What's new in REV23 Desktop v17.1

Third blog post in one day! Are you still with us? Good! Because we’re going to talk about what’s new in REV23 Desktop v17.1!

This version is definitely not the largest update of Tattoo Management Studio… err… REV23 Desktop that we’ve ever released, but it has some good improvements that I’m excited about. As you can tell, there was a lot of movement happening behind the scenes over the last year. We’d been in the 3.2 release cycle of Tattoo Management Studio for a while and were due for a new major version. But somewhere during development, we decided on the name change while working on the site, so things got delayed a bit. But now we've got a new version that's better than ever!

So, onto what’s new!

Settings Upgrade Notes: When upgrading from a previous version of Tattoo Management Studio, the settings in Global Options, such as default printers, whether or not to use the cash drawer, etc... are not retained. You will need to reset these options to your preferred defaults by going to the Tools tab → Global Options. You can find out more about these options here.

Service Amount and Quantity have moved: The Service amount and quantity fields have moved to be in the same section as Customer, Service Type, Employee, etc... it didn't make any sense to have you drop down beneath the Sale button to set the price then move the mouse back up. So, it may throw you off for a day or two, but its definitely better this way.

Constant Contact Removed: Due to low adoption rate, the Constant Contact integration was removed from REV23 Desktop. You can now easily export your customer email list by selecting the "Email list" variant while in the Customer list, then File → Export to CSV and upload that to your email marketing system of choice.

Enhanced Security: Our security system was overhauled a bit to allow for more granular permissions. While the roles we have were recreated to behave pretty much the same way they worked before, we can do some interesting things now. For instance, users in the Service Provider role can now see their commission on services, but not other service providers. Fields where the user does not have access to see them are currently labeled “Protected Content”, but the plan is to have these be hidden in a future update.

Note: Custom roles you may have created could not be presevered during this upgrade. As a result, you may need to add users to the appropriate roles after updating to this version.

Updated Navigation: While addressing a bug that most of our users have run into at some point or another, where the navigation panel just disappears without an easy way to get it back, we took the opportunity to update the navigation bar. Modeling the new experience off of Microsoft Outlook 2016 (which is how most of Desktop is modeled), the navigation groups now lay at the bottom of the window. Switching between groups will give a nice transition animation.

Translations of Templates and Custom Text: New in this version you can create translations of your templates and custom text for different languages. You can now set a user or customers’s preferred language in their profile, so you can create an experience where their release form, aftercare form, text messages and emails are presented to them in their native language. Desktop doesn’t automatically translate for you, you will need to provide the localized version of these texts.

Appointment Confirmation: Previously a customer would receive their appointment reminder by email and or text at the set interval (by default, 24 hours). Now, you can enable a Virtual Receptionist task that will also send them the confirmation of the appointment right as it is created.

Required Field Rules: Sitting in Configuration, you can now customize fields of an object that are required before being allowed to save it. We’ve built in some of the most common requests that you can enable or disable as desired. Some examples are ensuring that the customer has a phone number entered, or requiring the user gather’s the source (where the client heard about you). Additionally, instead of just making the validation fail, you can make the rule a warning, which will allow them to bypass it if needed, but remind them to try and get that information.

Hide unused SMS Gateways (Mobile Providers): Small but useful, you can now hide SMS Gateways from the list that appears when you select one for a client, so you can just focus on those major ones for your region. Uncheck the “Visible” field in Configuration, SMS Gateways to hide the ones you don’t need. Additionally, in Studio options you can now set a default provider if everyone around you pretty much as the same one and you’re tired of searching for it.

List View Loading Improvements: We've introduced a new way we load data into lists. While it may seem slower to some while it seemingly loads records one by one into the list, its actually faster because you're able to get in and start searching right away instead of waiting for them all to load. We have more improvements planned for this in an upcoming maintenance release that just didn't quite make the cut for this version.

Black Skin: Added the Office 2016 Black skin (which is the new default). You will love it.

Scheduler Agenda View: You can now put the scheduler into an Agenda view (similar to your mobile device).

Calculate Price for Tax: There is a neat little tool in Inventory Items → Manage Studio Item that allows you to set the desired price after sales tax is applied. For example, if your tax is 8% and you want an item to be exactly $20.00 this tool will set the subtotal to $18.52. Then when it's added to a sale, it will be $20.00.

Much More: Those are the highlights of this version. All in all there were 55 new features, improvements and optimizations and 30 bug fixes/corrections over version 3.2!
What’s your favorite new feature? Did you find one we didn’t mention here that you’re digging? Let us know in the comments.