nettTracker version 2 - progress and expected time lines

Good progress has been made in terms of the development of version 2 of nettTracker.  Over the coming months nettTracker updates will essentially be released over three phases.  Let's explain how that will work: 

Phase 1
A brand-new user interface, improvements and simplifications to settings and asset mappings, and slight modifications to the asset register.  (release expected mid-late December)

Phase 2
Full migration to version 2 will allow depreciation to be fully calculated on assets for the rest of their useful lives, enabling the depreciation forecast to be downloaded for the next three years.  A modification to the year-end process will make it much easier to make corrections after closing the year-end.  Depreciation adjustments will be able to made against assets at any time.  (release expected late January)

Phase 3
Supplier bills posted to 'Prepayments' will be able to be monitored via transactions in the same way that we do with fixed assets, allowing new prepayments to be created from the transactions area.   The loans feature will be in place initially for Hire Purchase loans, and other loan types to follow later.   (release expected late February / early March 2025)

When version 2 has been released, new video tutorials and webinars will be made available.  In the meantime, below is a taster of what is on the way so that you can see the improvements we have been working on. 
 

Version 2 demo

If you have any ideas or preferences for the kind of things that you would like to see on the 'dashboard' that would be useful to you, please let us know.  While we are spending a lot of time working on things 'under the hood', and with version2 'parked in the garage' now is really the perfect time to make as many changes and improvements as we can.
 

We do hope you find these updates helpful, and that you like the look of the improvements being made.  We are working really hard to make nettTracker best in class and helping you save time on fixed assets and other adjustments connected to your month-end close.

In the meantime, thank-you for your continued support.

The nettTracker team

nettTracker - Spring release 2024

Provider Tracking Options
We have had the ability to split accounting journals by 'Class' for QuickBooks users, but due to demand we are happy to announce that you can split journals for the following accounting providers as follows:

  • QuickBooks Online - Class, Location (either or both)

  • Xero - Up to 2 Tracking Categories and options below them

  • Sage - Cost Centre and Department

You will find the option to enable Provider Tracking Options within Company Settings.  This very short video tutorial will show you how.

Editing items and Batch Edits
Within the asset register and accrual/prepayment statement you will no longer see the 'Tools' icon to make edits until you select an item using the tick box on the left.  When you select multiple items you will be able to make 'Batch edits'.  Extremely useful if you wish to update the location of 100 assets at once!  Please see this short video that shows you how to use the new editing and batch edit features.

Option to disable condensed journal postings
A 'Condensed Journal' is a where nettTracker will create a summary of the total debits/credits that need to be posted to a particular chart of account category, and this can result with just one entry appearing in your transaction report.  For fixed assets this is often adequate as the required information is in the asset register, and detailed journals could easily result in thousands of lines.

However, we understand from feedback received that it's important that detailed information is included within the journal entries for prepayments and accruals. So, now you have the option to disable condensed journal entries.  This short video will demonstrate all you need to know.
 

What's next?
nettTracker is just over 4 years old.  We've learnt a lot from customers over the years, and we are currently planning version 2.  We understand that the 'Financial Year' settings can be a tricky one to negotiate, and our plan is to remove the 'Year-End' process as it currently works, and replace with reporting options that will work for any given situation.  nettTracker will have a 'closed books' option similar to accounting providers, but there will not be the constraints currently in place.

The key benefits:

  • Run the asset register between any two date ranges to review the movements in between (not just one full financial year)

  • Forecast depreciation for mulitple years

  • Adjust depreciation at any time

  • Continue processing months after the year-end knowing it's easy to go back and make adjustments

  • Review Tax and Book Depreciation for each asset

By focusing the next phase of development refreshing, and improving our core product, it will pave the way for the future when we start introducing new features like 'loans'.

We do hope you find these updates helpful.  As always we are always open to suggestions and feedback.  If you have any please feel free to email save-time@nett-tracker.com with any ideas you have. 

We can't promise that we can implement all suggestions, but we do take all ideas on board and give them careful consideration.

In the meantime, thank-you for your continued support.

The nettTracker team

New feature: modify the year-end date of a company

One of the most frequent support queries we get relates to the year-end dates of nettTracker companies…or more specifically “help, I’ve set the wrong date for my year-end!” It’s easily done, but until now, something that had to be resolved to the support team to resolve manually - not the best solution, for either of us!!

Today, we have released version 1.22, which includes a new wizard to help change the financial year end date for your companies. The wizard can be found from the company Settings menu and is really simple to use - simply enter the date that you want to use as your new year-end.

There are a few caveats.

To keep consistency with journals that nettTracker has posted to your accounting package, a year cannot be shortened to a date that is before the posting date of your most recent journal entry. For example, if you have posted to 30 April 2023, you will not be able to bring your year-end date earlier than that.

If there are assets acquired or processed transactions date beyond your requested date, that will not be allowed - you will have to resolve the issue by deleting assets that would now have been acquired in the next financial year.

And lastly, a year cannot be longer than 18 months. We do this to try and keep the projection screen easily readable - more than 18 date columns becomes almost too cluttered to read.

We’ve got quite a few things in the pipeline right now as we try to keep improving and adding value to the nettTracker application.

nettTracker news - March 2023

It may have been a long, hard winter for many of us, but it definitely feels like spring has sprung in the nettTracker camp and we have a bumper release of updates for you this month. 

Our aim is that nettTracker should always contain features that are useful and will save time, provide a user interface that is pleasing to the eye, and is also easy to use.  We hope you agree that our recent updates tick these boxes.  We've created a short video to highlight the updates released, but first here's a quick summary:

Connect to Xero
Firstly, we are pleased to announce that, following resolution of our dispute with Xero that you may have read about in the press and on social media, we have re-instated the ability to create new company files and connect to Xero accounting software.

Daily calculations
Within company settings you now have the option to choose 'Daily' or 'Reporting Period' for your preferred method of calculating the accounting journal entries made each month.  When 'Daily' is selected, the adjustment will be based on the number days in the period. 

If an asset was purchased or entered service part way through a month, the first month's calculation would be based on how many days since date of purchase.  If a month has 28, 30, 31 days, the value adjusted will be slightly different based on the number of days in the month.
 
This setting will default to Reporting Period, which is the behaviour that you are used to, however, it can be easily changed.

Change accounting provider
If you've set up nettTracker and connected to QuickBooks Online, but the business has decided to use Xero, or Sage Business Cloud, it is now easy to change the software your nettTracker uses for data.  If you are moving to a larger ERP but would like to continue using nettTracker, you can change your existing company to operate 'Standalone'.

You could choose to run the prior year asset movements in 'Standalone' first to see how depreciation calculations compare with your current system.  Then close the year and connect to your accounting software moving forward.

And if nettTracker was originally connected to the wrong QuickBooks file, simply choose to connect to QuickBooks again and select a different company.  This means none of your initial setup effort will have been wasted.

Tabulated 'Groups'
The fixed asset and prepayments/accruals groups are now displayed in a tabulated format in both the statement and the projection/forecast screens.  This means if your company holds a lot of assets, there is no longer the need to scroll down the page until you find the next asset group you are looking for.
 
We have also removed the Accrual/Prepayment ‘type’ grouping from the menu, which means that all of your Accrual or Prepayment groupings are displayed in one place and with much easier navigation.

Cleaner dashboard, with 'Difference' calculator
We've removed the company name from the dashboard as this is always clearly visible in the header bar.  We've added a 'Difference' value, being the difference between the balance sheet total, and fixed asset register net book value as at the next reporting period end. 

Updated Help & Support
The Help Centre has been refreshed to provide links to a suite of bite-sized video tutorials that can help you get the most out of nettTracker and are always just a few clicks away.  Of course, if you do need specific support or access to our professional services, the option is there to raise a support ticket - we'll get back to you as quickly as we can.

Managing Deposits using nettTracker

If you receive a payment in advance (deposit), for a future sale, this can’t be treated as income until the product/service has been delivered. There are lots of different ways in which a deposit can be handled within a business. The below video provides an example of how nettTracker can be used to manage deposits, and then automatcially adjust the P&L when the service is delivered.

Managing deposits using nettTracker

Handling Retentions (Retainage)

Retentions are basically elements of payments withheld by a customer until a job has been fully signed off as complete to an agreed level of satisfaction. Retentions are very common in the construction industry, where as an example, 5% of the invoice value will not be paid until the job has been signed off. This could be six months after the job has been completed.

Keeping track of what has been retained by who, and when that retention is due to be released, can take up a lot of work. Using the accrued income tools available in nettTracker, each retention can be listed, together with dates when the payment should be expected. The below video will give an idea of how the process could work.

Retentions

Scaling New Heights - 19 to 22 June 2022

2022 saw the co-founder of nettTracker (Ash Beetson) travel from the UK to Orlando, Florida in the USA to attend one of the largest annual accounting conferences for ProAdvisors known as ‘Scaling New Heights’. It was great not only to meet accountants and bookkeepers and understand some more of the difficulties they face, but to also talk with other accounting software providers, thought leaders and influencers too. Friendships were built and memories made.

Working within a digital environment is great, but nothing beats actually spending some time with people in real life. Hopefully, we’ll be back again next year.

new nettTracker - Prepayments and Accruals

Prepayments and Accruals: A fantastic new feature for nettTracker

We are really excited to announce the release of the most significant update to nettTracker since the software was launched in 2019.

When it comes to producing and reviewing profit and loss reports, we understand that consistency matters. We also recognise the time and effort required to create accounting adjustments to follow various accounting principles and concepts. With this in mind, we have developed a new module for nettTracker that provides tools to monitor the adjustments required for Prepaid Expenses, Accruals, Deferred Income and Accrued Income.

With this feature enabled on your companies, nettTracker will create all the monthly journal adjustments as required and will also produce statements that help to reconcile with values on the balance sheet. If you need to produce monthly/quarterly management accounts, you could potentially save hours of time by using nettTracker to record and monitor these additional balance sheet adjustments.

To support this new feature, we have made some changes to the menus and the dashboard, all of which we hope you will find make the software even easier to navigate. The 'Asset register' will contain all options for fixed assets, and the 'Accruals & Prepayments' menus are specific to that feature.

The Accruals and Prepayments module is a chargeable feature, however, we are offering all of our existing customers one free use of this new feature. If you want to make use of this, our app will guide you through the process of activating it on your chosen company. If you are an accounting firm, and feel that the feature would be beneficial to clients that don't require a fixed asset register, please reach out to us at support@farscape-applications.com and we will see what we can do to help.

We are currently busy creating some pdf guides and video tutorials for the new features. In the meantime, we shall be running a webinar on Tuesday March 15, where we will explain exactly how the features work. The webinar is only scheduled for 20 minutes - the new tools are easy to use, so it wont take long to demonstrate them to you. To register for the webinar, please click below:

The webinar time is 4:30pm GMT. However, if that doesn't work for you, the session will be recorded, and the link for the recording will be available for 30 days. (Registration is required)

As always, we thank-you for your continued support, and we look forward to helping you save more time, and generally making some of your accounting tasks a little bit easier.

The nettTracker team

Increased Consistency and Additional Balance Sheet Reconciliations

nettTracker was created with accountants in mind, and with a core accounting principle being ‘Consistency’. Our mission is to improve the consitency of values as they appear in the profit and loss. This started with depreciation, but we understand that this is just one of many accounting categories that require an adjustment to agree with different accounting principles and concepts.

The team at nettTracker are working hard on the following features to help make the lives of accountants in practice and industry even easier:

  • Prepaid Expenses

  • Prepaid Income

  • Accrued Expenses

  • Accrued Income

Tools are in development that will make the creation of these adjustments easier than ever, and what’s more there will be a register for each group of adjustments that will reconcile back to your balance sheet.

If you would like to be added to our rapidly growing list of users that would like to be one of the first to see how these features work, please drop an e-mail to support@farscape-applications.com

In the meantime, Happy Christmas and all the best for 2022.

team nettTracker

nettTracker meets.......

Here at nettTracker, we are always keen to get feedback on how our subscribers find the app; does it work for them, is it value for money, what else would they like to see? We genuinely love feedback, good or bad, so any opportunity to have a conversation with some of our users is music to our ears.

With this in mind, we reached out to some of early adopters to gain an insight into their use and experiences. Very kindly, a number of these have taken time out of their busy days to speak to us in depth about nettTracker and we have produced some videos of the resulting conversations.

You can find more details on what we discussed, and watch the short interviews, over on our new case studies page. We are sure you will find them interesting and perhaps may give some ideas for how nettTracker could save your business time and money. If it has, please contact support@farscape-applications.com so that we can help set you up with a trial.

Improvements to our asset importing in V1.17

We have released v1.17 of nettTracker this morning, with a couple of updates to hopefully make life easier and improve your experience.

Our asset import tool was lacking the ability to specify an asset’s depreciation start date, nor that its depreciation may be deferred - the asset perhaps not having entered into service yet, despite having been acquired in a previous financial year. We have modified our import template to include the depreciation start date and deferral as new columns. Should you wish to use either of these two fields, simply include valid values into the appropriate columns of the import template.

If you don’t specify a depreciation start date, nettTracker will use your company settings to determine when depreciation should have started. This will either be in-year, meaning calculations are based from the start of the financial year of acquisition, or by-month that will use the date of acquisition for starting depreciation. Our import template contains more information and can be downloaded from the asset import page.

The other improvement is in our management of payment methods. We use Stripe as our payment provider and their toolkits help to insulate us from your card details. We never see your credit card information and keep only a token that represents your stored payment method with Stripe. Our modification is so that we can start storing the expiry date of your payment methods. This will allow us to send out notifications when payment methods are due for expiry, rather than only if the payment method fails when attempting to take your payment.

We will also be able to indicate the forthcoming expiry of a subscription payment method within the UI, so if you see a new status bar mentioning your payment method, that will be why!

Our next major work is going to focus on introducing significant features to our asset register, primarily relating to taxation values. There is quite a bit for us to work out in order to complete this, so we are hoping to release these features around the end of 2021.

As always, if there are new features or improvements you would like to see, please let us know. We are always happy to get feedback and our improvements are driven by you.

nettTracker version 1.15 released with new subscription management tools

After several months in the pipeline, we’re pleased to announce the release of our latest version of nettTracker. This new release incorporates a number of improvements and bugfixes, but also a set of improved subscription management tools.

We pride ourselves on trying to make things as simple as possible, so we really hope you feel the benefits.

NEED MORE COMPANIES?

Updating your subscription resources has involved getting in touch with support to request the change. Now, you can control how many companies you have directly. Our new tools allow you to increase and decrease your allocation of companies, with billing updated to reflect the change from your next billing period. You keep the allocation you have paid for until your next payment.

END FREE TRIAL

We’ve streamlined the process for ending your free trial, allowing you to customise the number of companies that you need to support your needs. A future release will lock journal posting when operating in free-trial mode, so our new tool will make unlocking features much more straightforward.

EXPIRED PAYMENT METHOD

Updating expired payment methods is now a simple case of entering a new set of card details. A new alert strip will advise that your payment method needs updating.

We hope that these new tools will make things easier, but we are always keen to listen to your feedback, so why not drop us a line with your thoughts and suggestions.

Webinar - Tuesday 6 April - 4:30pm (British Summer Time)

If new to nettTracker, or thinking about how you can simplify your fixed asset processes, Ash will be on hand to answer any questions you have. He will also be covering:

- basic setup

- settings that should be checked

- how depreciation works

- the year-end process

The webinar is expected to run for approximately 30 minutes, but there will also be additional time available to ensure all questions are answered.

To register for the webinar, click the button below.

Updates - February 2021

We have been listening to customer feedback and working hard to improve nettTracker. Over the last few months we’ve released the following updates:-

  • Simplified mappings for disposals

  • Ability to delete prior year assets

  • Improvements to recategorised transactions

  • Introduction of double-decline depreciation

  • Ability to set date an asset is put into service

  • Option to defer depreciation

  • Improvements to the way that depreciation calculations are stored, which means there is now…..

  • Ability to edit depreciation rule against an asset at any time

  • Straight line depreciaiton can now be specified by a set number of months (as well as years)

  • Paging within the asset groups (speeds up the time pages load for 1,000+ assets)

  • A search function within each asset group

  • Option to change columns in view on the asset register

The above are highlighted in a short five minute video - see below.

Updates - January 2021 - Happy New Year!

We are very happy to announce that we’ve made a lot of improvements to nettTracker recently based on the excellent feedback from our existing users. These imporovments include:

  • Double decline depreciation as an available default

  • The ability to defer depreciation on an asset until it is to be put into service

  • The option to choose the date that depreciation will be calculated from (instead of defaulting to the date of acquisition)

  • The option to use the same balance sheet account for disposals as the one in use for additions

Here’s to making a fixed assets even easier to handle during 2021. Hapy New Year!

Black Friday Deals - enjoy a free upgrade on us!

For new accounts created between Friday 20th November, and Friday 18th December, you can enjoy a free upgrade on us. The upgrade means that if you purchase a subscription for one company you will be able to connect five. If you purchase a subription for five companies, you’ll be able to connect twenty!

To claim your free upgrade simply raise a support ticket within nettTracker and add a comment ‘Black Friday Deal Please’. All we ask is that an active payment method is in place to pay for the subscription.

nettTracker - Advanced Training - Friday 6th November (9:30 US Central Time / 3:30pm G.M.T.)

During this webinar that is scheduled to run for approximatley 90 minutes, the following topics will be covered.

- Revew of company settings

- Correcting errors

- Deletions and disposals

- Using kits

- Adding users

- The 'Year-End'

There should also be time at the end of the webinar for open Q&A. The webinar will be recorded if you are not able to attend the live session.

August Update - Mapping Asset Groups to Chart of Accounts fully re-worked

For new users especially, setting up any app and linking to your bookkeeping package can be the the bit that takes up the most amount of time to learn and fully understand. Our chart of account mapping has been given a complete overhaul and we’ve made this much easier. What’s more, is if you don’t have the account codes that are required, nettTracker will create these for you.

To learn in detail how this works, watch this short video tutorial.