A list of NewViews accounting features would be similar to the lists offered by many other accounting products. That isn't what makes NewViews stand out.
It's the way NewViews does things that sets it apart, makes it more flexible, accomplishes your goals faster, and ultimately goes where no other accounting system can.
We hope that this executive summary will give you a feel for what we mean.
See the Videos for an eight part series providing an overview of NewViews Accounting.
NewViews is really multi-user. It doesn't just pretend to be. When one user adds a transaction, everyone else can see the results instantly. You don't have to wait for batches or shut down the workstations while the server updates. If you're watching the balance sheet or the income statement you will see the numbers change as other users add transactions. If you're watching a sales journal you will see the invoices coming in, as they happen. With NewViews you don't run reports at the end of some period to find out what has happened. You simply look at reports to see what is happening.
Connect across a local area network, or across the planet. NewViews doesn't care. Your workstations and servers can be anywhere. NewViews can function as a private or self hosted cloud. NewViews doesn't require any special proprietary server hardware or software. Just your plain vanilla computer and operating system will do.
Other accounting systems sell separate modules that can be integrated. But NewViews is integrated. NewViews has state of the art object technology that sews subsidiary ledgers together into one seamless organization. And this organization can continue to grow, just as seamlessly, as NewViews is extended with more functionality. NewViews is designed with the future in mind.
With NewViews you don't look at one account or one transaction at a time and then ask for the next one to be retrieved. You scroll through pages of accounts, transactions, or any other objects, so you can always see more at a glance.
NewViews provides nested companion window panes that display more detail as you scroll through parent window panes. For example, as you scroll through transactions in one pane, the details of the current transaction are displayed in the companion pane. The information in the companion pane changes automatically as you move through the parent pane. But what's good for transactions is good for everything else. You scroll through accounts the same way, with all their ledgers displayed in the companion pane, changing as you go. But it doesn't stop there. Panes open panes to any depth so as you scroll through customers, you can see not only the invoice headers but also their line item details.
NewViews offers extensive multi-column reporting capabilities but these are reports with a difference. When you click on any report amount, a companion pane displays those transactions, and only those transactions, that total to that amount. As you click on different report amounts, the companion pane changes on the fly.
This ability can be incredibly useful. Suppose you're on a multi-column aged accounts receivable report. Each report amount is the total of a customer's open invoices for an aging period. That's pretty useful right there, but there's more. When you click on an amount, the open, i.e. unpaid, invoices for that customer and aging period are displayed in the companion pane. And the running balance on the invoices verifies that they total to the amount on the report.
It doesn't stop there. You have the invoices in the companion pane but now you want to check the details. Companion panes are nested to any depth so open another companion, this time a companion of the pane on the invoices, and you have invoice line item details. This linking is real-time too, so when you click on another report amount the invoices change and so do the details.
NewViews displays the transactions for each account on the account's collection of postings, i.e. the account ledger. Accounts ripple up to other accounts to report totals, and when they do, the transactions ripple up too. This is another incredibly useful NewViews feature because it gives you an even wider view of your information. For example, all customer accounts total to the root customer account, so on the root customer account you have the merged union of all customer transactions below. In one place, you can see all of the transactions for all of the customers in your database. You can find things faster than ever.
But customer accounts are just one example. The same merging feature works everywhere. You have all vendor transactions on the root vendor account, all expenses on the to root expense account, all inventory transactions on the root inventory account, and on and on. And merging doesn't stop there. It continues up your reporting structure right to the root account of the database where you can see every transaction in the entire database in one place. That also makes the root account a convenient proof. It will always sum to zero for any period you pick.
And what's good for account ledgers is good for journals. Transactions also merge as they ripple up through journals all the way to the root journal. So any journal that has sub-journals displays the merged union of all transactions on the sub-journals. In the extreme case, the root journal displays every transaction in the database. So you have two complementary places where you can see everything: one for the books of original entry (journals), and one for the books of final entry (accounts). With NewViews you can slice and dice.
For data-entry assistance just press <F3> and a selection window pops up. The pop-up let's you select from a list of allowed values instead of typing it in. The list may be as simple as Yes or No for a Yes/No field, or a pop-up calendar for a date field, but is can also be as extensive as a table of vendors when you need one for a purchase invoice, or a table of sales items for a sales invoice line item. Numeric fields even let you enter expressions instead of simple numbers so you can enter 1.15*3 instead of 3.45.
But if you have thousands of accounts, say customers, how can you pick one quickly for a sales invoice? The answer is just start typing. NewViews will automatically home in on the customer as you start entering the customer name. Only a few characters are usually enough to land on the customer you want, so you enter only the absolute minimum necessary. If you want to select customers by description instead of name, just click on the description column in the pop-up instead.
NewViews has find commands that let you search any column of any table, just like a spreadsheet. So, for example, you can find a transaction quickly if you know something about it like its amount, or reference, or even its description.
But other features of NewViews make finding things easy without even using find commands. Suppose you purchased a copier but you can't remember when you bought it or who the vendor was. Just click on the root account, flip to postings, and click on the description column title to sort by description. You now have every transaction in the database sorted by description. Grab the scroll bar tack and move to the descriptions that start with c or co. Your copier purchase should be there along with the date, invoice reference, amount, and vendor. If you want the transaction details you can navigate to the vendor and position on the invoice. But even better, don't go anywhere. If it's not already open, just restore the companion window and there's the invoice.
In the example above, the root account was used, but you could have restricted your search by using another account such as the root expense account if you expensed the copier, or you could have used the root vendor account. And there's something else you could have done. Instead of using the scroll bar you could <Ctrl+Click> on the description title. This switches the column to a mode where you can just start typing c o p ... and NewViews homes in on copier as you type. This feature is automatic for rapid selection from edit assistance windows but you can also use it manually with a <Ctrl+Click> on many column titles.
We mentioned that you can see all transactions for each and every account, even summary total accounts because of merged unions. But in addition, accounts have different views that also let you see just the debits, or just the credits, or just the open or the closed transactions, and so on. So you can flip to the debit view of an inventory account to look at just the purchases, or flip to the credit view for the sales. Or flip to the debit view of a customer for the charges, or the credit view for the payments and credit memos, or the open view for the customer's unpaid invoices.
You can even analyze summary total accounts using views, but in this case you're looking at merged unions of all transactions below. So flip to the debit view of the income account and you have all expenses, or all revenues on the credit view. Flip to the open view of the root customer account and you have all unpaid sales invoices for the entire database. And you have all unpaid purchase invoices for the entire database in one place, on the open view of the root vendor account.
Reconciliation is another area that demonstrates the power of account views. Flip to the open view of a bank account for the unreconciled transactions, or the closed view for the reconciled transactions. When you reconcile a transaction it disappears from the open view and re-appears on the closed view.
This is so much fun to watch that NewViews automatically sets up windows that let you see it happen as it happens. So as you reconcile transactions they get out of the way because they disappear, and you can see them re-appear in the reconciled window.
In addition, transactions in the reconciled window are sorted so they appear in the same order as the bank statement. This is convenient because every view has a running balance and the running balance of your reconciled transactions should always line up with the running balance on the bank statement, transaction by transaction. If something doesn't line up, the running balance will identify the exact transaction that caused the problem.
When you're reconciling you will eventually encounter a transaction on the bank statement that isn't recorded on your bank account, such as a service charge. This isn't a problem for NewViews because your reconciliation is live. You can add the missing transaction right now, and reconcile it right now, and you don't have to go anywhere else to do it.
And remember, NewViews has find commands that work anywhere. So if you have a large number of unreconciled transactions you can find them quickly. You can find them by date, amount, description, reference, and so on.
You already have the full history of every account, including all summary total accounts because of merging. But this information can also be summarized at different resolutions. NewViews really shows off when you want to analyze historic information. You can pick from resolutions such as yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, bi-weekly, and even daily. That's right. Any period can be selected right down to individual days on reports and account history views. NewViews keeps everything on-line and nothing is ever thrown out.
Note that we more often refer to a set of books as a database in this documentation and they both mean the same thing. You can manage any number of databases with NewViews. You simply keep them in different files. And you can open any number of databases simultaneously. You can open any combination of local databases with single-user access, and remote databases with multi-user access through a server.
The NewViews accounting model eliminates the need to close the books. You always have periodic amounts without the need to perform any closing operation. Note that you might want to prevent transaction activity on a prior period and you can do this on a user-by-user basis. So you can prevent other users from making inadvertent changes to prior periods, while at the same time, keeping for yourself the ability to reach back and make adjustments.
<F1>, the help key, actually works, and the entire manual is also always on-line. Error messages are extensive and the help on error messages can turn mistakes into learning opportunities.
The information displayed in NewViews windows is always live. When you see a spelling error you can correct it then and there. If you find out that a customer has moved, you can change the address on the spot whether you happen to be on a customer table, on a customer account, of even on a customer invoice. Reports are live and dynamic, never just static results produced by a report generator. So when you look at any report, even financial statements, you may see it change if other users are actively adding transactions. But don't get nervous. Only report amounts displaying the current period are likely to change because the transactions being added will typically have very recent dates. A report amount for a prior period such as last month will not be affected by this month's transaction activity.
Making fonts bigger or smaller is as simple as rolling your mouse wheel with the <Ctrl> key held down. Make characters smaller to see more or make them bigger to increase readability.
NewViews automatically sets up windows the way we think the majority of users will want them, but if you don't like them, rearrange them. You can grab and resize columns, move them around and even delete them. And you can always just restore to the default setup.
All information can be exported to Excel® where you can use Excel's additional formatting and data manipulation capabilities. Create your pie charts and customize printed reports and other documents.
NewViews comes fully equipped out of the box to address your basic accounting needs. There is no assembly required. But if you want, some assembly is allowed. NewViews is very flexible and lets you organize accounts according to customer requirements on reports and in totaling structures. And you can do this any time so you can get started now and organize, and re-organize, later.
You can completely control users by granting access to as much, or as little, as you want. What makes it so easy is that rights are inherited in the object hierarchy. For a purchase clerk, grant access to the root vendor and the purchase; exactly what is needed, and no more. Add access to the root customer and the sales journal and the user is now also a sales clerk. The administrator has access to the root object of the database for ultimate power. Or you can go the other way. Grant access to individual accounts, or objects of any kind. In the extreme, restrict a user to a single invoice. Access rights can be changed, and the window system responds, automatically restricting the user's view of the database to what has been granted, and nothing more.
NewViews provides a complete audit trail of all financial and security information. This is especially important in a multi-user environment where any number of users can simultaneously access and modify the same database. The audit trail gives you the full who, what, when, and where. (We're still working on the why.) All additions, modifications, and deletions, are tracked in the audit trail. A user can't change as much as a single field without it being tracked right down to the value of the field before and after the change. But that's not all:
The audit trail can be sliced and diced.
You can view all changes ever made to the database, but you can also home in on just the changes made by any individual user. You can home in further for just the changes made during a single user session. You can even home in on the history of changes for an individual object such as an account or transaction.
The audit trail can be sorted.
In addition to the traditional chronological sort order, you can sort audit trails by other useful criteria such as the kind of operation, or the type of object, to find out what happened even faster.
The audit trail can be monitored in real time.
NewViews is real-time so you can monitor the audit trail to watch the action as it happens. And you can track the activity for an individual user or session to really home in on the specifics.
The audit trail can be used to measure performance.
Because you have counts and running balances everywhere in NewViews, you also have data-entry activity, by user. And because you can sort the audit in different ways, you can analyze user activity effectively.
NewViews doesn't tie you to a proprietary technology. Run workstations and servers on 32/64 bit Microsoft Windows in any combination. We anticipate that NewViews for Linux will be released next, followed by Apple. When Linux and Apple versions are available, any combination of workstations and servers running on Windows, Linux, and Apple will be able to interact seamlessly.
Relax. We aren't asking you to program. The NewViews core is implemented in C++ but at the application level, its mother tongue is Tcl/Tk, a well-known scripting and windowing environment from the UNIX world. With Tcl/Tk, NewViews can be tweaked and customized to your specific needs. But it goes far beyond that. Tcl/Tk opens up a world of functionality like email, web-servers, (that's right your accounting system can be a web server), database connectivity, graphing, and just about anything else you can think of. If you don't believe it, check it out at http://www.tcl.tk, or http://www.activestate.com. Hundreds of thousands of programmers have.
There are always limits so here they are.
Let's make this easy and state right now that there is no limit to the number of reports, accounts, journals, transactions, users, or objects of any kind, that you can add to a NewViews database. So don't worry about how many customers or invoices you can have. If you want to get technical, of course there is ultimately a limit, but that limit is so large that it isn't a factor. NewViews is based on 64-bits and all internal limits follow.
Numbers go up to 999,999,999,999,999,999.99, or one million trillion. We carry up to 9 digits to the right of the decimal point, although dollar amounts are automatically rounded to the nearest cent.
Text fields have no pre-defined limit, so you can enter account names and descriptions, line item comments, addresses, and so on, that are as long as you want.
How many users can you have? We already said there is no limit to how many users you can add. The real question here is how many workstations can use the same database with multi-user access without experiencing performance degradation? We don't know because we haven't reached that limit yet. What we do know is that we have simulated the read load that approximately 300 users would place on the system with no significant effect on performance. We have also simulated the write load of approximately 50 very good data-entry operators entering as many transactions as they could, again with no significant effect on performance.