This has been a month for integration projects. We’ve gone live with a whole new client; added capabilities to one of our oldest live integrations; tweaked our widest used integration; and added a new accounts export option.
This month sees the release of a new Quickbooks purchase invoice export. Our old MARKUS Construction Purchasing added a Quickbook Export about 18 years ago, but none of our MARKUS Maintenance customers were using both Quickbooks and purchasing. That changed recently, so Quickbooks now joins Sage50, Xero, Clearbooks, and Dimension Accounts as having purchase and sales export options.
Probably our oldest continually running integration has been to Northgate’s (now called NEC) BARIS interface. We’ve had this live with someone somewhere since 2008, and at the moment we have two contractors working with Southwark using the SOAP API to exchange job information. The first new feature is a “request time extension”, which uses the core job update process to trigger target date changes to pass back to the client. The other is a more involved process that deliberately stalls jobs through our costing/invoicing lifecycle, and checks for similar progress within NEC – and when the client approves a job for invoicing this job is released in parallel for the contractor. This is intended to streamline what is currently a fairly chaotic monthly process to confirm that the client has properly progressed all the jobs in Northgate so they can be invoiced.
From our oldest to our busiest. Since 2011 we’ve had 7 contractors in lots of interesting permutations using an interface to Orchard across 6 different housing associations. There’s been some slow drift in the layout of data we receive from Orchard over the years, and this month we have a new implementation that is receiving some additional useful contact information. We have mapped this new data into MARKUS in a way that keeps the old functionality if we don’t get the data, but supports the additional job reporter information.
This brings us to our most recent integration – Archibus CAFM. It went live in October, and it is really an API to some middleware solution the client has developed, but this is now supporting upwards of 20,000 tasks a month with bi-direction data flow across all tasks. This will continue to evolve over the next few months as the final data mappings are sorted out. Over the last month we’ve repeatedly unraveled the data and reassembled it to get a better understanding of what both the client and the contractor need from the interface. The difficulty was that the client considers a single “check cooker extraction hoods in building” to be a series of up-to 400 individual tasks, and transfers them as 400 separate work orders – but the users treat this as a single visit to the block. Using our standard RAC mobile app, we’ve been able to fold the 400 separate jobs into a single diary appointment for the engineers, and they only need to “accept” one job per day. However, at the other end of the process, we are still able to report back to the client on each task with the time spent and any remedial work done.
New Features
- Added a new purchase invoice export type for Quickbooks
- New London Borough of Southwark (NEC Northgate) integration to a daily check for jobs approved for charging
- New London Borough of Southwark (NEC Northgate) integration to request time extension
- Turned on the exporting of work progression statuses for University of the West of England (Archibus)
- Added a new ability for reports to have outer headers to group multiple columns under a single caption
- Allow the contract on sales invoices to be corrected
- Added a customised scroll bar to the login screen to support larger screens
- Changed the site sheet to bring it up to date with the new styling if turned on
- Find order now can search for the order no while ignoring an order prefix
- Removed the element to enter an ordered qty when creating new sales lines on interface jobs
- None Epix users with setup permissions are now able to add a new status despite the owner field appearing to be locked
- Improved STANDARD PDF survey layout of contractor logos
- Canceling a job now uses captionable words
- Purchase order PDF printout now shows the full line description rather than the short description
- Added postcode to the client address on all survey printouts
- If no settlement term is set for a supplier then auto-populate the purchase order with the longest term
- Changed how partially completed mandatory surveys are displayed on the standard PDF
- Printing visits when the user selects nothing now displays a warning
- Created a new demo/sample class to generate one of every kind of visit print used across all contractors
- Changed how the job contact details are calculated for Orchard interfaced jobs – now using the “Entered By” as the job contact if we have it
- Added support for “(WARN)” UDC notes for the Cobalt (Orchard) interface
- Increased the form entry size of “other system reference” for assets to allow 100 char references
- New report to generate customer valuation summaries across a time period
- Changed the job notes report to use system captions
Changes For a Single Contractor
- Added contractor NICEIC number to a select number of survey PDFs
- Multiple new mobile app builds with additional logging
- Changed visit print to show notes with the photos
- Changed timesheet rules to apply overtime rules from “Department 5” to all electricians
- Changed timesheet to add contract (work type) as a column
- New visit evidence report for open-book clients
- Added contract (work type) to the UWE application evidence report
- Layout changes to Point-of-work RAMS
- New visit print layout to suppress engineer names and all signatures
Platform Improvements
- Small changes to the automatic request logger and replay to allow for longer periods of recording on live systems
- Removed the long-deprecated CONCURRENT_DASHBOARD system setting
- Continued PHP8 upgrade changes
- Updated the monitoring of all databases so that certain processes are automatically restarted
- Made it easier for the support team to access the licensing module
Bug Fixes
- Fixed how the last line of CSV files is handled
- Deprecated 2 old unused timesheet styles
- Set the maximum operative message length
- Fixed automatic emailing of timesheets to handle engineers with 0 hours in a week
- Fixed the single-day diary view to show visits with no end date where data was deleted from the mobile app partway through a visit
- Fixed the client wizard to allow the charge asset to be cleared from the client branch
- Fixed the contract/jobs/assets report to correctly filter by client and clientbranch
- Fixed the client summary for users with certain permissions and personalisations set
- Fixed a bug where edited start times on timesheets are not showing up correctly
