Frequently Asked Question

CP2 2.0.0 Release Notes

CP2 2.0.0 adds four major new modules: Smart Replenishment for purchasing, Account Watch for CounterCRM, FlightDeck Insights for the dashboard, and FlightDeck Inventory insights for stock and purchasing. It also brings a monthly brief and new CPMailer reports for buyers, Counterpoint reports as email attachments, calling and route-planning tools for reps on the road, a layout that works on phones and tablets, documentation in AMS FirstCall, a new sales measure, new nightly data feeds, more accurate FlightDeck figures, and fixes to the nightly import.

New Modules

Smart Replenishment

Smart Replenishment works out what to order from each supplier, from your own sales history, stock and lead times, and sends approved orders straight back to Counterpoint. It flags the lines most likely to be wrong and explains each one, so buyers review the few lines that matter instead of the whole order. Counterpoint item minimums and maximums, supplier minimum order values, purchase quantities and seasonality are all taken into account. AI suggestions are available as an opt-in. See Smart Replenishment for the full details.

CounterCRM Account Watch

Account Watch checks every customer account each night and tells reps who to call and why: a customer gone quiet, spending down on last year, or a category they've stopped buying. It adds a Call List to Customer Lookup in place of Targeted Customers, with quick logging of calls, visits, notes and appointments, and a Plan Visits tab for planning a day on the road. CP2 also shows the sales those calls and visits brought back. Two new CPMailer reports, Call List and Call Log, bring it to your inbox, and AI Insights on each flagged account are available as an opt-in. See Account Watch for the full details.

FlightDeck Insights

FlightDeck now shows why sales moved and where to look next, not just how much you sold. A row of headline numbers, Insights at a Glance, opens the page; click a number to go to its panel. Five new panels follow:

• Why Sales Changed: the change split into customers, how often they bought, lines per invoice and value per line, in dollars.
• Month Pace: where the month will land, against last year and your sales goals.
• Demand Turned Away: lost sales and your fill rate.
• Margin Below Target: profit given up below each category's minimum GP%.
• Customer Health: accounts flagged for a call, what calls brought back, and returns.

Each panel opens on its headline sentence; click Show details for the rest, or Open all to open every panel. An optional weekly brief for managers sums up the week in a few sentences, written by AI from figures CP2 works out itself, and sits above the panels with a link to each topic it covers. See FlightDeck Insights for the full details.

FlightDeck Inventory

The Inventory page now gives the whole stock and purchasing picture. Stock and Purchasing at a Glance opens it with six headline numbers: movers in stock, stock beyond need, on order, overdue, items that will run short, and stock you could transfer instead of buying. The panels below show in full:

• Stock Health: healthy, excess, slow and dead stock in dollars.
• Why Stock Value Changed: a waterfall from purchases, cost of goods sold and adjustments.
• Return on Stock by Category: GMROI, and each category's share of stock against its share of sales.
• Will Run Short Before the Next Delivery: regular sellers that won't last their lead time.
• Open Purchase Orders with what's overdue, a Supplier Scorecard of actual against set lead times, and What Customers Are Waiting For.
• Transfer Before You Buy: stock another branch can spare instead of a new purchase order.

The weekly brief for managers now covers stock and purchasing too. See FlightDeck Inventory for the full details.

New Features/Improvements

FlightDeck - Sales Dyno

A new page, FlightDeck > Sales Dyno, answers "what if" questions about your sales. Set customers buying, invoices per customer, lines per invoice or value per line, or a new GP% for any category, and see what the period's sales, gross profit and GP% would have come to. Each lever shows its range over the last 12 months, so you can see what your business has already reached. Nothing you try is saved. See the Sales Dyno article in the FlightDeck section.

Ready for Phones and Tablets

Every CP2 page now fits a phone screen, with no pinching, zooming or scrolling sideways. Wide tables keep their first two columns and fold the rest under a + on each row; figures and tiles sit two to a row; long bar charts show the top 10; and tabs sit in one row you can swipe. Long pages are much shorter on a phone; the Prebuilt Reports page, for one, is less than half its old length. See Tablets and Phones.

Documentation - Now in AMS FirstCall

CP2's documentation has moved from docs.amscomp.com to the AMS FirstCall knowledgebase. Every ? on a panel and the Documentation item in your user menu now open the matching FirstCall article. New articles cover Account Watch, FlightDeck Insights, FlightDeck Inventory, Smart Replenishment, Tap to Call, the 2.0 CPMailer reports, attaching Counterpoint reports, and every prebuilt report.

Custom Reporting - Average Lines Per Invoice

Sales reports have a new Average Lines Per Invoice field: the average number of lines on each invoice, counting every line except comment lines. It sits with the other averages in the field list.

CPMailer - Clerk Sales

The Clerk Sales and Clerk Sales Summary blocks now end with Avg Lines/Invoice and Avg Lines/Invoice (Previous), compared across periods like the other columns. In the by-branch version, the branch name column has moved to make room.

CPMailer - Call List and Call Log

Two new blocks for CPMailer reports:

• Call List: each rep's accounts to call, with this week's appointments.
• Call Log: what each person logged over the period, and the sales those contacts brought back.

CPMailer - FlightDeck Brief

A new FlightDeck Brief block brings the AI-written brief to managers' inboxes, with a link back to FlightDeck. It's available once your company turns on the brief, and what it shows follows the email's frequency:

• Weekly emails: the weekly brief, written each Monday.
• Monthly emails: a new monthly brief, written on the 1st: last month against the same month last year and the month before, the year to date, and your sales goals.
• Daily emails: the weekly brief once a week, in the first daily email after it's written, so it isn't repeated every day.

Both briefs also cover stock and purchasing: stock beyond need, overdue orders and the suppliers behind them, items running short, and stock that could move between branches.

CPMailer - Customers Waiting, Overdue Purchase Orders and Orders to Review

Three new blocks for buyers, best in a daily email. Each shows things as they stand on the day it's sent:

• Customers Waiting: special orders not on a purchase order yet, special orders on a late PO, and back orders past the date the customer needed them, oldest first. Reps see their own customers.
• Overdue Purchase Orders: open POs past their required date, totalled by supplier, with how many customers are waiting on each one.
• Orders to Review: Smart Replenishment orders waiting to be reviewed and approved, and approved orders not yet sent to Counterpoint.

See V2 Reports.

CPMailer - Counterpoint Report Defs

Any report Counterpoint produces, such as the Invoice Register, can be attached to a CPMailer email. Set the report up once in Admin > Counterpoint Report Defs with the exact name of the file Counterpoint writes, then tick it under Additional Attachments on any CPMailer email. Each time the email goes out, CP2 attaches the latest copy of that file. Getting Counterpoint's files to CP2 is set up with AMS, so contact us to add a report. See Attach Counterpoint Reports.

Customer Lookup - Call List and Plan Visits

The Targeted Customers tab has been replaced by the Call List, the first tab on Customer Lookup. Pinned customers and your overdue balance alert limits carry straight over. A new Plan Visits tab sits next to it.

CounterCRM - Calling and Planning

New tools for reps on the road and in the office:

• Tap to call: phone numbers on the Call List, Plan Visits, contacts and the customer page dial when tapped on a phone. Coming back to CP2 after the call opens the call log, with the person already chosen. See Tap to Call.
• Before You Call: a new panel on the customer page with the account's open special orders and back orders, what they asked for in the last 90 days that couldn't be supplied, and the lines they're buying more or less of than a year ago. It opens on a short summary of each list.
• AI Insights on demand: a Get AI Insights button on flagged accounts that don't have them yet, on the Call List and the customer page. Each user can ask for up to 20 a day, a limit your admin can change.
• Who with: calls, visits and appointments can name someone who isn't a saved contact, and save them as a contact in the same step.
• Plan Visits by city: accounts are grouped by city, however the city is written in Counterpoint, and big cities are split by postal area. Accounts with no address are left out and counted.
• Call List pages: the Call List shows 50 accounts a page.
• Rep picker for managers: managers can narrow the Call List and Plan Visits to one rep.

CounterCRM - Customer Page

The customer page now opens with the account's figures, then Before You Call and Account Watch. AI Insights open on the main point, with the talking points a click away.

Home - Call List Tile

The Home page's Targeted Customers tile is now Call List, showing the calls and visits due today, with a link straight to the Call List.

CounterCRM - Notes

Add Note on the customer page and in QuickDial now opens CounterCRM's note window, with the note kept alongside calls and visits. The Notes page lists these notes together with the notes from Counterpoint, newest first.

New Nightly Data Feeds - Special Orders, Back Orders and Packing Slips

The nightly import now accepts three new files from Counterpoint:

• Special orders: Smart Replenishment can add special orders that aren't on a purchase order yet to the order.
• Back orders: customer back orders, in the same layout as special orders.
• Packing slips: loaded each night, ready for future features.

Each file replaces the previous night's in full, and a file that fails to load leaves the previous data in place. Customer names, addresses and phone numbers in these files are skipped and never stored in CP2.

Bug Fixes & Behind the Scenes Updates

• Fixed the nightly import of the Classes, Notes, Pay Types, Sub-Classes and Transaction Types files, which could empty those tables instead of reloading them. The other files no longer log an error after loading.
• Notes added in CounterCRM are no longer erased when Counterpoint's notes are imported each night.
• The Average Value - Price 2 to Price 5 report fields now each use their own price level. Previously they all showed Price 1.
• The Lost Sales CPMailer spreadsheet's column headings now line up with its data. The Part Number heading was missing.
• The Seasonality Report loads again, and items with no sales no longer cause an error. A part is now marked seasonal only when one season holds at least 40% of its sales; previously every part that sold was marked seasonal. The report also has its own card on the Prebuilt Reports page.
• The Inventory page's Old Stock table loads again, with the right item descriptions and costs.
• Wide tables on the prebuilt reports, Alerts and Admin pages no longer run off the edge of smaller screens, and the two chart panels on autoecat Analysis no longer sit off-screen on a phone.
• The Buyer Sales Analysis panel and the Counterpoint Report Defs page now show their own titles, and the Audit Log's help link works again.
• FlightDeck's New Customers tile counts new accounts only. Extra ship-to addresses on an existing account no longer count as new customers.
• FlightDeck's Average Days of Receivables now includes balances owed by accounts that haven't bought on account in the last year. Expect it to rise for some companies.
• FlightDeck's Top Customers lists each account separately, even when two share a company name. GP% on the Top Customers, Clerks and Sales Reps lists shows one decimal and is no longer capped at 99%.
• A scheduled procedure that fails now waits for its next scheduled time. Previously it ran again on every scheduler pass, every few minutes, until it succeeded.
• Procedures no longer get stuck as Queued when the message broker (RabbitMQ) is unavailable. The scheduler now waits until the broker is back and leaves each procedure's status as it was. The worker log also gives the reason the broker couldn't be reached.
• In Admin, Procedures, a procedure that has never run shows Never as its Last Run, instead of the current time.
• Open purchase orders closed in Counterpoint no longer stay in CP2. The nightly import now replaces the list of open POs in full, and keeps the previous day's list if a file fails to load. On-order totals may drop the first night after the update as old closed POs are cleared.
• Each AI feature (Smart Replenishment, AI Insights and the FlightDeck briefs) can use its own OpenAI model and reasoning effort, set in the server's configuration. AI requests can now take up to four minutes, so large orders no longer time out.
• Nightly processing that reads sales and inventory can now run alongside the Counterpoint import without waiting on it.
• Every change to CP2 is now checked automatically before release, across both supported PHP versions.
• A new update process deploys each release with a single command and rolls back automatically if anything fails.