In this latest version of Fusion, the following changes have been made:
Headline features
New release notes functionality
From this version onwards, users logging into the back office for the first time after their system has been upgraded will be presented with a popup providing a summary as to what has changed since their last log-in. If this is the first time they have logged in for a while or their system has been upgraded by multiple versions, the user will be presented with a summary for each version increment.
Clicking anywhere on the row will open this page of the user manual for that version and simultaneously mark that release as “read”. Additionally, the user can choose to manually mark that item as read (or all as read) and the next time they log in, they will not see these read items again.
Price management improvements
How prices are managed with Fusion has undergone an overhaul. While all users should benefit from these changes, the biggest beneficiaries will be users who manage large multi-school systems. Behind the scenes, these changes are fundamental to how Fusion works and we were very aware that we had to limit any disruption for our existing, single-school systems who understand the current system as it currently is. Therefore, any changes we made had the following requirements:
- Existing single-school systems must be able to intuitively use the new system with no training required.
- Reduce the administration of prices to the minimum absolute minimum required.
- Allow individual schools to have their own prices for a product if required
- Add improved tools to make the management of products and promotions easier
- Improve performance
The new pricing system we have implemented uses a hierarchical model, with a ‘Global’ level at the top of the pyramid, optional ‘School areas’ in the middle, and individual ‘Schools’ at the bottom. It works by setting a global price for an item which will be used across the system unless an override is set further down (in cases where it is a single-school system, all prices are global ones). For example, if you have an item that is the same price at every school within the system, all you now need to do is set the price once at the global level, and all the schools within the system will now use this price. If a single school needs to charge a different price for that item, an override can simply be enabled just at that school and a new price entered. This provides greater control while reducing the administrative burden.
No longer need to manually save pricing changes
Previously after making changes to prices, you had to press a save button to commit the changes. Users would all too often make changes but lose them after forgetting to save. Additionally, if you had two users wanting to make changes at the same time, the second person to save would incorrectly overwrite the changes made by the first person. Now, after you have finished changing a price, that change is instantly saved to the database as soon as you navigate away from that cell.
Improved visibility and management of promotions
Fusion allows for the creation of promotions, commonly referred to as “Meal deals”. Previously, the ability to create and manage promotions was a little hidden and would often be forgotten about when schools would change their prices. Now, there is a new ‘Add promotion’ button directly on the PLU screen, and existing promotions are now shown amongst products in the same table, and are managed and priced in the exact same way.
Improved ‘Bulk price change’ tool
The ‘Bulk price change’ tool has been completely rewritten. This functionality now provides a “wizard” that guides you through making changes so that you can do this more easily and confidently.
Improved price list management
Price lists control the price of products between date ranges. They allow you as a user, to prepare for future price changes and have these changes automatically trigger on the specified start date. The process to select price lists has been simplified and the management of them made easier. Additionally, the process of exporting and importing price lists via a .csv file has been improved.
Performance improvements
Lastly, the performance of this screen and its related functions have been drastically improved by optimising the storage and retrieving of product and pricing data, making those systems with thousands of products to manage much more responsive.
User-type settings management improvements
Just like with pricing, the management of user type settings has also received an overhaul, allowing for the same level of flexibility whilst reducing administration.
New look
The User types screen has received a new look. Previously, there was a lot of steps to locate and view/edit the settings that you were interested in. Now, all settings from all the user types are presented in a new grid which closely resembles the PLU screen. This means that you can now locate and change the settings that you wish to change more quickly, while being able to more easily see which settings are in use by all the available user types.
Multi-school systems, global settings and overrides
Just like prices, user type settings will now follow the same hierarchical structure, where a setting can be set globally, and then overridden at a particular school area, or individual schools as required. For example, perhaps all schools have a daily limit for students of £6, but one school wants to have a daily limit of £7. Now the global daily limit for students can be set at £6 and an override set just for the one school that wants the different limit.
User type settings lists
Previously, each user type could have settings starting on different days. Whilst this allows users to make changes that would become active when the start date rolls around, how this was managed was a little confusing and different from how price lists were managed. To simplify this, we have improved how these settings lists are managed, replicating how we do the management of price lists.
Force offline mode
Fusion has the ability to operate offline while there is no connection to the data server. However, in the case of intermittent network or server issues, some clients wanted to force the Point of Sale into offline mode even if the data server is connected, so that they can get through service without the connection disconnecting and reconnecting frequently. This is now possible.
General improvements
- Improved school switcher: Changed the school switching process in the back office to make it easier to locate and switch to the school that you want to view
- Products can now have more than one barcode registered against them
- The ‘Prices’ tab when adding or editing a PLU has been removed so that all prices are managed in the same place to avoid confusion
- The ‘Add’, ‘Edit’, and ‘Delete’ PLU buttons from the layout editor screens have been replaced with a single ‘Manage PLUs’ button that navigates the user to the PLU screen so that all products and prices are managed in the same place to avoid confusion
- Added some keyboard shortcuts to manage products on the PLU screen as some users prefer to use these
- CTRL+N: New PLU. CTRL+S: Save PLU, CTRL+SHIFT+S: Save PLU & Close, CTRL+E: Edit PLU
- Added a new ‘Breakfast limit’ so just like with the Break limit, you can now restrict how much users can spend during breakfast time
- Updated the back office feedback button to link to the new Product Board portal
- Improved performance of the Daily Summary report(s) by optimising the data source
Bug fixes
- Fixed an issue where the date range on User activity screen would occasionally default to just showing today’s transactions, rather than the previous 28 days.
- Fixed an issue where long menu names caused display issues on the PoS
- Fixed an issue where some settings could still be edited by logins, even though they did not have the ‘Edit settings’ permission
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