Pawn Tracker - Revision History

This page contains information about the history, updates, and features of latest version of Pawn Tracker software. Updates to Pawn Tracker Synchronization Manager are also covered. The first version number presented applies to the main Gold Tracker program, while the second version number refers to Pawn Tracker Synchronization Manager.

August 1st, 2016 - Version 4.60 / 1.14
-Created Advanced searching and selectibility to all entity collections including inventory and tickets. Significantly improved the ability to query and select specific sets of tickets or inventory items for export, reporting, analysis and editing.
-The "Auto pay and close ticket" feature has now become an option which can be controlled by ticket type. This is useful for ticket types such as repair tickets, for which payment is normally not immediate, while still allowing auto pay on buy and sell ticket.
-Synchronization is now able to keep track of previously indexed ticket files and previously updated daily customer files so it can avoid indexing them redundantly and significantly speed up processing.
-Added new invoice detail option called "Show ticket type banner" which will print a very large bold message indicating the ticket type. Intended to reduce confusion between ticket types when dealing with printed receipts.
-Added a complete employee and management notification system which can send triggered messages by email and texting short message system via SMPP. Notifications can be defined by which employees actions trigger the notification, and which set of employees receive the notification. Each employee can define a list of one or more email address and one or more mobile text numbers to receive notifications. Notifications available include starting or stopping the program, logging in or logging out, and finishing with a ticket in a particular status. Variable detail level options have been established in the store/location table to control message length and content. SMPP server and account fields have also been added to the store/location table giving further flexibility to the notification system.
-Added pawn reminder system to send email or text messages to customers with overdue pawn tickets. Reminders include amounts due and key dates. Pawn reminder notification age in days can be defined in the store/location table.
-Added number of elapsed days and number of elapsed periods to the pawn details summary section.
-Added ability to send pawn status notifications including late notices from within lot tickets.
-Added "date/time forfeited field", and "forfeited by" to the pawn ticket structure to keep track of these details by ticket.
-Pawn parameters table has been expanded to include "late penalty interest rate per time period", "late penalty fixed amount per time period", "Additional interest rate per time period", "Additional interest fixed amount per time period." and "time periods after which to add additional interest"
-Added the display of customer pool account balances on pawn payment options dialog.
-Reporting added "Quick select filter criteria" to set reporting options and statuses for reporting of "Total Buys", "Total Sales", "Pawns Due" and "Pawn Fees".
-Corrected memory leak in Sync Manager
-Added merchandise picture count to the searchable and filterable fields in the company ticket information index.
-Cancelled records in registers are now displayed in a dark color to make it easier to identify which lines are cancelled.
-User warning message added if the price override field is not zero and user attempts to change quantity or weight.
-Added user warning to warn about changing/overwriting inventory id when changing product code.
-Increased the number of cached tables to include virtually all support data tables, increasing performance and reducing I/O load.
-Repeat customer reuse of settlements has now become an option in the customer record. You may choose which customers should remember past settlements, and which customers should use the current ticket type default settlement. A ticket customer dialog field has also been added to allow this to be set directly when editing tickets.
-Created a new sub-table inside the store location table to organize a standard list of inventory storage addresses or bins. Added an optional field inside the ticket editor so that the inventory location address of each line item can be selected, or entered. Added inventory location address field to inventory table structure and completed integration of ticket and inventory records for this new field.
-Added a new report called "Ticket Number Date-to-Date Summary Report" similar to other reports in this family but organized by ticket number, each ticket becomes a line in the report. Useful for understanding payments and profit by ticket in a summarized way.
-Bulk editor was enhanced to enable bulk forfeiture of past due pawn ticket as well as bulk editing of other statuses.
-Enhanced register edit logging in the system log and error report.
-Added progressive search capability INSIDE of a lot ticket. Easily locate items inside a lot ticket even for tickets containing hundreds of line items.
-Added popup hint over supplemental description field in lot ticket editor, so can see very long descriptions without scrolling.
-Provided optional ticket selectability during law enforcement exports and reporting.
-Improvements to search and replace functionality in entity editors for filling blank fields (search for blanks, replace with non-blank).
-Register added last day and next day buttons to make it quicker and easier to switch from one day to the next and back again.
-Added inventory id history lookup report from within lot ticket editor.
-Added warning message to help prevent transactions which would exceed customer pool account balance.
-Increased bag number flexibility to support up to 6 digits.
-Changed the default order of customer lot listing history report to be chronologically ascending.
-Added warning/reminder message if no start inventory file was found by the system for a location.
-Added field "check-in weight" to selectable fields which can be exported in lot tickets.
-Added new report "Product Category Summary by Ticket Type" allowing products to be aggregated by general category and separated by ticket type, buy, sell, pawn, redeem, etc.
-Added a new inventory field to keep track of the "original store location" where an inventory item was purchased or acquired.

April 15th, 2016 - Version 4.21 / 0.97
-Ticket master search added, allowing the rapid filtering and searching of company ticket information. Now permits the searching of virtually any field data or text within the ticket, including in ticket items, comments to customers, and internal notes. Hover the mouse pointer over any search result to see a pop-up hint of ticket details before actually opening the ticket!
-Pawn ticket types can now compute and display tax in the pawn details summary if they are subject to tax. This is especially helpful for companies using "guaranteed buyback" functionality instead of true pawning.
-New inventory fields added including type/category, manufacturer/make/brand, model, serial number, pin number, condition, condition notes, and original location code.
-New ticket item fields added including condition, condition notes, original location code,
-Product Condition table database added.
-Support added for warning if customer transaction frequency is too high.
-Register improvement include ability to quickly change the date focus from within the register without the need to exit the editor. Ability to force flow balances forward to future days.
-Auto ticket close suggestion on refine and result tickets.
-Improved progressive search capability on ticket fields
-New invoice detail options for showing comments, minimum price and retail price.
-Added an "already printed" warning on ticket receipts.
-Eat-the-Tax feature added as well as price matching of ticket totals which include tax.
-QuickBooks interface improvements for Pawn, Redeem and Rewrite tickets, as well as Deposit and Withdrawal tickets.
-Added font typeface and size control to jewelry label print dialog.
-Search and replace on entity editors now supports replacing blanks.
-Scale and balance integration has been extended to the gold calculator.
-CSV import and export options have greatly improved flexibility and options and have been extended to all entity editor tables as well as all ticket types including individual tickets.
-Inventory "Revision" ticket type has been created allowing any field to be changed on any inventory item.
-Ticket numbers may now be sequenced either by ticket type AND by location, or by location only.
-Pawn parameters can now vary from one store to another within the same company shared folder.
-Added employee permission ability to restrict creation of tickets for off-premises locations.
-Added table of Manufacturer/Make/Brand which can be selected in tickets.
-Receipts can now be emailed to any specified additional email address at the time of printing and recipients are no longer limited to the customer and management only.
-Active or work in progress ticket warning list created, appears during login.
-Customer pool account functionality added for refinery capabilities allow the credit or debit of multiple currencies as well as multiple pure metal balances in the customer pool accounts.
-Improved customer do-not-buy from functionality.
-Introduced concept of a "rounding process" defining one of three possible ways to implement rounding
-Full employee time clock system added including employee reports of hours and days worked.
-Login option added to require login before creating each ticket.
-Customer pool account history report added.
-Added "net weights rounding method" allowing the definition of rounding method applied after multiplying the quantity, times weight, times assay.
-Multi currency sales tax and rounding support added.
-Buffered no-waste option added for printing Dymo 30299 Jewelry labels 2-up.
-Added ability to restrict running of gold sync manager to specific workstations.
-Created the ability to define a set of automatically added products, variable by ticket type, when creating new tickets.

September 26th, 2013 - Version 1.95 / 0.32
-Expanded ticket types to include additional ticket types other than simply only "buy" tickets. Gold Tracker now supports multiple ticket types including "buy", "sell", "pawn", "transfer", "repair", "consignment", "payday advance" and "check cashing". Employees must be authorized for each ticket type in the employees table field "authorized ticket types".
-Created a new table of pawn loan parameters, used for pawn tickets and payday advance tickets, defining the loan amount, loan origination fee, periodic interest rate, periodic fees rate, period length in days and the number of periods before redemption.
-Created a new invoice detail option controlling the pawn details summary section on receipts, which can show the actual interest for each period, the period interest rate, all fees combined per period, the APR, amount to rewrite the loan, and key dates and amounts to be paid by the pawner when redeeming the loan.
-Added control of sales tax options by ticket type. Store/location fields "apply tax to buy tickets" and "apply tax to sell tickets" added. Also added tax exempt status field to customers table.
-In registers, changed "payee" to "customer" since selling tickets and pawn payments the payee may be different that on a buy ticket. Added "ticket type" field to the register to indicate buy, sell, pawn etc.
-Added a new checkbox field to the payments method table called "is a loan payment" which is useful for pawn tickets and payday advance tickets.
-Added controllable affidavit message fields and receipt message fields to the store location table for "seller's affidavit", "buyer's affidavit", "pawn affidavit", "receipt thank you message" and "order check in message". If left blank, the internal program message will be used. Very useful for locations needing specific legal language to be included on their receipts.
-Added the concept of a rounding product to the product table, so that rounding could be fully accounted for on lot tickets. Rounding products can be optionally added to lot ticket which may be subject to rounding for currency or convienience reasons. The rounding product codes can be surpressed on customer receipts and are also helpful to account to the nearest 0.01 for some forms of reporting which accumulate the contents of rounded tickets.
-Added new fields to the store/location table including ability to disable a store/location, date opened, and date closed.
-The denomination profile field, which controls the list of banknotes and coins used for reconcile counts on registers, was moved from the store/location table to the bank account table. This permits the reconcilliation of multiple cash drawers at a single store/location which may not use the same currency type for each cash drawer.
-Refreshing of company ticket information search index and refreshing of customer master file is now available from the gold sync manager so these key files can be updated or fully refreshed in the background.
-Created lot ticket bulk editor which can filter upon date, location, and status to select a group of tickets and permit easier verification and more rapid changes to groups of tickets.
-Allowed for the assisted, rapid and controlled verification and correction of lot tickets, including the creation of underpayment and overpayment products. Allows for the support of corrections to weights and correction to products and purities.
-Created a verification and pick-up report, similar to lot listing report, but simpler and which is filtered upon the status "not sent to verification". Allows the selection of all tickets which have not been sent to the verificaton center.
-Allowed ticket status selection and filtering to use the negative of the status to permit selection of tickets matching the status "not void" or "not verified" etc.
-Added new statuses to support the pickup and verification process, "verified by employee name", "verified date/time", "verification batch control number"
-Added protections and warning messages for the default customer record to prevent accidental changes and deletions of the default customer.
-Changed the default save-to-file filename extension to ".CSV" when a report has been generated for export.
-Corrected a problem with the lot listing report where columns would sometimes not line up due to long store location codes or ticket numbers.
-Company ticket information and lot ticket search index has been sorted by transaction date, then by store location, then by date/time.
-Synchronize over date range function has been limited to only the list of authorized locations.
-Added fully filterable "Payment Log Report" which is similar to a check list or payment list, derived from the payment history of the lot tickets.
-Added new group permission options "allow price match as a bonus percentage", "allow price match as a new line item", and "allow price match on total only". These three new options give greater flexibility and control over the possible ways a price match can be added to a lot ticket.
-Limited the list of selectable sales people in the lot ticket to only those employees authorized for the store/location of the current ticket. Employees with disabled accounts are also no longer selectable.
-Added optional new field "Serial Number" to the lot ticket fields and integrated with export and export to Leads Online.
-Added the report "Store/Location date-to-date Summary Report" to the lot listing quick print reports button.
-Added a new group right "start file synchronize upon logout" which will automatically start the file sync process and run the gold sync manager upon employee logout.
-Added a new group right "require all tickets closed for end-of-day reconcile" which inhibits closing the register until all tickets for the day are closed.
-Fonebank / fonebank.com integration. Fonebank buys and recycles cellular phones. Added abiltity to import products from the web, which will get the XML from the product import URL for the current location. Also provided the verification and cell phone model and price lookup based upon the cell phone IMEI entered into the new serial number field.

July 5th, 2013 - Version 1.80 / 0.28
-Made lot listing quick print reports sensitive to the group right/permission 'set show profit checkbox as checked by default' to optionally allow the removal of profit related columns from these reports when generated from the lot listing quick print button.
-Significantly improved performance of loading of entity collection tables, such as the product list when it has large numbers of products such as thousands of products. This performance improvement also extends to customer tables, market spot price tables, company ticket information and all entity collections.
-Significantly improved performance of all progressive searching on any entity collection tables, such as when finding a pre-existing lot ticket, customer, or product.
-Quickened the loading of the lot ticket editor.
-Put user names from Gold Tracker onto system log and error report lines. (Used 'goldsync' as the user name for the goldsync program since it does not require user login.)
-Improved market value hints on the gold calculator and on the quick price guide for products which use fixed pricing but also have an assay.
-Created a new group right/permission 'start file synchronize upon logout' to automatically start a file sync process upon user logout. This can help to push files to the server at the end of day and make them visible on the network if the user forgets to start the sync process before shutting down the computer for the day.
-Created a new group right/permission 'require all tickets closed for end of day reconcile' which will prevent end-of-day reconcile function in the register if any active status tickets are found. This will encourage the users to find and properly close tickets which otherwise could remain open at the end of day.
-Corrected a defect related to manually setting the market spot price using the popup numeric keypad on systems with numeric format set to use the comma as the decimal separator.

June 28, 2013 - Version 1.79 / 0.27
-Removed Employee level permission/rights field from the employee table. All permissions are now controlled by group membership exclusively. To enable a permission or right, add it to at least one group that the employee is a member of. To remove a permission, clear it from all groups the employee is a member of.
-Corrected the display on screen and printing on receipt of "Undefined Client" in cases when the default customer code was blank. Added a printable warning message if the default customer code is invalid.
-Customer payment method and bank account are now saved into the client table for possible reuse when re-selecting the customer in future transactions.
-Allow the automatic selection of the default customer payment method and bank account when a specific pre-existing customer did not have these fields defined.
-Created two new fields in store/location table to control if the market spot prices table should upload and download for each store/location. Since some locations care for or import their own market spot prices from the web, it is reduntant to also download market spot prices from the sftp server, so this can now be avoided. Likewise, if all locations in a network care for their own spot prices, then there is no need for them to upload and share the market spot prices. This too can now be avoided using these new fields. With proper setup this improves file sync efficiency.
-Added new fields to the product table, including 'default picture list' which can show example photos of the item useful for verification and authentication, added fields for manufacturer, manufacturer code and model.
-Added support for Fonebank.com import of products, including phone or tablet manufacturer, make, model, description, picture url, and prices for working and nonworking condition. The phone and tablet computer photos are now viewable from the picture dialog in the lot ticket editor after selecting the product. The 'product import url' field must be configured in the store/location table, and this product import option is available under the tools menu.
-Corrected an issue with the reporting dialog store/location sites tab not filtering properly based upon groups.
-Moved the permission/right 'Automatically Add Customers from Lot Tickets to Customer Table' from the group rights table, to instead become a store/location field. The default value for this new field is true.

June 20, 2013 - Version 1.77 / 0.26
-Added the display of customer address information on the main lot ticket editor screen, without the need to use the mouse-over hint.
-Added store/location code and names to printed check stubs.
-Added payment IDs (check numbers, wire transfer confirmations, etc.) to the company ticket information table, allowing lot buy ticket searching based upon check number or payment ID.
-Corrected an issue related to adding fixed prices to ticket spot price collections in environments with multiple check-in units of measure. Fixed prices will now always be added to the ticket spot price collection using the reporting unit of measure.
-Added a new group permission "Display Unit of Measure Column" which will control if the unit of measure column can be displayed. A separate permission "Allow Editing of Unit of Measure Column" now exclusively controls if data in this field can be changed or edited in the lot buy ticket.
-Added a group permission "Allow access to Gold Calculator" that will permit control over this function. Added Tools menu access to the Gold Calculator.
-Made the employee number field automatically increment, or auto sequence the employee numbers as they are added.
-Introduced more improvements to the customer-by-location-and-date file type which will permit the efficient transfer of changed or new customer records between locations without the need to transfer the entire customer database. Provided a way to "touch" all customer records in the customer master table, forcing an update of all customer records to synchronizing locations.
-Eliminated the in-sync-process updating of the company ticket info file to speed up and simply the sync process. The company ticket info file is now refreshed exclusively at the end of each successful sync process.

June 17, 2013 - Version 1.76 / 0.26
-Added a new field to the store/location table "Minimum Required Software Version Number" which will allow the system administrator to encourage and promote timely software updates to the latest software release. Whenever the location's version number is below the specified minimum required version number, then the program will suggest an update. For example, if an instance of the software is running version 1.45 and their location is set to require version 1.46, then they will be prompted and encouraged to update to the latest version of the program whenever Pawn Tracker program starts. It is still possible to bypass the suggested update. This feature should help ensure all instances in the system are running a minimum version of the software.
-Made corrections to improve synchronization of customer data between multiple locations, and correct for cases when customers could be missing from the customer table. Changed the way customer data is shared between locations to use a customer file by location and date, so that only the new customers will transfer between locations in the sync process. This will further improve the file sync performance by reducing reduncancy in the transfer and re-transfer of customer data.
-**Please note** due to backward incompatibility with version 1.74, it is essential that all instances of Gold Tracker in the same shared folder network be updated to version 1.75 or higher at the same time. (Access violations due to user permission buffer overruns are likely to occur on version 1.74 and earlier when using user group and permission data produced by version 1.75 or higher.)

June 11, 2013 - Version 1.75 / 0.25
-Added new user and group permissions/settings to control the *display* of each and every button on the main screen.
-Corrected a calculated payment price discrepancy between lot buying tickets and the gold calculator that occurred for some fixed price items.
-Reset the locations tab in the reporting dialog to select only the current location, following the improvement of adding the 'Reporting Authorized Locations' field, which had initially set them all selected by default in version 1.74.
-Ensured the current location always appears in the locations and sites tabs in the reporting dialog, regardless of the 'Reporting Authorized Locations' field.
-Increased the robustness of the file sync process to allow it to automatically recover from certain corruptions, or abnormally terminated internet connections resulting in zero size files. If the date and time of a certain file is the same between the local file system and the remote SFTP file system, but one file has zero size, then it will be overwritten and replaced by the file that has non-zero size.
-Corrected a problem that would occasionally cause an access violiation related to the display of hints in the lot ticket editor.
-Improved the caption on the salesperson dialog in the customer table editor to display the code and name of the customer being edited.

June 10, 2013 - Version 1.74 / 0.24
-Added a new user or user group permission/setting 'Automatically pay and close ticket upon receipt' which will add the payment automatically according to your payment method and bank account default settings, paying off the balance on the active ticket, and also automatically change the status of the ticket from active to closed, during the process of printing or viewing the receipt. If your default bank account is a checking account, the check printing dialog will be automatically invoked, printing the next check in sequence.
-Improved the handling of the pending file uploads in the rare case that a lot buying ticket did not have an assigned store location, it will delete the pending upload file and carry on without repeatedly attempting to upload a non-existant file or a file with a double backslash in the filename.

June 6, 2013 - Version 1.72 / 0.21
-Added a new user or user-group permission giving the ability to set (or not set) the salesperson/buyer when selecting a pre-existing customer. ('Set Ticket Salesperson when selecting pre-existing Customer')
-Provided new Employee field 'Reporting Authorized Locations' which will limit the locations on the sites and locations tabs in the reporting dialog according to the user settings. This can help limit the data in reports accessible to specific employees. You will need to define these lists for the employees but you can use the F1 copy, F2 paste and F3 copy to next keys in some cases to make it faster to copy this field from one employee to another.
-Provided a checkbox to disable employees allowing you to effectively turn off their accounts and deny login without needing to delete the employee or change the employee password. This could be used to preserve information in the employee table after ending their employment, or to temporarily disable and re-enable employee accounts.
-Improved display of file sizes during file sync functions.