DEVELOPMENT ROADMAP

GREETINGS, LIFTOFF COMMUNITY!

Your Liftoff team has been hard at work on many new and exciting features. This email is rather long, so if you’re a coffee drinker, make sure you grab a hot cup before you begin reading. We’ve been working hard to create features that will have a tremendous impact on your business and customers. Enjoy! 

PURCHASE ORDER-BASED INVENTORY

You can now provision inventory through a purchase order process within Liftoff and track inventory relative to the PO. Here’s a quick start guide to using this process:
 

• Click the “Order New Inventory” button that appears in your Products > Inventory > Inventory PO Items tab.

• Next, select the vendor you wish to purchase against and the warehouse you wish to house the product in, once received.

• After continuing, you can now supply your own PO number and the ownership assignment for the inventory. Please note, if you do not supply a PO number, Liftoff will create one for you. You may choose from subscriber-owned inventory, account-owned inventory, or vendor-owned inventory. This designation will be important to downstream processes such as reporting and accounting.

• Now you can begin adding products to your purchase order.

• Continue doing this until you’ve entered all products.

• Note that the cost fields allow for hand entry. This provides you a way of capturing the actual cost of the product you’re ordering up until you decide to close this purchase order.

• When finished, click either the “Save PO” button or the “Save and Send PO” button. The “Save and Send PO” button is only available for vendors that you have an active integration with. When clicked, it will send a copy of the purchase order to your vendor.

• Once saved, your PO now shows up on the “Inventory PO Items” tab. Note that items tagged with “Base Inventory” are items that were created outside of the purchase order process but can still be managed through this interface.

• From this screen you have several activities you can perform. The first notable activity is receiving inventory and making adjustments. To do this, click on any of the input fields for a given inventory item.

• You’ll be greeted with a modal form that provides the ability to indicate how many were received, what shelf you’d like the inventory to occupy, what action you’re taking, and a notes section to provide descriptive text related to this transaction. Note that ALL changes made to inventory are recorded for posterity. Below is a snapshot of how inventory adjustments are recorded:

• If you’d like additional information about this new feature, or a guided tour, please reach out to your account manager for assistance.

VENDOR SEARCH AND SORT

By popular demand, we’ve added the ability to search and sort your vendor list. Using the same convention found elsewhere in Liftoff, simply click the arrow underneath each column caption and a search box will appear. Entering text into this field and clicking “Go” will yield a filtered list, showing only matches for the text you’ve entered. Additionally, clicking the column headers determines how the list is sorted and in which direction.
 

VENDOR PAYMENT TERMS

You may now manage payment terms for each vendor in Liftoff. You can access this feature under Products > Vendors and selecting a vendor from your list.
 

VENDOR DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT

Need to store agreements, receipts, invoices, or additional information supplied by your vendor? This new feature will allow you to store and manage practically any file along with meta data that captures compliance fields such as expiration date, license number, and more.

 

QUAD XML INTEGRATION
 

 Liftoff has recently added Quad as a fully-qualified integration partner. You’ll note that we now have a “Quad XML” integration setting within your integration settings. If you wish to connect your platform to Quad, please reach out to your Quad account manager to capture the details necessary to complete this section. 

SUBSCRIBER FTP SETTINGS

You may now establish saved FTP settings and parameters that can be used by other features within Liftoff, including automated reports. This feature supports FTP and the highly recommended SFTP protocols. You may access this feature by going to All Accounts > Tools > FTP Settings.

 

AUTOMATED REPORTS

Our reporting feature has recently changed and is now equipped with a scheduled report feature. To access, navigate to Reports > Scheduled Reports within My Liftoff. To create a scheduled report, click “Generate New Report”. You will be presented with options for report category, which report within that category you wish to run, date range options, delivery methods, run dates, and recurrence. Complete each field based on your needs and select a delivery method. Reports can be delivered via scheduled download, email, or FTP. This is an especially powerful feature if you need to export Liftoff data to another location for processing or ingestion.
 

ORDER NOTES

Liftoff’s backend ordering solution now incorporates a powerful notes feature that allows you to track communications back to each order.
These notes are brought forward when repeated to ensure the chain of information is not lost.
 

ORDER-LEVEL REORDERING FOR BACKEND ORDERS

You may now reorder any order for your accounts through Liftoff’s backend ordering module. Simply open the order you wish to repeat and click the “Repeat Order” button. When clicked, Liftoff will make a deep copy of the order and place the new order into Draft mode. From there, you can update order information, address, billing and more.
 

CSV REPORT OUTPUT

Your reporting feature has been updated to include CSV file output for any reports that were previously exportable to Excel. Note that CSV output is only available for reports targeted for Excel output.
 

PRODUCT START AND END DATES

Liftoff now provides date-driven control over the publication of products to your customers. To enable this feature, open any product for editing.
You will note that we’ve added “Start Publication On” and “Stop Publication On” controls. Simply specify when you'd like your products to be published and when you’d like them to be removed from your site. 
You may also modify publication dates through our product batch job feature.
 

EXPANDED LISTS VIEWS

Previously, all list views had a hard limit of 7 columns. We have increased all list view column limits to 14 columns, double the previous ceiling. To accommodate wider list views, we've implemented horizontal scrolling when content overflows the current viewport. Note that expanding products with a lot of custom fields may yield slower search performance.