On September 8, 2022, Queen Elizabeth II died and Operation London Bridge, the funeral plan for Queen Elizabeth II, was set in motion.  No other event, in recent times, could have brought home the importance of succession planning more effectively.  

The key takeaway from this event is that Operation London Bridge was planned well in advance of the Queen's death and was revised over the years to keep it current and relevant.  The plan was comprehensive, including all details from the death announcement to the details of the State Funeral to the duration of the mourning period.  They even included a plan outlining actions to be taken should her death occur in Scotland (Operation Unicorn).

​How can we learn from this event?  The first and most important lesson is that a succession plan is an essential part of any business. The plan must also be looked at frequently, revised when needed to keep it up-to-date, and include implementation and communication details for all affected parties.

A. More combinations of having and not having PO Number, Order Number, and Invoice Number are now handled by the Sales Importer.  When using Update Records, there will be reduced change of missing Orders based on not having any information about an Order in the source import spreadsheet.

B. Deleting a Payment in MRSweb will now confirm the action and delete all of the Payment's Line Items as well.  This behaviour matches what takes place in Desktop.  Deleting a Payment will not delete any Invoices or their commission amounts from Invoices that were confirmed on the Payment, it just deletes that Payment and checked items that were marked as paid on it.

C. Batch Import Summary now has direct links to related items throughout the system, to make it easier to jump from the Batch Import Summary page to the pages of those items, without having to find and filter for the items yourself.  These links open the related page in a new tab, filtered to the Batch Number used.

1. Number of Import Rows: brings the User to the Sales Import page
2. Number of Order Line Items: brings the User to the Order Line Items page
3. Number of Orders: brings the User to the Orders page
4. Number of Invoice Line Items: brings the User to the Invoice Line Items page
5. Number of Invoices: brings the User to the Invoices page

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D. The label for Discount Amount has been changed to Unit Discount, to better reflect that the Discount being records here is per-unit-item, just like the Unit Price.  The math that is being performed related to this column is:
        (Unit Price - Unit Discount) * Quantity = Sales Amount

E. With the Unit Discount label change, the order of the columns has also been changed to better reflect the order or calculation related to the equation used above.  I.e. the column order is now Unit Price, Unit Discount, Quantity, Sales Amount.
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F. The Item Description field will now take up to 80 characters of text as the description.  This is up from 50, which was the previous limit.
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When you're taking a look at your business' profitability, one of the factors to consider is whether your Principals and/or your Customers are generating a good ROI (return on investment).  Being able to track the ratio of earnings to time spent on these partners gives you a general idea of the success of your sales efforts and your profitability. 


We all have our favorites - favorite manufacturers and favorite customers.  These are the people who we feel most comfortable with, who appreciate us, and who we spend most of our time working for (manufacturer) or selling to (customer).  What we don't often do is check to make sure that the time spent is worth it - i.e. a good ROI.