2026 is starting with a bang! Later in the month Chris is presenting a webinar on “AI Invoice Parsing” using the Affinda platform. We’ve been working on adding support for automatically processing supplier invoices since the start of October and we are now ready to launch it into the world. The January release includes all the capabilities to turn it on. If you want to see what it is and how it would help you then let Chris or Ella know, and they will send you an invite to the webinar on the 30th to see AI in action!
For a big chunk of the last month we were also working our way through a secret list of our own. This was a list of small tweaks and bugs that we had spotted, but no users had ever noticed. The holiday period is normally fairly quiet, so we used the opportunity for housekeeping and cleansing some of these older issues that only we knew about!
Finally, following feedback on our mobile app update process, we are steadily reducing the lag between the back office releases and the mobile app updates. By the time you are reading this I would expect all core engineers should be updated to the December 2025 mobile app release, and the update to January 2026 should have started in parallel to this back office release. If you have any comments on how we package up the back office and mobile updates then we are always happy to see how we could improve the processes. Contractors can still determine their own update policy, but we are encouraging early and regular updates.
New Features
- New AI parsing of supplier invoices to automatically import documents against POs, and process the values
- Improvements to the “New User Email” to make the process of sending logins to new users more pleasant and informative
- Improvements to the diary screen to hide unwanted statuses (and colours) to simplify the key
- Added additional job detail fields to the jobs requiring action breakdown report
- Added the first fix state and comment to the jobsheet, and improved how this can be manually edited including preventing setting before the job is actually complete
- Continued the split of the non-job activity count from absences
- Added a filter for contract containing to the items requiring action dashboard widget
Changes For a Single Contractor
- New electrical testing team mobile app
- Changes to the Accruent (Verisae)/COOP APIs to support additional trade types [waiting for confirmation of final PROBLEM_TYPE mapping]
- Changes to the Archibus/UWE APIs to support fetching individual jobs, including a display of the raw data mapping between systems to explain the updates applied; new passback API; new PDF completion document export
- Added the ACR/Asset apportioning time information to visit reporting to the standard Property/Site visit entry
- New logos and layouts to support rebranding
- Supported different process flows for abandoning a multi-task job on MARKUS Asset Mobile app
- Changed the images shown on a contractor’s survey PDF
- Added the sales line SOR Code to the visit PDF
- Changes to the MIS/Accent APIs to send different AppointmentAnalysisID for new appointments
Platform Improvements
- Continued internal billing project improvements
- Continued work on migration to PDO
- Improved the CD/CI unit testing
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug in the (old/PPM) subcontractor portal that surfaced the primary job’s attachments on the split jobs
- If there are multiple appointment slot options available, the system will now display the correct slot after the job has been issued
- Fixed a bug which would cause the RACSAMS mobile app to crash after the risk assessment when configured with an unusual set of mobile app system options
- Changes to the invoice entry popup screen to save the invoice line quantities for multi-invoice orders
- Fixed a bug on the RACSAMS mobile app that caused jobs to appear multiple times on the Job List screen
- Fixed the operative performance report not passing the correct filters to the timesheet report when breaking down by the new visit date column
- Fixed a 12 year old display bug where asset details were including <BR> tags in the ACR asset wizard
- Fixed the bulk updater not reflecting status changes on parent jobs when applying updates to PPM/T152 tasks
- Fixed timesheet filters not correctly being passed to the holidays reports
- Fixed the reviewed and confirmed-by signatures showing on survey printouts
- Fixed a summary grouping bug in absence booking and various related operative holiday reports
- Updated the new survey screen to have a caption for task and separated out the use of the task caption to disambiguate from its use for job lines
- Fixed multi-select livesearch input text box not clearing when using the enter key to select an item from the list
- Removed the MARKUS logo from the login screen if a customer logo was not set
- Altered the internal terminology used to reference secondary job sign-off signature data
- Made the the first visit fix fields on the general job details and edit screen respect the system option
- Improved the nesting of conditional statements used to monitor successful SMS queue sending
