We’ve switched on our accounts system (Xero) today. Your invoices and accounts email will look slightly different, but the amounts shouldn’t. If you pay be direct debit or standing order these payments should still go through as normal.

If you do have any queries about your account please get in touch with Sue at accounts@lamplightdb.co.uk.

We’ve decided to make the communications module available for free to any customer that needs to add it to their system, for at least the next 3 months. We hope this will be helpful if you are changing the way you work and need to stay in touch with your service users and supporters in different ways. We’ve done a short introductory video to help you get it set up.

Other changes we’ve made:

• Improved the setup for email. Lamplight can work out the SMTP server settings needed for the most popular email providers, so in many cases all you need to do is enter your email password. Lamplight will also send a test email so you can see straight away whether everything’s working.
• Individual operators can set their own email account details, so admins don’t need to do it for them.
• Communications can now have a date from and to, so you can store and report on duration of communication records.
• The ‘reply to’ email address will be the email of the sending account (you often get errors if these are different).

You can add modules to your system via the system admin menu > Customise Lamplight > Add or remove modules.

We’ve added a new feature over the weekend which allows you to click on a number in a work report to see a list of the people or work records that have been included. Simply run a report as usual, click on a number in the ‘number of people’ or ‘number of sessions’ column, and you’ll see a little popup with them listed. Each item in the list is a link, so clicking on one will open the profile or record and you can view it.

At the same time, we’ve added a little trick that’ll make cross-checking things a bit easier too. If you hold down the ‘shift’ key on the keyboard and click a name in the list, the profile will open up in a new window. This means you can double-check the profile details while still keeping the report on your main screen.

If you want to find out more, why not watch our short introductory video?