Knowledge Base

Updates & Maintenance Schedule

Regular Maintenance Window

Zahara undergoes regular updates and maintenance to ensure optimal performance, security, and reliability. These updates are typically carried out:

• Time: 7:00 am UK time
• Duration: Usually no more than 15 minutes

During this period, Zahara may be temporarily unavailable. Once maintenance is complete, you can continue using Zahara as normal.

Why We Perform Updates?

• Feature Enhancements: We introduce new features and improvements to enhance your experience.
• Security & Fixes: Critical patches and fixes ensure a secure and reliable system.
• Performance & Stability: Regular optimisations help maintain a smooth and efficient system.

How to Stay Informed

While maintenance is typically scheduled for 7:00 am UK time, we will notify users in advance if a longer or out-of-schedule update is required. If you experience any issues after an update, please contact our support team.

Latest Release

15/03/2025 –

We’re excited to bring you new functionality in Zahara, including enhancements to custom line item coding fields and API capabilities, alongside various performance improvements and fixes.

What’s New?

• Shared Custom Line Item Coding Fields: Streamline your financial processes with enhanced flexibility in custom line item coding fields.
  • What is it? When selecting the document type for a custom line item field, you can now choose both Purchase Order and Invoice, allowing seamless linking and transfer of this information.
  • How does it work? If a custom line item coding field is applied to both Purchase Orders and Invoices, the data can carry over when converting a Purchase Order into an Invoice, reducing manual re-entry.
• API Enhancement: Custom Line Item Coding Fields Exposure
  • What’s new? Purchase Order Line Item Custom Coding fields are now accessible via our API.
  • Why it’s great: This allows better integration and alignment of additional coding fields with external accounting systems.

Improvements and Fixes

• Enhanced system stability and performance with various bug fixes.

Take advantage of Shared Custom Line Item Coding Fields now in Business > Settings > Custom Fields > Line Item Level and experience a more streamlined way to manage your financial data!

24/01/2025 –

We’re excited to introduce a new feature that enhances your purchasing experience in Zahara, along with the usual improvements and fixes to keep your workflows efficient and seamless.

What’s New?

• Product-Centric Buying: Simplify the way you create Purchase Orders with our new Product Centric Buying feature.
  • What is it? This feature introduces a new search section to the purchase order creation screen, helping you find the products you need faster.
  • How does it work? Use the “What are you looking to buy?” and “Which supplier do you usually buy from?” fields to search your product catalogues from all your suppliers. Zahara will match your query with relevant results, allowing you to add items directly to your purchase order.
  • Why it’s great: By using either or both of these two search fields, you can quickly locate and add the right products, saving time and reducing manual effort. You can still make amendments to the line items before creating your order.

Improvements and Fixes

• Enhanced system stability and performance with various bug fixes.

Enable Product Centric Buying now in Business > Settings > Purchase Orders and experience a more efficient way to manage your purchasing!

19/12/2024 –

This update is packed with new features, improvements, and fixes designed to make Zahara even more powerful and user-friendly. Alongside these updates, we’ve also introduced bug fixes, stability improvements, and performance enhancements to keep your workflows running smoothly.

What’s New?

• Default Values for Custom Fields: Take control of your custom fields with the ability to set default values (or leave them blank). This feature ensures consistency while giving you the flexibility to configure fields as needed.
• Enhanced Export Options: Custom exports now include Document-Level Custom Fields. Easily access the data you need with clearly labelled options and downloadable sample files to test your settings.
• Easier Invoice Integration with Custom Fields: For those users accessing our API, we now support the retrieval of Document-Level Custom Fields to invoice lines. For businesses using external systems, this enhancement means smoother, more tailored integrations.
• Smarter Invoice Recognition with AI: We are in the process of upgrading Zahara’s OCR capabilities by applying advanced AI technology for more accurate and faster invoice processing.
• Streamlined Inbox Management: Simplify your invoice processing. Staff can now remove draft invoices from the Invoice Inbox without needing delete permissions. This ensures only relevant draft invoices stay in the inbox while maintaining control over processed ones.
• New Currency Visibility: Quickly identify invoice currencies with the new optional Currency column in the invoice list.
  • Displays short codes (e.g., GBP, USD).
  • Hover to see full names (e.g., Pound Sterling).
• Coming Soon – Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Integration: We’re almost ready to launch our direct integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Stay tuned for more updates!

24/07/2024 –

We are pleased to announce the latest release, which primarily consists of essential bug fixes and several significant enhancements.

Key Enhancements and New Features

• Purchase Order Approval Line Item HTML Template: A new HTML template for Purchase Order Approval Line Items has been implemented, providing a more streamlined and user-friendly approval process.
• Extended Sage Intacct Project Syncing: The synchronisation capabilities with Sage Intacct Projects have been extended, allowing for the synchronisation from the Project Dimension area of Intacct.
• Recipient Creation Improvements in Currencies Direct: Enhancements have been made to the recipient creation process within the Currencies Direct module.
• Global Search Optimisations: Various optimisations have been added to the global search functionality, improving search speed and accuracy across the platform.

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• Various Bug Fixes: A series of critical and minor bugs have been addressed, enhancing overall system stability and performance.
• General Improvements: Several performance and usability improvements have been implemented based on user feedback and internal testing.

Payments are Go

19/6/2024 –

Exciting news! You can now pay your supplier invoices in batches, including foreign currency payments such as USD and Euros. We’ve partnered with Currencies Direct to bring you this new built-in functionality, which also includes payment run approvals.

If you regularly pay overseas suppliers in foreign exchange, you know how cumbersome and costly it can be. Our latest feature aims to streamline the process and save you money.

For further details, talk to the team at Zahara or read this useful article.

Try New Reporting

28/4/2024 – If you are a reporting user and have the correct permissions, feel free to try our new reporting module. Read this useful article to find out more.

Sage Intacct

18/10/2023 – We have released our integration with Sage Intacct. Those customers already on Sage Intacct should book in with customer success for a demo. Those customers looking at the next level of finance software, especially Sage 50 users, can transition knowing that Zahara can follow you.

New GRN’s and more…

16/7/2023 – V3 GRNs are now the same, but better:

• They have all the functionality of the V2 GRNs, but with helpful new features. You can now use the line by line ‘Fully Received’ button and leave line comments.

We’re seeing big changes to the Invoice Inbox:

• You can now track a conversation about a specific invoice before it’s been processed.
• Your comments will get converted to document history entries when the invoice is processed, so the comments will remain connected to the document.
• There’s a new ‘status’ you can use to flag a problematic or disputed invoice. Simply mark it as ‘on hold’.

You can now drag and drop files (both single and multiple) onto the upload button

POs and Invoices:

• You can now clone POs, which is super useful if you’re putting in repeat requests often.

Originally only available in V2, you can now add comments to the document history while viewing them in V3.

Payments

23/1/2023 – Payments are go! We are very pleased to launch our new integration with Comma. Now you can use Zahara to pay your supplier invoices as well. This new integration is for UK customers making GBP payments. We have additional integrations planned for Forex payments coming soon which will work for all of our global user base.

 

New Divisions

07/11/2022 – New Divisions are now live. This is a major feature set that covers workflows, budgets and user management. All Division managers should check out new Divisions from the Business menu. We have left the older Division link in under “Older Zahara”

 

New Customer Forum

17/10/2022 – Get the conversation started! Share your ideas for improvements and discuss new features on our new customer forum.

Customer Forum

 

New Purhase Orders (Beta)

10/9/2022 – We have released new purchase orders to everyone now under new look Zahara. The older Purchase Order create and edit is still available to use. There are a few things to implement still – like Recycle a workflow and in purchase GRN. These are coming soon. But we hope you like it.