It’s getting harder and harder to to write the monthly release notes as there so many changes and fixes flowing through the development team that it’s hard to pick out a favourite to spotlight in these notes. We’ve had a few months of working behind the scenes on a couple of mobile application R&D projects, and two gnarly interfaces, so it feels like we have no “big thing” to announce, but that doesn’t mean we’ve not got any new features!
To support some of our electrical contractors who need to add extra signatures to a survey, MARKUS is now able to upload a signature against a back office user. During the job costing/approval process it is now possible for the person approving the job to “Add Signature” to the job – this can then be used to countersign appropriate PDF surveys. This only works for PDF layouts with 3 signatures, but this is something we can retrofit to existing surveys to allow counter signing by the QS/manager.
We’ve also made it easier for you to contact us – we have added our support email to your drop down menu in the top right corner of the menu bar. The team have been working on a number of tool-chain processes behind the scenes to help the support process – the links on the new login screen were the start of this, but this month Pat has been working on tools to automatically download “crash logs” from the mobile app to trigger support requests in our issue tracker. This, along with a number of other support related changes, is being rolled out in parallel to the MARKUS releases.
We also had a number of great visits this month – we’ve been to 3 contractors in Fareham, a contractor in Central London, we’ve had visits from 2 contractors to our offices, and Mike and Ian have been at the Quality Homes Conference in Leicester.
New Features
- Added the ability for supervisors to attach signatures to jobs and add these on approval, so they can be used in survey prints if requested
- Added a column to the invoice detail to show who entered the invoice
- New communication template replacement for “mail merge” to show only quoted job lines with outstanding quantities so that you can generate quotes for additional work on part completed jobs
- Added a link to the support email address on the new login screen
- Added a new option in the menu bar dropdown menu to quickly trigger an email to the support team
- Changed the Verisae job importer to handle specially formatted of job descriptions so that new lines and other whitespace are not suppressed by their end of the API
- Change the Xero purchase invoice export to combine rounding errors into the last real line on the invoice, rather than adding an extra rounding error line like the Sage, Quickbooks, and Clearbooks invoice exporters
- Added filters to the complete job list financial report so it can be used to quickly report on jobs that have moved between 2 specific levels in the workflow
- Changed the SASSHA export interface (Leeds Jewish Housing Association) to show different data for sales credit notes
- Added Last Visit date to the job site report
- Added the option for the invoicing dashboard widget to breakdown by last visit date instead of job completed date
- Added extra mapping for trades to the Service Channel job imported (Euro Garages, ASDA OTG) to set different depots
- Added Client Branch to the work in progress report
- Added trade to the job visit log report as both a column and a filter
- Updated the standard survey print to include some additional site and job information that was present on the old default survey
- Added the ability to archive trades so they don’t show up in manual job entry
- Added Supplier Reference to the pass invoices report
- Added foreign_id to the costcode setup screen so users can directly change the Eque2 exported cost information relating to specific costcodes
- Changed the login reminder email to include different portal links based on the user’s permissions
Changes For a Single Contractor
- New customer mobile application build
- New questions added to the Caffe Nero/Harris and Hoole specific PPM report
- Changed the Travis Perkins IP address for purchase integration
- Added another contractor to the “Estimated Profit” exceptions list to display additional interesting but often unreliable data to the profit jobsheet widget
- New invoice layout
- Changed travel time wording on visit print to aid with client communications
- Added new “probtype” mappings to trades for the UWE interface (Archibus+Bespoke API)
Platform Improvements
- Improved the page loading times for massive purchase orders with many lines and many invoices
- Continued PHP8 migration
- Removed some deprecated Android legacy code that was still supported in current versions, but was due to be dropped in future Android releases
- Removed some deprecated code from our auto-patching process that was only present to migrate from a period in history before the authentication database was controlled by auto-patching (2015!)
Bug Fixes
- Fixed the timesheet portal job search to include the primary jobs, which were removed by the change to add split jobs
- Changed the Verisae timesheet export (Coop, MAB, Tesco, MFG) to handle complex sub-contractor names
- Fixed the jobsheet sales lines report when system option “show lines” was turned off
- Fixed the mobile application so that codecode was no longer incorrectly hidden
- Fixed the allowed holidays value on the authorised absences screen
- Fixed auto passing of invoices so if it is above the agreed leeway based on the original order line values it doesn’t pass
- No longer allowing operatives to see the enter work done screen before accepting the job
- Fixed the delete button for surveys on the job sheet
- Fixed the new status group page that was incorrectly pre-selecting some statuses
- Prevent the archiving of split jobs as it reopens closed primary jobs
- Fixed the job detail form labels when entering new job details
- Fixed the generic job importer so it no longer misses the final row in some CSV files, depending on the EOL/EOF encoding
- Added export options back in to the jobs to be charged report
- Changed the Quickbooks sales invoice export to include the correct CIS DRC VAT account reference, and to massage the apparent VAT rate
- Improved the Sage order importer to link jobs to orders automatically
- Prevented engineers for changing their redial timeout to be zero seconds
- Fixed the filename being used by download pdf pack when no extra attachments are added into the pack
- Prevented personalised filters from vanishing in the bulk issue jobs report
- Corrected mobile application mandatory notes on the end of visit screen
