New Product

Web-based Reader Application

• FastClose version 3 introduces our brand new, web-based Reader application. Access your reports from anywhere, on a laptop, tablet or phone, with interactive filtering and drill through to more detailed or related ERP data in real-time.

Improvements

Performance

• The performance of the FastClose calculation engine for reports with many dimensions has been dramatically improved making complex reports run much faster. In areas such as consolidation for example, consolidating data over multiple companies with different currencies, reports that previously might have taken over 15 minutes now complete in just a minute or two.

• Opening and saving of reports is now even faster, building on the substantial improvements already delivered in version 2.5.18 and later. Data in the FastClose repository is now compressed to both improve performance and reduce the database size.

All Client Applications

• The look and feel of the desktop applications has been updated to match the latest Microsoft Office styling.

• FastClose has a fantastic new logo throughout.

Designer

• Report designers now have fine control over which measure columns are subtotalled, so that they can, for example, prevent unwanted subtotalling of quantities across products. (FC-671)

• Further, they can choose for each measure subtotal whether it should show the minimum, maximum, average, count or sum of its values. (FC-234)

• Report Description may now include formatting such as bold, italic and underline, as well as clickable links.

• A Help button has been added to the ribbon, and to the bottom left of most dialogs, to provide a visible alternative to the existing F1 key press for accessing context sensitive help. (FC-1555)

• When editing hierarchies, calculated nodes now show if they have conditional expressions defined, or have the 'Run After' option configured. (FC-1042)

• Filters can be quickly added to a report from the Field Explorer, by right-clicking on a dimension and choosing 'Add to Selections' from the context menu. (FC-618)

• Similarly, right clicking on a filter label provides an option to add that dimension to the columns of the report by choosing 'Add to Columns' from the context menu. (FC-803) This context menu also now includes the Field Help for that item. (FC-1093)

• If a dimension only has Code and Caption attributes, these are no longer displayed by default, as they are rarely useful. Tick the 'Show All Attributes' checkbox to reveal them. (FC-1535)

• The maximum displayable number of decimal places has been increased in reports from 5 to 8. This can help when working with currency exchange rates. (FC-1431)

• Control of Bill of Material reporting has been enhanced by the addition of a dedicated Part selection control. (FC-1026)

Excel Add-In

• Previously, the Add-In displayed the filters side panel on every worksheet, if the workbook contained just one FastClose report. This made it possible to change the filters and re-run the report from derived worksheets without having to switch back to the FastClose source data worksheet. This behaviour is now optional and disabled by default: visit the Workbook Options dialog to re-enable it, if required. (FC-1418)

Administration

• Users now have an email address property editable via the Admin web app. (FC-1513)

• This makes it possible to have a 'Forgot Password' feature in all the client applications. This requires an SMTP email server to have been configured and of course user email addresses filled in, in their profiles. (FC-704) No more handling password reset requests for FastClose administrators!

• For better navigation, the Setup page of the Admin web app is now also accessible via the System item in the navigation menu. (FC-1433)

• The style and iconography of the Admin web app has been modernized, for improved clarity and better usability on wider monitors.

• Password policy settings have moved from the appsettings.json file on the FastClose server, to a separate file called accountsecuritypolicysettings.json by default. If you are upgrading to v3, your existing settings file will need editing. Please see the 3.0 Upgrade Guide. (FC-1370)

• As an unavoidable consequence of fixing a bug, on Windows Authentication sites, visiting the Admin web app no longer logs you in automatically. The user has to click 'Sign In'.

Nextworld

• Inactive accounts, companies, organizational units, etc. are now filtered out of member selection lists by default. To reveal them again, tick the new 'Include Inactive' checkbox. (FC-1531)

Fixes

Version 3.0.0 contains all the fixes released for 2.5 up to 2.5.20, plus those below.

Platform

• FastClose Server and the Worker Service for scheduler have been upgraded to use .NET 6. As a result they have an updated pre-requisite: the ASP.NET Core Runtime 6.0.x Windows Hosting Bundle. Please see the 3.0 Upgrade Guide.

• Many third party libraries used by FastClose applications have been updated to eliminate or mitigate disclosed security vulnerabilities. (FC-1259)

All Desktop Clients

• Drill through would fail if the user had permission to read the target report, but not the folder that the target report was saved in. (FC-1509)

Designer

• Calculations referencing subtotals and grand totals are now working and available again. (FC-1473)

• After applying the 'Accounting' formatting style, changing to any style other than Transactional would not remove the display of negative numbers in red. (FC-1104)

• Spaces are no longer permitted at the start or end of the names of folders, reports etc. Any existing leading or trailing spaces will be replaced with the underscore character when upgrading to v3. This will not affect references such as drill through links as those are based on internal, unique identifiers, not names. (FC-1190)

• Clicking on the Remove button for a dimension in the Rows list of the Rows & Columns dialog removed the currently selected dimension instead of the one on that row. (FC-1341)

• When a range node is selected in the Hierarchy editor, double clicking on a member in the member list populates the start and end range items (FC-151)

• Importing templates no longer requires the template file to be write-able. (FC-220)

• If a dimension has the same column for its code and caption then don't offer the 'Show Codes or Captions' options in the context menu of the column in the results grid. (FC-1550)

• Adding a custom date range bucket to the 'SO 11 Customer Price List' report would fail with an error. (FC-1603)

Excel Add-In

• If you opened or ran a report while editing a cell in the worksheet (with the cursor blinking in the cell or in the formula bar), when the Excel add-in tries to update the worksheet, Excel appears to hang and lots of COM exceptions are logged. (FC-1591)

Scheduler

• Scheduled jobs would fail to run after switching the FastClose Server from FastClose authentication to Windows authentication. (FC-1364)

Epicor

• Adding Epicor's SysRowID or SysRevID columns to a report no longer causes an error when the report is run. (FC-1336)

SAP

• Trying to select members of an attribute dimension in templates with the 'As of Date' functionality no longer results in an error. (FC-1546)