Key new features
These are the headline new features for MoneyWorks 7. This version concentrates more on the internals and technical and usability improvements, rather than features per-se.
- Faster—Optimisations in the core database have yielded speed improvements which in some cases have been on the order of 10x, but are generally more modest. Optimisations in the network protocol and caching have made many network operations significantly faster, particularly list display; Posting is now done on the server; most formerly hard-coded reports have been reimplemented as custom reports, which as well as allowing user-customisation, can now be run on the Datacentre server. In general, it is now possible to access Datacentre server over a high latency (order of 30-60ms) network connection without painful slowdowns, and even moderately slow LAN access (multi-ms latency) is noticeably faster.
Datacentre database servers now run in 64-bit mode on Windows as well as Mac, improving memory availability and therefore performance for very large files.With v7, MoneyWorks Datacentre now works well over a (reliable) internet connection (and will continue to improve)
- Easy full-text search—While Moneyworks has always had quite powerful searching, it was not sufficiently useful to naïve users who did not know which field they wanted to search on. These days people are used to near-instant results from a browser search bar. So that is what we now provide. The new search field in the toolbar does a fast asynchronous full-text search (including sticky notes and transaction details). Additionally, Advanced Find is now optimised and progressively executed on the server.
Finding information is faster and easier than ever.
- Unicode—Up until now, accented characters have not translated between Mac and Windows, and there has been no proper support of non-Roman characters. In v7, all text is encoded as Unicode (specifically in the UTF-8 encoding), so the full gamut of non-Roman characters can now be entered into the database and are preserved across platforms. Accented characters (including macrons for Māori), special symbols, Chinese, Japanese, Runes, Emojis, etc..
您可以输入中文字符. પણ અને ગુજરાતી
- Scripting—MoneyWorks Gold 7 includes a built-in script editor and compiler for an easy to learn and use scripting language which allows for extensive customisation of application behaviour.
When end-users ask for new features, the answer will now more often be "yes, you can have that".
- Stock Counting—Super simple "stock" mode, fot those who want a stock count but don't want the complexity of inventory accounting.
What you need to know
- Conversion—In Gold, Express or Cashbook, opening a v6 or earlier file will convert a new copy of the file. For a large file, you may see transmogrification progress as the text in the file is transcoded to Unicode.
On Datacentre, use the Convert Files to v7 button in the Folders tab of the console to convert all files. Copies of the files will be converted and transcoded, and the original file's file extension will be changed to .archive. You can delete these archived files after conversion if you wish. IMPORTANT: Conversion to v7 should be done on the same platform the file has always been used with. This is because any non-ASCII text (e.g. accented characters) will be assumed to be encoded using the native codepage of the platform that you are doing the conversion on. Note that "same platform" refers to the client platform where text is actually displayed. If the server is Windows and all clients are Mac, the file conversions should be done on a Mac. Some non-database text such as custom column headings may be transcoded on the fly only when it is actually loaded and used. Reports and forms will be transcoded the first time they are used. Some standard forms may have special characters that are MacRoman-encoded. These will be correctly transcoded even on Windows (Windows version knows about MacRoman special characters such as « and » that may be used in forms). - Posting—When networked, posting now happens on the server so it is much faster. There is no longer a posting options dialog box—the job credit option has been moved to preferences. Posting will no longer stop if inventory would go negative and ask for a course of action—inventory will just go negative. This alert used to lock the entire database for all users while it was up.
- Customisable Reports and report signing—With the exception of the GST report, all reports have been reimplemented as custom reports, so you can modify them if you want. The factory-standard reports have been signed by Cognito to allow them to be run by anyone with appropriate privileges (usually Account Enquiry). If you change a standard report, then it will need to be signed for use by users who don't have the signing privilege (and they will still need whatever privs the report requires, unless you remove those (they are in the custom controls list)).
- Building products—parts need no longer be in stock (they will just go into negative stock).
- Running reports on server—Most reports are set to run on the server if required. This will happen automatically if the network latency is beyond a threshold considered to be "slow". If a report will be run on the server, you will see a ↔ symbol next to the Output to... control. If you hold down the Shift key when you click the Preview (or Print or whatever) button, then the run-on-server setting will be reversed (if it wasn't going to run on the server, then it will, and vice versa). Server-side reporting no longer requires a spare concurrent connection.
- Details printing—The list printing dialogs no longer have a bunch of format options. Instead all of the relevant options are available as separate reports in the list sidebar. In the case of Details printing, there is also a specific toolbar icon, since that is an often-used report.
- Asterisks in window titles—These indicate that the window is being affected in some way by a script (you will notice that this is often the case with standard report settings, which often have special custom control behaviour in the settings dialog. If you notice that some other window is behaving oddly and has an asterisk in the title bar, then the odd behaviour may be due to a script—check the scripts window.
- Uploading plugins to server—Upload All now REPLACES the plugins folder on the server (it used to merge the folders). If you do not want to replace the folder, use Upload One to upload individual files. There is also a Remove Custom Plugins button on the index to reports (change the folder popup to see it). This trashes the custom plugins on the client so that a fresh set will be downloaded on next login.
- Report writer font settings—If you change the font for a selection of parts, all of the cells on those parts will now change as well.
- Manual—is now downloaded on-demand, rather than being part of the install.
- On-line help—is now served from the web, rather than installed locally. The move to online documentation allows update installs to be full installs without a huge increase in the download size.
- Using v7 and v6 side-by-side—The Gold v7 serial number will not overwrite your v6 serial number, nor will the v7 standard plugins overwrite the v6 standard plugins, so it is entirely possible to run v6 and v7 side-by-side. Just be sure to make a copy of the v6 app/exe before updating (name the copy MoneyWorks Gold 6.1.3). Note that custom reports and forms opened/used by v7 will not be usable by v6, so also be sure to keep a copy of custom plugins with your old v6 files. This issue will only apply to accountants and consultants who deal with clients' older version files.
Outside of these, and the headline features, there are many small tweaks and fixes.