What’s new in v2?

As most of our users are aware, for the past two years we’ve been beavering away on v2 of our Buying Group Platform. There has been sweat and tears, but we’re really proud of the work we have done, and we know it will deliver huge benefits to our user base. So, we thought it would be a good idea to summarize some of the new features and improvements we’ve made — both for users still waiting to migrate, and for those who have already migrated and who might not be aware of all these new features.

Agreements

• Flexible Structure
  All “sections” within an agreement can now be edited — names changed, and re-ordered. Not to be confused with elements, which already had this functionality, but the sections themselves (Terms, Marketing, Rebate, Notes etc.). You can also add sections, which means you can create a completely bespoke agreement without restriction.
• Rebateable Turnover streams
  Turnover streams can now be flagged as rebateable or not. Of course, we’ve always allowed users to create whatever turnover streams they needed, but this new classification of the stream can provide useful insight when reporting as you can filter between rebateable and non-rebateable spend.
• Participation
  Participation now has the ability to use groups as well as companies. This means that specific groups of members can participate (or be excluded from participating) in an agreement. Of course, this shouldn’t be confused with security (we’ve always been able to exclude members from viewing an agreement). But participation prevents suppliers loading turnover against those who cannot participate, and filters data when using EDI line level figures — reducing the chance of incorrect or unneeded figures being assigned.
• Turnover
  Members can now view their turnover in on-screen spreadsheet format, meaning there is less need to download turnover spreadsheets in Excel.

Spend available in an on-screen spreadsheet format

• Security
  Individual deal elements can now be secured in a far more granular format — you can exclude certain members, only include certain members, set user permissions so only certain individual users can view an element, and mix and match security to create a truly bespoke and highly secure agreement.
• Element hiding
  You can now hide elements within a deal to prevent them appearing on the deal dashboard, and also within the deal PDF. This means you can add information to the agreement which doesn’t become part of the signed agreement sent and signed off by suppliers, or doesn’t appear on the deal dashboard to members and suppliers.
• Agreement Browser
  Filter and display deals based on expiry, start date, category, negotiator — and extract key parts of agreements into a simple table. For example, need to know the Invoicing Route of all Plasterboard deals? Easy!
• Visual Spend Projections
  We’ve always projected spend and rebate — but we now have a visual representation of this on-screen, which can help not only to push for close target bands upwards, but also ensure lower bands are achieved too.

Visual Spend Projections

Rebates

• In/Out rebate values
  New in/out rebate values allow for groups who are funded by rebate commission. You can set a different in/out rebate amount — the “in” about being the rebate amount claimed from the supplier, and the “out” amount being the rebate amount distributed to members. Suppliers only see the “in” amount, and members only see the “out” amount.
• Linear rebates
  Linear rebates pay out a fraction of spend between two bands.
• Accounting Webhooks
  Automatically trigger rebates as paid and received once marked as received in your bank through Quickbooks and Xero.
• “Do not chase” rebates
  Ability to not chase for rebates or show them as due on the rebate dashboard — useful for rebates that get automatically paid, but which are used by strings and therefore needed for strung calculations — such as settlement discounts or price deferment rebates.

Documents

• Drag and drop
  Documents now feature drag and drop, and drag and select — which provides a desktop windows explorer feel and functionality to the management of documents
• Shortcuts
  Files can be copied/pasted to create shortcuts. Extremely useful if you want to add, for example, price comparison spreadsheets to all copper deals — whilst maintaining only a single spreadsheet.
• Document Browser
  Easily filter all system documents, to find anything you need — such as:
  - Recently added plumbing price lists
  - Soon to expire hand tool prices
  - Recently added promotions in workwear.

Reporting

• Report Builder
  Our new report builder provides real time data reporting on spend by supplier, agreement, member, category and subcategory. You can compare periods, to get year on year comparisons and see which supplier, members and categories are growing, and their rate of growth or decline. Data is presented on-screen in a spreadsheet-like format, or downloadable in Excel.

Our new report builder

• Rebate Targets
  Find all agreements where you are projected to be a set distance away from the next rebate band. “No-brainers” (where an increase in spend is less than the additional rebate earned) are highlighted, and can be order by percentage of increase needed, deal duration completion, extra spend required (monetary value), or member participation. Each row can be expanded to view the visual representation of the projection.

• Accounting Integration
  Integration with Quickbooks and Xero (and other accounting packages), provides detailed statistics of Aged Debt, Outstanding Invoices and Payment Requests, Customer Balances and Payment History.

Communication

• Individual and Group Chat
  Slack-style online chat — for individuals and teams, such as Category Management Teams. Chat includes 256bit encrypted secure exchange of documents, links and images. Help online users, chat within your Category Management Team — all history recorded online for reference.
• Notification system
  Facebook-style notifications, for when you’ve missed a chat message, been invited to a questionnaire, have a turnover query comment outstanding, or have been invited to tender. Notifications disappear once a task has been completed, or they’re been marked as read.
• Email Marketing Module
  Comprehensive outgoing email system, with dynamic configurable email lists, detailed responses (sent/read/clicked/bounced), dynamic templates, and scheduled emails.

Security

• Category Security
  Restrict access to entire categories (not just agreements) perfect to secure whole categories of agreements for non-mixed merchant members, or merchants who may be members of other buying groups.

Adaptable Layouts

• Better device portability and display on Edge, Chrome and Firefox — or on Android and iOS devices.
• Options to maximise display layouts for smaller desktop screens, by either reducing or hiding the main menu.

More — much more

That’s just the tip of the iceberg — pretty much every area of our system has been modified, enhanced, and improved. That includes improvements to search, tags, logging, security, document storage and thumbnailing, user avatars, company logos, product profiles, category management, workflow, promotions, price file loading — you name it!

There are thousands of big and small changes, all of which help to make our system the most comprehensive system for Buying Groups anywhere in the world.

For more information about how we might be able to help your group communicate more effectively, please get in touch.