We had a slightly longer than normal sprint over the Christmas and New Year period, which along with the quiet phones meant the team was able to tackle a longer than normal list of issues including some internal ones. There’s no headline feature as such, but quite a few of these issues came out of our meetings with clients in the last quarter.
For example, the first one, displaying the engineers’ phone numbers on the jobsheet – this was something that one of the admin users at Heatcare asked for when we visited them just before Christmas. She had a Word document with all the engineers listed, and their numbers, and if she had questions about the job she would open the file to find their details so she could call them. When new engineers started she found that inevitably she was missing their number! To help her we have added the engineer numbers clearly on the jobsheet so she can quickly access it, and made it one of the fields that are entered as part of engineer setup. This took one of our 1st year apprentices about 2 hours to code, from adding the new field to the database and engineer setup screen, to surfacing it on the jobsheet. It was then reviewed and shepherded through testing by our final year apprentice, and merged into the release. I’m sure there are lots of ways of achieving the same outcome, but it is always nice to have such a clear request and then be able to satisfy it exactly as the user imagined it.
New Features
- Display engineers’ phone numbers on the jobsheet
- Added support for captioning the pre-visit and post-visit warnings on the mobile app to allow end-user customisation of the screens
- Added specific detection of user agent to support latest Microsoft Edge “Edg/” in various user statistics report
- Added support for upper status limit to the project widget to match various job widgets on the dashboard
- Added support for clearing status colours
- Logged additional details into the audit trail when users requeue interface blockages caused by 3rd party failure
- Changes to the bulk allocation screen to allow further refinement of the issued work
- Further changes to the “add to workplan” process to support merging the two alternative methods used by different contractors – to support both system generated jobs, and spreadsheet imported jobs side by side
- Addition to the mobile status dashboard widget to highlight engineers who are using an outdated version
- Improvements to the standard cost/banded cost setup process for individual operatives
- Improvements to copying standard cost/banded costs between operatives
- Added more verbose messages to mobile app to explain job attachment download issues to end user
- Changes to the mobile layout to make the main job details more attractive
- Changes to the archive caption to support different archive options for jobs and assets
- New gallery upload for multiple photos on the mobile app – replacing the Epix custom upload screen
- Improvements to finding (or hiding!) archived communication templates
- Add support for archiving “contractor” and “depot” records
- Improvements [mostly cosmetic] to the financial summary section when editing sales lines on jobs
- New invoice layout for Lancer Scott based on A&S Cooling’s vanilla mainstream accounts style layout
- Changes to Eque2 sales invoice export to pass different taxpoint date
- Display (multiple) job information relating to purchase invoices to help guide users when correcting nominal codes and cost centres
- New timesheet layout for Lancer Scott
- New timesheet layout for Link-Contracting
- Improved feedback when trying to email massive attachments from within the system
- Added the ability to trigger a fake status change that leaves the job at the original status but triggers all the various additional elements of changing the status – notification record, history entry, audit trail, new last status date and comment, and any self-recursive incrementing status changes
- Surfaced the last status change comment on the jobs requiring action breakdown report
- Added customisation to communication download file name – eg to support prepending “quote” to the start of PDF filename produced
- Prevent the engineer timesheet portal from recording overlapping events for the same job
- Changes to jobsheet financials to handle serialised stock transfers that relate to parts used on a job, and triggered new assets on site
- James’ 3rd Year Project – changes to personalising jobsheet sections
- Improvements to the built-in context sensitive search, triggered from “?” in the corner of all screens
- Added the ability to move sub-elements of FSC survey jobs between different client jobs
- Added breakdown by monitored client to the purchase order status dashboard widget
Platform Improvements
- Changes to constructors to support PHP8 – added support to client statement report
- Changes to constructors to support PHP8 – confirmed “all reports” still instantiates all report objects correctly
- Changes to client setup wizards in ACR and Property Maintenance back office systems to remove deprecated language features
- Changes to the jobsheet to remove deprecated language features
- Improvement to fetching attachments and their thumbnails transparently from S3/Minio deep storage and DRBD replicated storage – remove double fetch of main attachment before thumbnail
- Changes to email sales invoices to support PHP8 constructors
Bug Fixes
- Removed overflow onto the next day for the financial summary widget on the dashboard to ensure the summary matches the detail for the same date range – the two reports had been handling the date ranges subtly differently
- Tweak to charge asset breakdown report to highlight the implied mandatory filter by making it explicit
- Fixed warning on dashboard widget of operative mobile status to respect whether the contractor has a hard limit on number of mobile user licences
- Fixed Xero payment importer to pull in partial final lines
- Added back in the limited ability to show historical appointments for some contractors in the bulk appointment change screen for a single job to support correcting of KPI appointment information
- Fixed missing mainMenuJobListNotificationText in main menu of ACR mobile app that caused crashes under unusual use cases, originally introduced by changes to the Property Maintenance version. Confirmed the same bug is not present in Care & Repair versions
- Fixed bug when switching between simple and complex views on the quote entry screen
- Recalculate UI running total of PO value for deleted lines used for guidance only before posting
- Forced invoice attachment drag-and-drop to handle a variety of PO id formats
- Added support for captions to the invoice send batches report
- Force prices for sub-contractor issue job for additional purchase order lines
- Fixes to reversing stock movements to a job
- Fixes to converting stock issue to assets report to refresh as assets are created
- Fixes to retro-LGSR PDF page breaks to prevent blank pages within large batches
