Written by Steve Mahy

Created: 09 June 2021

Expenditure Enhancements

JCS Version 31.100.03 includes a number of enhancements to the Expenditure page, which has had to grow a little, to accommodate some extra details:

The first thing you might notice is that every expenditure category may now be assigned a Priority: Essential, Discretionary or Luxury.

These priorities can be set at the summary expenditure category level (e.g. Client Home and Other Properties), or at the detail level (e.g. Client Rent). In the Expenditure by Priority section, a running total of the amount of expenditure of each priority is displayed. In a single click you can also produce a report showing a full breakdown of all the expenses and their priorities.

By default, this page is used to record expenditure in the current year but you may now also record estimated expenditure, in the years following the retirement of the client or partner. It takes just a couple of clicks to copy all the expenses and priorities from the current year over to one of the retirement periods. You may use these copied figures as a starting point, and edit them to suit.

Any of these sets of expenditure figures may be used for the What If? and Needs Analysis tools, such as the Income Drawdown Calculator or Planning for Retirement. The Choose Expenses to Use page has been updated to allow you to choose expenses from the current year, or from the year following the client or partner's retirement. You can then quickly select groups of figures, such as All Essential or All Partner expenses.

Some other enhancements to the Expenditure page are worth mentioning: Under Medical Expenses, a new slot has been added to record Residential/Nursing Home Fees. Each expenditure summary category also now has three user-defined expenditure detail categories, where any description may be entered.

You've probably already spotted from the screenshot above, a new section showing Income Remaining After All Expenditure. (These figures, calculated from Total Income minus Total Expenditure, also appear on the Income page).

At the foot of the Expenditure page there is also a new Notes field, which supports formatted text, which not only means you can highlight the most important bits, but you may also insert links to documents or webpages. 

Finally, there's a new option to count policy contributions in the Calendar Year (01/Jan - 31/Dec), as oppose to the default Tax Year (06/Apr - 05/Apr). 

Written by Steve Mahy

Created: 03 February 2021

Software Releases During the COVID-19 Pandemic

We would like to reassure our users that development of JCS during the pandemic is continuing as normal. At time of writing there have been 11 releases since March 2020, including software enhancements and fixes.

We normally recommend that all users sharing the same company dataset install the same version of JCS. Due to the high numbers of people working from home throughout the pandemic, and the difficulties some firms may have in ensuring all home workers are using the same version of JCS, for the last several months, software updates from within JCS have been disabled. Therefore, if you check for updates via File > About JCS > Check For Updates, you will likely be told that no updates are available, even if there is in fact a new version of the software ready for release. This has been done to help prevent users at home updating JCS and making their shared dataset incompatible with other users on earlier versions of the software.

When we know a new release of JCS is of particular interest to you, our Tech Support team will be in touch and will help you update your software. They will also advise if other users on your network also need to update.

We will continue to send emails with news of the latest software release and you may see details of all recent updates on our website:

Software Updates

For the foreseeable future, if you would like to upgrade your version of JCS, please contact our Technical Support team who will be happy to assist.

Written by Steve Mahy

Created: 26 October 2020

Microsoft JET Database Errors

In the last few weeks we have seen some new specific errors reported by JCS users. These errors occur intermittently when attempting to read or write to a Microsoft JET database over a network, as JCS does. We are aware similar problems have been reported by other users of Microsoft JET databases, particularly since December 2019.

In JCS, the errors tend to most frequently occur during start up or when performing Bulk Valuations, but may occur in other areas too. The errors are:

• 3046 - Could not save; currently locked by another user
• 3260 - Could not update; currently locked by user ‘UserName’ on machine ‘PCName’
• 3531 - The wait period for an event has timed out
• 3043 - Your network access was interrupted. To continue, close the database, and then open it again.
• 3035 - System resource exceeded

These errors are not caused by a specific version of JCS and, as yet, we have not been able to link them to a particular Microsoft Windows or Office update. Unfortunately we have not been able to reliably reproduce these errors in our test environments either. There has been some speculation among our users that these errors started occurring after updating to the new version of the database used by JCS (JCS Version 30.100.04 and later). We can confirm that this is not the case and installing an earlier version of JCS will not solve the problems. The working assumption by Microsoft at the moment is that changes they made to the locking system within the Microsoft JET system to help address the issue of databases corrupting have caused this problem. It appears these changes have been brought in various updates since December 2019.

Please help us

We are now working with Microsoft to try and diagnose and help them fix these problems, but we do need help from you all in doing so. Please whenever you have an error in JCS submit the error to us by clicking on the “Send Error Details to JCS” button. This helps us identify under what circumstances the errors are occurring. This information will enable us to assist Microsoft, so that they can hopefully fix the problem more quickly.

The error details you submit are encrypted before transmission but if you have any concerns about your privacy, please refer to our Privacy Policy.

We would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused by this ongoing problem. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact our technical support on 03450 049 599 opt 1 or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Written by Maxine Le Cheminant

Created: 13 November 2019

Error 3340: Query is corrupt error

There is a serious bug in the Microsoft Office Patch Tuesday update which was released yesterday (12th November 2019) which prevents JCS and other Microsoft Access software from working.

This update is currently rolling out worldwide and will prevent you from being able to use JCS at all. We have created this advice rapidly in the last hour and advice may change as we understand the issue more thoroughly. 

To fix this problem you need to reverse out part of the update depending on which version of Office you use for JCS and which version of Windows you are running. If you do not have this problem yet you need to stop the update from installing.

We have had confirmation from Microsoft that this will be fixed again in the next Patch Tuesday release on 10th December 2019, so in the meantime you need to make sure that the problem patch is not applied.

Office 365 and 2019 versions of JCS

Windows 7-10

 If you have not yet had the issue:

1. Open an Office app, such as Word.
2. Create a new blank document.
3. Click on File.
4. Click on Account.
5. On the right side, click the Update options menu.
6. Select the Disable Updates option.

 If you have the issue:

1. Download the Office Deployment Tool.
2. Install and extract it to a covenient location such as your desktop and copy into a folder named ODT. This folder should now contain a file called Setup.exe and a couple of other xml files.
3. In the ODT folder, right click, select New and create a New Text document naming it RevertOffice.txt. Open this file and copy the following text into it, replacing the xxxxx's with the correct version number as below:

<Configuration>

<Updates Enabled="FALSE" TargetVersion="16.0.xxxxx.xxxxx" />

</Configuration>

Where xxxxx.xxxxx is

• 12026.20320 for retail versions of Office 2016 C2R and Office 2019 
• 10351.20054 for volume licensed versions of Office 2019 
• 12130.20272 for Office 365 Version 1910
• 11328.20438 for Office 365 Version 1902
• 10730.20386 for Office 365 Version 1808

Save this text file and rename it RevertOffice.xml.

1. In Windows, click Start, search for cmd, right-click Command Prompt, click Run as Administrator.
2. Switch to the file location for the Setup.exe file. For example, type “cd C:\Users\User Name\Desktop\ODT” (Nb: replace User Name with correct name). 
3. Run the following command: “setup.exe /configure RevertOffice.xml”
4. Open an Office app, such as Word.
5. Click on File.
6. Click on Account.
7. Click the Update options menu and select Enable Updates from the dropdown list.
8. Click on Update Now, Office will take a few minutes to download the files
9. Check if Office has reverted to your targeted version by checking the file > account. It should have reverted to the version you entered in the RevertOffice.xml file.
10. Now in Update Options, disable Updates
11. JCS should now start up without errors.

Office 2016 versions of JCS

If you have not yet had this issue:

Windows 7/8

1. open Windows Update. You can easily find it by entering Windows Update in the Start menu search.
2. Select Change Settings
3. Uncheck Receive updates for Microsoft products and check for new optional Microsoft software when I update Windows checkbox

Windows 10

1. Open Settings, and click/tap on the Update & Security icon.
2. Click/tap on Windows Update on the left side, and click/tap on the Advanced options link on the right side.
3. Turn off the Receive updates for other Microsoft products when you update Windows or Give me updates for other Microsoft products when I update Windows option

If you are having the issue

Windows 7, 8

1. Go to Control Panel
2. Select Programs
3. Select Programs & Features
4. Select View Installed Updates
5. Select the update (Office 2016 KB4484113) and click uninstall.
6. open Windows Update. You can easily find it by entering Windows Update in the Start menu search.
7. Select Change Settings
8. Uncheck Receive updates for Microsoft products and check for new optional Microsoft software when I update Windows checkbox

 Windows 10

1. Go to Control Panel
2. Select Programs
3. Select Programs & Features
4. Select View Installed Updates
5. Select the update (Office 2016 KB4484113) and click uninstall.
6. Open Settings, and click/tap on the Update & Security icon.
7. Click/tap on Windows Update on the left side, and click/tap on the Advanced options link on the right side.
8. Turn off the Receive updates for other Microsoft products when you update Windows or Give me updates for other Microsoft products when I update Windows option

 If you have any queries please do not hesitate to call Tech Support on: 03450 049 599 Option 1.