up. Here you can name the tab page, change the order of the tab page or add/remove a page.


B. Setting Tab key order of the buttons

As multiple speed buttons can be placed on a single tab page of the Control Centre. The simplest way to use

a button is to click on it, if you would rather use the keyboard to activate a button, you may want to set the tab

order of the buttons so that when you use the Tab key, the focus will jump from one button to the next following

a desired order. This can be achieved by selecting Tools – Tab Order from the menu bar. Using mouse, you

click through the buttons in the order you like, and the number of the button showing at the top left corner of

each button will increment. Once completed, hit File – Save or Ctrl-S to preserve the tab order you just set.


C. Multi Control selection and editing

Adding a button to the control centre works in the similar way as it did in Nexus 9. However, in 9.5, you are

now able to multi select a set of controls (buttons or labels) and perform functions such as object alignments,

copy/pastings or deletions at a group level. This can be performed either via the context menu (right-mouse

click to evoke) or Menu – Format. Copy/Cut/Pasting functions can be performed across Tab Pages.

D. Adding a button from the menu

Similar to previous versions of Nexus, you can create a button from the menu in design mode. To do this, in the

new Control Centre Designer, select menu Tools – Add from Menu.

The Add From Menu Window will open up. Locate the menu item you would like to add (the search box can

be used for this purpose), click on it and you will see a new button for that program added to the Control

Centre. Reposition the button and change properties of the button as you see fit, then save the design so the

new change is preserved.


3. New look Nexus Powerflex Programs

Nexus programs are a combination of PowerFlex (Pflex) programs and C# programs. In this release, we are

able to update all Pflex programs to have a consistent and fresh look & feel, with menus and tool bar icons

refreshed. A typical Pflex program will look like this. The key strokes to move focus from one field to another

and all the function keys remain unchanged.


4. Enhanced Contact Management Interface

Since the Nexus Contact Management was introduced in Nexus 9, much work has been carried out to

enhance the usability of the user interface. These changes are:

When a new Contact gets created, the Company Name and Address fields will now be pre-populated

from the relevant Debtor/Creditor/Employee

You can create a new Contact by cloning an existing contact. To do that, right mouse click on the selected

Contact and choose Clone this contact or press Ctrl+N

The main window is now resizable to suite modern large screen display, and view more contacts at once.

Ability to re-order Contacts via Drag and Drop action– the order of Contacts are important as it may affect

which contact gets what document sent by Nexus Electronic Delivery as dictated by the Electronic Delivery

Branch rules (Refer to the next chapter of Nexus 9.5 Release Notes)

To re-order Contacts, you need to click on Arrange Contacts or press F6 to enter re-order mode. This is to

prevent accidental Drag-and-Drop resulting in unintended changes to delivery of a Nexus documents.

You will be presented with a warning of the actions, and then you can perform the drag-and-drop to re-

order the Contacts.


5. Advanced Electronic Document Delivery using Contact Management

Overview

The Contact Cards introduced in Nexus 9 was our first step to build a sophisticated Contact Management

system, allowing as many contact cards stored against an entity (Debtor, Creditor or Employee) as you like,

with each contact able to have as many different contact methods (emails and phone numbers) as desired.

However, you did not yet have the flexibility to choose which contact receives which type of communications

from Nexus in the Electronic (batch) mode. The programs rely on the previously established Contact 1 and 2

for differentiated communications. This has been significantly enhanced in 9.5 and you now have the full power

to configure which contact to receive what document generated from Nexus, and via what means. The

functionality extension in this area is one of the most noticeable and sought after improvements delivered with

Nexus 9.5.

The aforementioned functionality is achieved via configuring Electronic Delivery rules at the Entity

(Debtor/Creditor/Employee) or Branch level for reports that are to be sent to a debtor, creditor or employee

in Electronic mode. Configuring these rules in Nexus 9.5 is straightforward, while still providing greater flexibility

and a variety of options.

A new program SYSEDMNT – Electronic Delivery Contact Maintenance has been developed to support the

configuration of the rules. This program can be opened from a Master Maintenance program or Enquiry

program for a specific Debtor / Creditor or Employee. Alternatively, the SYSEDMNT program can be

launched from a speed button added to the Nexus Control Center, where you can search and filter all

available Debtors/Creditors/Employees or All Contacts, and maintain the delivery options in one place.

Documents the Electronic Delivery rules appled to

The Electronic Delivery rules will affect any report that are delivered to the contact(s) of a Debtor, Creditor or

Employee where the user has selected the Electronic Output option, or SystemDefault option when an E

(Electronic Output) is set in System Forms Defaults (SYSFDMNT) – Dest (Destination) field for that user and

report. Examples are shown below.


The Electronic Delivery Rule hierarchy

Nexus decides which contacts to deliver documents to based on the following rules:

1. If the Debtor / Creditor / Employee has any Custom Rules specified against itself, deliver to the

contacts specified for that Entity in SYSEDMNT.

2. If there are no Custom Rules, check for Branch Rules specified in SYSEDMNT for that particular branch.

3. If there are no Rules in place, Nexus will follow the original procedure, which is to deliver to Contact 1

(Or Contact 2 for Remittances and Quotes). This is to ensure backward compatibility when you

upgrade to Nexus 9.5

Launching SYSEDMNT for a Specific Debtor / Creditor / Employee

Below section uses the Debtor for example to illustrate the setup of Electronic Delivery Rules for a specific Entity,

hence the Debtor Master Maintenance program is used to launch SYSEDMNT.

From the Debtor Master Maintenance program, once a debtor is loaded, Electronic Delivery Maintenance

program can be invoked from the F2 options menu - Elect… 9. Contact details such as Email addresses can be

modified with option ‘cOntacts’.

A. Configure the rules by Contact

Once started, SYSEDMNT’s default screen is the first Tab screen – Configure by Contacts. It provides details of

the contacts for the selected debtor, their preferred delivery addresses, and the current Electronic Delivery

Custom Rules in place if any. Below example illustrates how to interpret information presented on this screen.


Examining the first two contacts in the list view in this example, you’ll notice the contact name, their preferred

delivery method, and the addresses available for this contact are listed. A simple ✓ or ✗ in the Electronic

Delivery column tells you if this address for this contact will receive any electronic delivery, and the Programs

column identifies if only some programs (Select) will deliver to this address or if all programs will deliver to this

address. For instance:

Contact #1 receives Electronic delivery to Email 1, for only select programs.

Contact #1 doesn’t receive any Electronic delivery to Email 2.

Contact #2 receives Electronic delivery to Fax 1, for all programs.

To modify the Custom Rules for a particular address line, you can select the line and press Enter, double click

the line, or right click the line and select Choose programs for this line option from the context menu. For

instance, for the second email for contact #1, Simon Howard, we can specify a rule for electronic delivery by

double clicking the record. This takes you to a screen where you can select the programs this email address

will receive for document delivery:

Clicking on the AR Module group will select the whole AR group of programs. You can also select individual


programs by pressing the space bar or ticking the checkbox on each line.

Press F10 to save and return to SYSEDMNT, where our new rule has been updated. Now the second address

for contact Simon Howard (email address [email protected]) will receive a copy of the generated report for

all the listed AR programs, such as ‘Statement Print’ (ARSTARPT), when they are run for this Debtor.

B. Configure the rules by Program

The second Tab screen – Configure by Program, allows you to see the same set of rules for Electronic Delivery

in a different view, where rules are organized by programs. You will see all the programs available for delivery

for this debtor are listed.

In below screenshot, the delivery rules have been expanded for program Receipt Print for Sales Order –

SORECRPT. In this example, the document printed by this program will be sent to Email #1 of Contact #1 as

well as Fax #1 of Contact #2.

Against program SMCOFRPT, there is a red None in the Electronic Delivery column, which is to highlight the

fact that no contact will receive electronic delivery for this program.

mailto:[email protected]


Editing the delivery rules in this view is consistent with when viewing in the first Tab, accessible by double

clicking a record or by pressing enter when it is selected.

Launching SYSEDMNT from Nexus Control Center

When launching SYSEDMNT from a speed button in the Nexus Control Center, apart from configuring custom

Electronic Delivery rules for specific Debtor / Creditor or Employee or specific group of them, you can also

configure Branch Rules for all Debtors / Creditors / Employees of that branch. Branch Rules will be picked up

and applied if Electronic output is selected for an Entity without any custom rules in place.

When launched from the Nexus Control Centre, SYEDMNT will display Branch Rules in bold at the top of a list

of Debtors /Creditors or Employees. The top left drop down box can be used to switch from one type of Entity

(Debtor, Creditor or Employee) to another. The filter boxes to the right will be dynamically updated to reflect

the drop down selection.


Reading the branch rules in this example, you can see that for Branch 00, Contact 1 should receive Electronic

Delivery for All programs, while Contact 2 will receive delivery for only Select (selected) programs; Contact 4

will receive delivery specifically for SMCOFRPT. As a result, when running SMCOFRPT, Nexus will deliver to

the primary address for Contact 1 and Contact 4 for that debtor. An error will occur if that debtor does not

have a contact 4, however delivery will still occur for Contact 1. In Branch 01, Contact 1 will receive delivery

for All programs.

You can define Select programs by double clicking any line, selecting a line and pressing enter, or by right

clicking and selecting ‘Choose programs for this Rule’.

Show Rules checkbox allows you to show or hide the branch rules when you need to configure rules for

specific Debtor / Creditor or Employee.

The Filter text boxes are provided to facilitate finding the relevant Debtor/Creditor/Employee. In below

example, we have selected Debtors as the entity type, filtered for Bendigo, which presents all Debtors with

Bendigo in the name, and Contact name for Joe:


Two Debtors returned - Joe’s Cuppas – Bendigo and Portobello Ristorante – Bendigo, and only contacts with

Joe in the name for these debtors are listed. Portobello Ristorante has custom delivery rules, and Joe Bloggs

receives electronic delivery from all programs. Joe’s Cuppas has no rules specified, and will therefore receive

documents based on the rules defined for Branch 00.

Using SYSEDMNT, you can also configure multiple contact method lines at the same time by holding Control

key down while selecting contact methods and then pressing Enter, or right-clicking and selecting Choose

programs for all selected lines. When multiple contacts are being modified, a square checkbox represents that

currently only some of the contacts have that particular program selected for delivery. The status bar at the

bottom of the screen informs you how many contacts are being modified currently.

From SYSEDMNT the contact details for any Debtor/Creditor/Employee can be modified via the Contact

Card screen. This can be accessed by right clicking on a Debtor and selecting Maintain contact details for this

Debtor.

From this screen contact details can be modified, preferred delivery changed, and contacts can be reordered,

added or deleted.


6. Enhanced Security Control over changing Creditor EFT and Bank Details

In Nexus 9.5, a new AP Control File maintenance option has been added to specify the required permission

level to edit a Creditor’s EFT and Bank Details. This enables you to set a higher security level required to

change these details than that required for modifying general AP master details, such as a creditor’s address.

APMASMNT will observe the new control file option and grant access to EFT and bank details accordingly.


7. Multi-line Content from Enquiry Programs now Exportable to Excel

In Nexus 9.5, a number of programs now have the ability to export the multi-line details produced by the

program to an Excel file. The list of programs are:

ARTRAENQ - Debtors Transaction Enquiry

GLDRLENQ - General Ledger Drill Down

APTRAENQ - Creditors Transaction Enquiry

APHISENQ - Creditors History Enquiry

PRHISENQ - Employee Pay History

SAHISENQ - Sales History Enquiry by Stock Code

SABHSENQ - Stock Batch/Location History Enquiry

SAVALRPT – Stock Valuation Report

(Unlike other programs in the list, this program does not produce a multi-line result, but the export works in a

similar way)

The below example uses the program Debtors Transaction Enquiry (ARTRAENQ) to illustrate how the export

can be carried out. Start the program and select a Debtor.

The result pane is a multi-line table containing debtor transactions for Debtor ABELEL. There is a new icon

added to the tool bar for available programs in this release. Clicking on this button will allow you to

export the content of the multi-line table to an Excel file. The export file location and name can be specified.


The exported content will cover all the pages returned by this program.

The resulting Excel file looks like this:

The feature makes it very easy for a user to share a Nexus query result with another party or perform additional

analysis using Excel.


8. Over 100 FastReport base templates now exportable to Excel

In Nexus 9.5 release, we also included over 100 FastReport base templates. These templates have been

redesigned to be Excel export friendly. A complete list of these reports can be provided upon request. Some

examples are listed here:

APHISRPT Creditors History Report GLBALSHT Balance Sheet Report

APMANLST Creditor List by Company Name GLPLLRPT P & L Last Year Comparison Report

APMASLST Creditor List by Creditor Code GLPLSRPT Profit and Loss Summary Report

APSUMRPT Summary Trial Balance GLPREBLS Prior Period Balance Sheet

APTRIRP1 AP Detailed Trial Balance Format 2 GLPREPLS Prior Period Profit and Loss

APTRIRP2 AP Detailed Trial Balance Format 1 GLPRETRI Prior Period Trial Balance

APTRIRP3 AP Detailed Trial Balance Format 2 GLTRIRPT Trial Balance

APTRIRP4 AP Detailed Trial Balance sum Code PRICELST price list

APTRIRP5 AP Detailed Trial Balance sum Name SACSTRPT Stock Cost Change Report

APTRIRPT Trial Balance SAREORP2 Reorder Report (Old Format)

APTRIRPT Trial Balance SAREORP2 Reorder Report (Old Format)

ARHISRPT History by Customer SAREORP3 sareorp3

ARMANLST Debtor Master List by Company Name SAREORP4 sareorp4

ARMASLST Debtor Master List by Debtor Code SAREORPT Reorder Report

ARSTARPT Statement Print SMCOFRPT Customer Order Form

ARSUMRPT Summary Trial Balance SODELMNT Delivery Run Maintenance

ARTRIRPT Trial Balance

When one of these FastReport is produced, you can use File – Save to Excel file.


9. FastReports Raw Data now exportable to Excel

If a Nexus program execution results in a FastReport document produced, then the raw data of that report can

also be saved into an Excel file. This feature is different to the Excel exportable FastReports as documented in

Chapter 8 as this applies to all Nexus Programs that produces a FastReport. The final Excel document is not the

FastReport content itself, but a data dump of the data used to produce the report which typically has more

information than what is seen in the report itself.

Below is an example:

Run Program ARSTARPT (Debtor Statement Report). Select a Debtor, and select to save to a file.

Confirm the file path and name (extension will be ignored if the selected output file type is EXCEL). If FastReport

has been previously configured to save report into separate user directory, the user login name will be added

to the specified file path. For example,


In the next dialog box – Output to File, select the file type XLRAW (XLS Data Only)

The resulting file path could be ..\XMLSPOOL\UserName\ARSTRARPT0.XLSX

or .. ..\XMLSPOOL\ARSTRARPT0.XLSX depending on the FastReport file output settings.

(note: if multiple Debtors have been selected, then there will be additional statement output file saved as

ARSTRPT1.XLS, ARSTRPT2.XLS)

Open the exported Excel file, you will see different sections of the report definition file (as defined in

ARSTRARPT.XSD) are exported to different tabs, and the content are the raw report data saved and most likely


contains more information than the FastReport ARSTARPT.FRX itself contains..

This feature again, is extremely useful if you desire to perform additional analysis of the output data.

Please note, the option to save to Excel Raw file is only available if you have configured to use a FastReport

type of report from a program.


10. Nexus FastReport Allowing Multiple FRX Designs for the same XSD and XML

files

If you have designed FastReport in the past, you will know that for a particular set of XSD and XML file, there

can be only one FastReport design. If you want to create a 2nd FastReport design for the same program, then

you need to create the 2nd XSD and XML file set from the original and name them the same as the FRX file for it

to work. This restriction is lifted in Nexus 9.5.

For example, SAINVRPT.FRX requires the presence of SAINVRPT.XSD and SAINVRPT.XML. Now you may

have multiple FastReport designs saved as SAINVRP_A.FRX, SAINVRP_B.FRX etc, all pointing to the same

SAINVRPT.XSD and SAINVRPT.XML file. Which means, by using SYSFDMNT, you can configure different users

to use different FastReport design when printing from program SAINVRPT and they will get a different looking

FRX report.