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Pastel Accounting 2009 makes businesses more secure, flexible, efficient

By Headlines
Johannesburg, 16 Sep 2008

In response to customer and channel partner feedback, the 2009 upgrade of Pastel Accounting provides enhanced security, flexibility, efficiency, and control.

"With the economy as tight as it is - and looking like it's going to stay that way for another 12 months - it's vital that businesses have software that enables them to do way more with way less and therefore keep putting money back on the bottom line regardless of how difficult things get," says Softline Pastel managing director, Steven Cohen.

"Trying to add more functionality without making the product more difficult to use is quite a balancing act, however.

"That's why we base all our development on what our users and channel partners tell us they would find beneficial. Pastel Accounting 2009 is, therefore, very much our customers' product - enabled by some very astute underlying technology from us."

One of the most significant new modules, Pastel Bank Manager, creates a huge leap in efficiency - saving the time normally spent in manually capturing bank statements into the accounts.

Pastel Bank Manager downloads bank statements from any of the major South African banks and then automatically updates the books. Having mapped the bank transactions to the correct customer, supplier or ledger accounts the first time a download is done, the system automatically assigns the transactions after each subsequent import.

Security and control have also been given a massive boost with new user groups and user access features.

Specifically, organisations can now restrict access to sensitive financial information by user. In addition, new user group functionality allows organisations to categorise people according to the access capabilities they wish them to have, as well as providing the option to further personalise a particular user's rights.

Levels of access control range from the type of document a user can process to the type of functionality a user can access. For example, an employee can be allowed access to a particular report he or she needs, but not all the financial reports or the trial balance. One user can be given the ability to do only quotes and another the ability to do only invoices.

Pastel Accounting's new System Audit Trail provides additional peace of mind on a slightly different level, in that it enables tracking by date, time, and user of any changes made to the system set-up. It therefore promotes accountability, minimises mistakes, and deters users from fraudulent behaviour.

The new Transaction Audit Trail provides a chronological sequence of transactions to help with data interrogation and simplify investigations into anomalies or queries. It is possible, for instance, to identify deleted transactions - because each transaction is now uniquely numbered and listed in the order that processing occurred.

When it comes to productivity, Pastel Accounting's new Cash Manager add-on massively optimises collections through automating daily control of the debtors' book. It generates automatic chase lists for follow up, eliminates the need for scribbled notes on the age analysis, provides instant reconciliations of invoices outstanding per aging category per debtor, calculates actual days outstanding per invoice, monitors payment history and tracks all calls made to debtors and promises made. It also does all the conventional projections such as cash flow forecasts and average age of debtors.

Other enhancements to Pastel Accounting include Gross Profit Reports that offer the option of using either average cost or last cost, a Point of Sale module with improved assignment rights and greater integration with the core Pastel Accounting application, receipting against multiple customers, suppliers, or GL Accounts, and tighter online back-up integration.

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Softline Pastel

Softline Pastel, a member of the Softline Group, is South Africa's leader in accounting, payroll and business software for the SME market. Founded in 1989, Pastel has been a trusted name in accounting software for over 18 years and is recommended by nine out of 10 accountants that serve the SME market. While Pastel is South African-born, it is used by 180 000 businesses worldwide and is currently sold in over 52 countries through a network of more than 3 500 channel and business partners. The Pastel support contact centre, a critical component of the business, has received both local and international accolades, and was voted best customer service contact centre in South Africa by its customers in the BPeSA 2007 National BPO Awards.

For more information, please visit the Softline Pastel Web site on www.pastel.co.za.

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