Software Update — 22 October 2026

Release: 22 October 2026

This update covers two and a half weeks of work. The way tax is worked out on examination and dispensing lines has been put onto a single rule that follows the branch you are working in, five new reports arrive, trial contact lenses now carry forward to a patient's next examination, and appointment reminders can be switched on and off per practice with cancel and move handled from the reminder itself.

Below is a plain-language summary. A few items change how something behaves — please read Worth knowing at the end before your next month-end.

Examinations and dispensing

• Trial contact lenses carry forward to the next examination — the trial lenses recorded at a fitting were not carried into the patient's next examination, so the next clinician started without knowing what had already been tried. They now carry forward, including on examinations that skip the usual prompts.
• Spectacle Rx shows first, and read-only, on the Contact Lenses tab — it is there to be read from while fitting contact lenses, so it now sits at the top of the tab and cannot be changed by accident. The same applies on a repurchase.
• Fees and contact lens tabs can be edited on a repurchase, and the final contact lens dispenses on its own, which previously had to be done by hand every time.
• The Dispensing Sheet shows the lens types your Lens Filter allows — without locking out a script written before that filter was set up.
• Lens and frame pickers search the whole category — a picker set to a category offered only what sat directly in it and missed everything filed in a sub-category underneath, so stock the practice had appeared not to exist.
• The patient's funder shows on the examination screen and the Exam Report — previously it had to be looked up on the patient record.
• Clinical dates always show the year — a date without its year is ambiguous on a record covering several years of a patient's history.
• Quote from Exam works where no pricelist is set, and the quote now carries the patient's details and the correct Dispenser caption.

Job Cards

• The Vendor shows on the Job Card — so whoever picks the job up can see who the work went to without opening the purchase order.
• Posting a supplier's bill no longer requires access to the Job — an account clerk without clinical access could not post a bill that happened to be linked to one.

Patient records

• A dependant saves under a legacy patient number — adding a dependant to a main member whose patient number predates your current numbering failed to save at all.
• The 24-month recall email addresses the patient properly — where a record had no preferred name, the email fell back to a blank rather than their first name.

Appointments and the roster

• The Roster can be opened up to 24 months ahead — the previous ceiling stopped practices booking a recall or a contact lens aftercare that far out.
• The Appointment Tags menu is shown only to staff who may change tags — it appeared for everyone and then refused the change.

Invoicing and payments

• Tax on examination and dispensing lines follows the branch you are working in — the tax on a line was worked out in more than one way depending on where the line came from, which in a multi-branch practice could put the wrong rate on it, including on a branch that is not VAT registered. There is now one rule for all of them. Please see Worth knowing.
• Community Edition payments read as Paid again — the paid status on an invoice was waiting on a tool that edition does not have.
• Invoicing no longer depends on one particular pricelist existing — a practice that had renamed or removed it could not raise an invoice at all.
• Pricelists and quotation templates can be set per practice, and the companies on a quotation template now actually save, which silently did nothing before.
• A patient can be found by medical aid number on journal entries and journal items — usually the number the person at the counter is reading from.
• The write-off amount can be edited when reconciling several lines at once — it was fixed to the full difference, so a part write-off had to be done one line at a time.
• The currency-rate warning banner is gone from invoices — it appeared where it did not apply and was being read as noise.
• Confirming a purchase order works on practices that do not use PIN authorisation — it previously failed outright on those systems.

Reports

• New: Patient Birthdays — patients with birthdays in a chosen period, as a report and as a spreadsheet, with a CSV export shaped for importing into a messaging campaign.
• New: Stock Received by Date and Vendor — what came in, when, and from whom.
• New: Stock Lens Override per Period — lens overrides for a chosen period.
• New: six customer follow-up call lists — ready-made lists for working through the patients who need a call.
• Supplier and product filters on the days-to-sell report — so it can be read for one supplier or one product rather than everything at once.
• The Executive Summary survives one bad sub-report — a single sub-report that could not be produced took the whole summary down with it. Each is now produced on its own, so you get the rest.
• Several reports no longer fail while applying your letterhead.

Stock and stocktake

• The Open Stock Take wizard defaults to today — using your own local date, and batch names are dated the same way, so a stocktake opened late in the evening is no longer dated the next day.
• The stocktake screens act on the scan you selected — Variance History, deleting a batch and the duplicate check in the batch wizard each now work strictly on the scan you picked from the list.

Appointment reminders and SMS

• WhatsApp reminders now have per-practice switches — reminders and letting a patient confirm are on, as they have been. Letting a patient cancel or move their own appointment, and birthday messages, are switches that start off, so nothing reaches the diary or a patient's phone until the practice asks for it.
• A patient confirming a reminder is written back against the time they actually saw.
• A cancelled appointment stops reminding — it previously carried on sending.
• Where patients may move their own appointment, the move is held to your opening hours — it could previously land outside the hours the practice works — and the patient is no longer emailed about a move they made themselves.
• SMS replies to a shortcode reach the practice — a reply was being filed against a record that never existed, so nobody saw it.
• The follow-up SMS is linked to the patient, so it appears on the SMS Report, and it now also reaches patients whose cell number is recorded in the Phone field.
• Template pickers open quickly again — they were searching far more widely than they needed to.

Medical aid

• A claim with no tariff codes is refused instead of being sent — it was previously submitted with the word "False" where the code should have been, which the medical aid rejected without saying why. The same applied to a benefit check.
• Option is asked for only where the plan offers one — it was being required on plans that have none, which blocked the claim.
• Self-pay patients can be submitted.

Enterprise Edition Only

• Trial Balance group totals include the Initial Balance again — the opening balance was dropped from the group subtotals, so the groups did not add up to the report's own total. Please see Worth knowing.

Worth knowing

• Tax on examination and dispensing lines is now worked out by one rule, following the branch. This is the item most worth checking: raise one invoice from an examination in each branch and confirm the tax is what you expect, particularly where one branch is not VAT registered. The new result is the correct one, but it may differ from what the same examination produced before.
• Trial Balance group totals will differ from earlier runs of the same period. The opening balance is now included in the group subtotals, which is what makes the groups add up. The new figures are the right ones — do not expect them to match a copy printed before this update.
• Pricelists and quotation templates are now held per practice, so a branch sees only the ones assigned to it.
• WhatsApp reminders are unchanged — they stay on, per practice. What is new is that each practice can now be switched off on its own, and that letting patients cancel or move their own appointments, and birthday messages, are separate switches that start off. Nothing a patient can do reaches your diary until one of those is turned on.

If anything here does not behave as described on your system, please log it with us in the usual way.