Anna - the 'cannot have a negative line item amount in an estimate' remains unaltered in 1.9.  However, through the wonders of customised archetypes, you too can adjust this.  As you will know, invoice line items do not have this restriction. If you go look in <OPENVPMS-HOME>\update\archetypes\org\openvpms\archetype\customer and compare act.customerAccountInvoiceitem.adl and act.customerEstimationItem.adl you will find that the invoice item has the 'not negative assertion commented out as follows:

Whereas the estimate item does not:

So - there are two ways to allow negative amounts in estimates:

1. edit the act.customerEstimationItem.adl to comment out the nonNegative assertions (by changing the <assertion to <!-- assertion and the </assertion> to </assertion -->) and save it somewhere and then use Administration|Archetypes to import it; or
2. to simply use Administration|Archetypes to edit act.customerEstimatimationItem to delete the nonNegative assertions against the three amounts

Unless you have other customised archetypes, I would do the second, and make a note that when you install 1.9 you will need to repeat the process.

[I find it interesting that I have not encountered this behaviour - we use negative quantities for discounts a lot in Hong Kong, but make little use of estimates so I have not seen the problem.]

1.9/Visit completion - I must admit that I did not realise that this behaviour had changed, but I just verified that in 1.9 if you simply invoice an item to a patient, then the visit is created and completed when you finalise the invoice.

1.9 release date - we have reached the end of adding features and are in the final stages of alpha testing. I would expect beta testing to start this month with 1.9 released in September - but Tim A may have a more exact schedule. A number of practices have 1.9 snapshots (ie pre-releases) running in production.

Regards, Tim G