Release Notes v.3.6.0.261

As the clocks go back and the warehouse mornings start a little darker, Helm has been attending to the details that make the working day run smoothly. This release is about clarity and control: purchase orders that tell you when stock is really expected, Smart Shipping reaching every corner of despatch, storage billing figures you can trust, and a handful of quiet refinements that remove friction from everyday tasks.

Nothing here demands a change to how your teams work. Where a new option is available, the existing behaviour stays exactly as it was until you choose to switch it on.

Purchase Orders: Clearer Dates & Cleaner Deliveries

Purchasing teams spend a great deal of time asking one question: when is it actually arriving? This section is about giving a better answer, and about making deliveries behave predictably whatever shape they arrive in.

Expected Delivery Dates That Follow Your Inventory Lines

A new setting, Settings > Purchasing > Purchase Order Expected Delivery Date, lets you choose how the date shown on the Purchase Orders list is worked out. The default, Set on the purchase order, keeps today's behaviour: the list shows the date entered under Edit Order Details, so nothing changes for operations that already manage this by hand.

Switch to Follow inventory lines and the list instead shows the earliest expected date across the lines that are still to be delivered. It keeps itself up to date as line dates are added, changed or removed, as lines are added or deleted, and as deliveries are booked in. Switching the option on aligns your existing purchase orders once, so the list is accurate from the moment you enable it.

In this mode the date can also be edited directly on the list for Draft, Submitted and Partially Delivered purchase orders. A date changed there is applied to every undelivered line, which makes updating a whole order after a supplier call a matter of seconds rather than a line-by-line edit.

Deliveries With Zero Quantity Lines Now Reset Cleanly

Resetting a purchase order delivery that contained lines with a delivered quantity of zero could previously stop part way through. Reset now skips the stock movement for those lines (there is nothing to remove) and clears them as intended, and a reset that cannot be completed stops before any stock moves, leaving stock levels and delivered quantities exactly as they were.

To keep deliveries tidy from the start, zero quantity lines are no longer saved when a delivery is created, whether from the purchase order screen, the Mobile App or the Public API. If every line on a delivery is zero, nothing is recorded and you are asked to enter a delivered quantity; the Public API returns a clear 422 response with the same explanation.

Smart Shipping & Batch Labels Across Despatch

Smart Shipping has proved its worth on the Packing Terminal. This release brings the same rules-based courier selection to the rest of the despatch toolkit and gives batch labels a proper home on the order.

Smart Shipping Now Works Everywhere Labels Are Created

Smart Shipping is now available on Batch Label Processing, Pregenerated Labels and the Multi Pick Pack Terminal, as well as the Packing Terminal. Each of these now applies your Smart Shipping rules when choosing a service, and the shipments they create are recorded and cancelled as Smart Shipping shipments, so your reporting stays consistent however an order was despatched.

Batch Label Details On The Order Edit Page

Until now the only way to tell that an order already had a batch label was to check the order log or look for a tag. The Order Edit page now shows a clear batch label notice with the batch number and date, alongside View and Cancel Batch Label buttons, for undespatched, despatched and fulfilment client orders alike. Return labels created through batch processing also open correctly from the same place.

Storage Billing You Can Rely On

For operations billing storage through Cost Centre, the recurring storage run is now far more transparent, and the figures it sends keep pace with what is actually on the shelves.

Rejected Storage Lines Are Now Visible

When Cost Centre cannot apply a storage line (for example because a location type or client has not yet been set up on the Cost Centre side), that outcome is now recorded against the client and shown in System Logs and on the client's page, rather than passing silently. You can see at a glance which storage has and has not been billed, and put the configuration right before the next run.

Location Types That Empty Are Reported As Zero

When a client's stock leaves a location type altogether, Helm now sends a quantity of zero for that type, so Cost Centre no longer carries forward a stale figure from the last run that held stock. Clients with no stock links at all are handled the same way. Non-zero quantities and run log totals are unchanged across all four billing options.

Clearer Billing Options & Deleted Locations Excluded

The Client Billing Option on the fulfilment client screen now carries help text explaining what each option counts, and newly created clients default to option 4, which bills by location rather than by every SKU and location link. Existing clients keep their current option. Deleted locations are now excluded from storage calculations under every billing option and from the item data file, so the storage figures sent for billing agree with the Stock Locations report your customers check them against.

Terminal Sorting Plugin: Every Line Accounted For

The Terminal Sorting plugin now lists each order line on its own and highlights every line of a SKU that appears more than once on an order as its quantities are scanned. Packers can see exactly which lines are complete and which are still outstanding, with no risk of a repeated SKU being shown as finished before all of its lines have been picked.

This is a plugin update and is released separately from the core Helm version.

MicroApps & Public API Refinements

MicroApps are young, and this release tidies some of the edges reported by early adopters.

Order data returned by GET /picks/{id} now follows the same privacy masking as GET /orders, so customer address and contact details are handled consistently across both endpoints, with and without PII consent. Orders now include the details of the packer who handled them, subject to the same consent rules, so apps can show who packed what without resolving staff numbers by hand. The Activate and Deactivate buttons under Settings > Apps now update the app's status immediately, and the MicroApps guide has been refreshed to match.

Everyday Refinements

A collection of smaller improvements that remove minor irritations from day-to-day work.

Draft Orders Stay In Draft

Manually created orders in Draft status now remain in Draft when an out-of-stock item is added or a quantity is increased, instead of being moved to Back Order straight away. Order rules that act on Back Order status therefore wait until the order is actually submitted. Orders that are not in Draft continue to move to Back Order as before, and orders created as Draft through the Public API or a CSV import follow the same rule.

Quicker Navigation In User Setup

The Edit User screen now has a Back button at the top, matching the User Setup list, and saving a user returns you to the list with a confirmation message. If a save cannot be completed, the screen stays put with your entries intact and the reason shown.

Batch Logs Toggle Behaves As Expected

On the Batch Logs view within a location, clicking Available now highlights Available, and clicking back to On Hand highlights On Hand, with the matching log set loading each time.

General System Improvements

Alongside the items above, this release includes a round of security and reliability refinements across purchase order, inventory, order and return terminal requests and the Public API, including stricter validation of request data. These keep the platform robust without changing how your teams use it.

Every change in this release is designed to give your teams clearer information and fewer surprises: purchase orders that show real expected dates, despatch tools that share one set of shipping rules, and billing figures that match the warehouse floor. Thank you for trusting us with your operations. We will keep listening and refining so that Helm stays a dependable part of your working day.

Your team at Helm