Cameo 9 was released about 18 months ago. While there has been a large number of individual changes since to improve existing functions, version 10 will introduce completely new features in the next few months…

Accounting

Cameo 10 will offer accounts bookkeeping. It already has some parts of an accounts system, such as bank statements, reconciliation to support membership payment matching with transactions. Cameo 10 will take this further to offer a full package, supporting initially:

  • chart of accounts and full reconciliation to the cost centres (account codes) this provides
  • invoices, quotations and purchase orders (Fig 1). This will use existing:
    • template and email facilities to create the “paperwork” (with a few additions and new substitutions for invoice content), and
    • contacts to identify customers and suppliers
  • an “invoice” form so that people can view and download their invoice online
  • invoice payments by card etc. through the existing payments form
  • attachments to trading documents. If you send a purchase order, you can attach the supplier’s corresponding invoice. Similarly, your invoice can have their payment remittance advice attached to it. All the same ways of getting them in (scanner apps, email or upload), and copying between Cameo’s other attachment types are supported.
  • Financial reports

You’ll start seeing accounting functions appearing shortly where they extend existing functions.

If there is some aspect of managing accounts that other systems don’t provide and that you would particularly like to see, please let me know.

Fig 1: invoices, quotations and purchase orders

Merchandise

Along with accounting, we’ll also support merchandise sales. Again this will draw on existing components: for example, payment methods and forms.

  • merchandise inventory and stock controls (which link to invoices for easy itemisation)
  • a “shopping cart” form for online sales of that merchandise

“Purposes”

It has become apparent that there’s a number of problems with using lists as the foundation for opt-outs, which can probably be summarised as the recipient doesn’t understand the difference between opt-outs for various reasons. There’s also an issue that opt-out from all will suspend postal communications in some cases, as these also just select their audience from a list. And combining manual and automatic lists is more complicated than it needs to be.

Cameo 10 will introduce purposes. These will be a small number of things that people opt-out from, rather than lists. Each template will identify its purpose. A separate article looks at purposes in more detail.

PDF templates

Once upon a time, Cameo’s letter templates produced PDF files. However, this did not offer sufficient layout flexibility, so we switched to HTML pages fairly early on. Now, though, Cameo 10 will reintroduce PDF templates, but in a much more flexible form. They will work just like letter templates, with stationery to provide the layout and HTML to provide the formatting. The HTML is then converted into a PDF file rather than being displayed in the browser.

While you can preview these files and merge alongside HTML “letters” in pending letters, you can also:

  • download them immediately (like report templates)
  • merge into the filestore (like report templates),
  • attach to membership records,
  • attach to invoices, or
  • sent personalised email attachments (like attachment templates).

The main reason for providing this is to support invoices, for example by attaching a more formal paginated file to an email invoice for saving and printing, or for access by the customer online.

Modern JavaScript

JavaScript is the language used to provide the code that runs in the browser, originally Cameo’s JavaScript was written very conservatively because of the limitations of Internet Explorer 11. However, IE11 is now obsolete. In fact, it will no longer even reach Cameo (and many other websites) because it does not understand up to date HTTPS encryption and security.

This means Cameo can use more modern JavaScript, which will make it easier to read and maintain. While there may be some slight initial instability because of this, it should make a more solid platform in the longer term.