Salesforce

Salesforce partners?

We are continually moving toward more Salesforce development and implementations.

In the past 18 months, we have been going further and further down the Salesforce rabbit hole. Admittedly, the Salesforce ecosystem is enormous. We have been actively assisting with a Marketing Cloud implementation and have an in depth knowledge of actively developing within Marketing Cloud and integrating with external applications and data sources. This has also brought us into other peripheral products. Skyvia has been a solid tool to use for integration to both Salesforce CRM and Marketing Cloud.

A welcome surprise was the training side of Salesforce. Trailhead is a great way to quickly come up-to-speed on Salesforce products. The badges and points are a great examples of gamification and the certifications appear to be within reach. They are obviously quick to produce material for this as well. There are numerous Slack modules and badges available. You can even become Slack certified. There’s nothing there for Servicetrace, but in fairness, it was JUST announced.

Stay tuned as Batten continues to embrace more Salesforce solutions.

Focused message boxes in xTuple

If you’ve developed in xTuple, then you probably share this pain. Such a simple requirement, maybe something along the lines of “can you add field X to the sale order item screen?”. No problem, easy stuff. Then you run into what feels like a syntax error. Usually it’s a typo, am I right? You try to add a debugger line, but then you hit that modal screen and remember how hard it is to step through the sales order item screen.

There are lots of approaches at this point. One simple approach is to add a couple of message boxes to get an idea of what’s happening. You don’t want this message box popping up for others. Here is an easy way to make the message work only for your user.

var _currentuser;
var params = new Object();

var data = toolbox.executeQuery("select geteffectivextuser() as currentuser", params);

if (data.first()){
  _currentuser = data.value("currentuser");
}

...

if (_currentuser == 'szuke'){
  QMessageBox.critical(mywindow, qsTr("testing"), "set override");
}

1099-NEC

It’s that time again. The days are ticking off and W2s, 1099s, etc are coming due. This year we have a new form to contend with. The IRS has introduced form 1099-NEC. This is now required for reporting payments to contractors. Evidently, this isn’t actually a new form, but an old one. The form has been absent for 38 years.

I have been working with xTuple to include support for the 1099-NEC form. If this doesn’t happen, we’ll all be filling out the forms in some manual approach. Worst case, I’ll put the logic in the system myself.

Stay tuned…

Below is more information related to both forms.

IRS Form 1099-MISC

Form 1099-MISC is used for miscellaneous incoming. This is used to to report payments (e.g., rents and royalties) and miscellaneous income.

File Form 1099-MISC for each entity you made payments to during the tax year:

• At least $10 in royalties or broker payments in lieu of dividends or tax-exempt interest.

• At least $600 in the following:

  • Rents

  • Prizes and awards

  • Other income payments

  • Cash from a notional principal contract to an individual, a partnership, or an estate

  • Any fishing boat proceeds

  • Medical and health care payments

  • Crop insurance proceeds

  • Payments to an attorney

  • Section 409A deferrals

  • Nonqualified deferred compensation

Do not use Form 1099-MISC for W-2 employees. And as of tax year 2020, do not use Form 1099-MISC to report independent contractor payments. That’s what we’ll now use form 1099-NEC for.

IRS Form 1099-NEC

IRS form 1099-NEC, Nonemployee Compensation, is used to report nonemployee compensation.nForm 1099-NEC is used in conjunction with Form 1099-MISC. Form 1099-NEC replaces the use of Form 1099-MISC for reporting independent contractor payments.

Prior to 2020, you would include nonemployee compensation in Box 7 on Form 1099-MISC. In 2020, Box 7 on Form 1099-MISC turned into “Payer made direct sales of $5,000 or more of consumer products to a buyer (recipient) for resale,” and nonemployee compensation is reported on Form 1099-NEC instead.

1099-NEC reporting requirements

The IRS Form 1099-NEC is used to report nonemployee compensation. This includes the following payment types to independent contractors:

• Fees

• Commissions

• Prizes

• Awards

• Other forms of compensation for services

You must typically report a payment as nonemployee compensation if all of the following conditions apply:

1. You made the payment to an individual who is not your employee

2. The payment was for services in the course of your trade or business

3. You made the payment to an individual, a partnership, an estate, or a corporation

4. Payments to the payee were at least $600 during the year

Are you secure?

That little padlock symbol in the web address is more important than you realize. While it’s most important for financial transactions, it can be equally important to protect both your privacy and the privacy of your customers, vendors, family and friends. Are you unknowingly sharing private information? Not only can that be inconvenient, it can also be a liability. Product prices? Buying habits? These are all worth protecting.

Why do I care? I’m not a target. My company is small. I don’t have much money. I don’t use my credit card online.

Keep rationalizing.

The reality is, we all have less privacy than just a few years ago. Small measures go a long way. While you may not feel like a target, how many spam emails do you get? How many telemarketing calls? Keeping our private information private helps to reduce the impact on the little things in our lives. A few less spam emails, one less telemarketer during dinner.

OxygenXML

We are big fans of OxygenXML. This has become my goto editor for XSLT. The debugging along makes it worth the price. They have been providing some great webinars lately. If you have an interest…here’s some info.

https://www.oxygenxml.com/events_programme.html

Shopify to xTuple integration - Configured Options

We’ve been a Shopify Partner for a while now. We have been honing our skills and integrating business systems with Shopify to fully understand the challenges facing our customers. We have created new solutions to address many of these issues.

One of the first integrations we did was to put xTuple configured items on a Shopify storefront. This was a challenge. This brought us quickly into the world of options and variants and all of the limitations that go with them. We learned how to work with the limitations and then how to make the storefront a pleasant experience with configured products.

Yes, we used the iconic STOCKCAR1 and the toys database for much of our testing.

This might seem simple to those not familiar with Shopify. Shopify provides Options that can be used to add pricing for various configurations of a product. Matching this up with the configured options in an ERP system can be tricky. Our utilities read the configured options and related Bills of Materials to then create the liquid code for each product page. The drop-downs will then display the option price and the product price will update as selections are made.

The pricing reflects the chosen options.

When a user selects the different options, the price changes and is passed through to the cart. The order can then be imported into the awaiting ERP system for fulfillment.

The pricing is updated as options are chosen.

Ok, not bad. Wait, I said that Shopify only allows 3 options. The demo data in xTuple only has 3 options on this toy truck. We went ahead and added a couple more options. You can now see that we are handling 5 priced options.

Standard Shopify handles 3 options, but you shouldn’t be limited.

We are doing some very exciting stuff. This is the stuff that makes it fun to come to work each day. If you are looking to enhance your online presence, or simply trying to import the orders that are already coming into your website, reach out to us.

Help - I got this error... (in xTuple)

We’ve all been there. You’re just trying to enter a sales order and this horrible message comes up. There are many of these types of messages. Most of the time, it’s not a serious as it seems.

This is a great time to make use of your xTuple talent. This might be a trusted consultant, an internal poweruser, or xTuple support.

The actions you take when getting an error can make the difference between a few minute inconvenience or a much longer period of time while your resource struggles to put together just what happened.

Take screenshots. This may seem obvious, but I very often get requests with very little information.

Provide relevant details. Try to detail the steps you were in the middle of. If you can repeat the steps, even better. Make sure to give information such as the order number, customer, item, etc.

Get the Details. The error messages usually have a button that says “Show Details…”. While the information in those details may seem unimportant to you, a developer may find them invaluable.

Check the Database Log. I’m not trying to take you deep into the technical stuff, but this one is readily available.