It has been a busy summer with lots of changes, big and small.
Before we get to the technical stuff, today we announced a new investment in Workglue’s future. Some of you may know Shamrock Painting in Denver. Gina and her team at Shamrock have been Workglue customers for about six months and during that time they have seen a noticeable impact on their business. They’ve also seen how Workglue is catching on quickly. To help us reach the next level, and benefit from our future growth, Shamrock has made a direct investment in Workglue and Gina has joined our Board of Advisors to help guide our product development plans. You can find out more in our announcement
Now, on to this month’s technical changes:
1) A lot of development time has been going into estimating and purchasing of materials. Both estimates and change orders now have new data fields to describe the product, as well as a place to put the estimated unit cost and unit sale price. When entering or changing either the quantity or unit cost/unit price the totals for each will be calculated automatically. You can type over the total if you prefer, for example if the total price calculates to $3,984.97 you can manually enter $4000.
When entering quantities for materials on estimates and change orders, you will now see a unit of measure. We have provided a default set of options (Gal, Case, EA). You can also customize those options by going to the Support menu and selecting Custom Data.3) A new “Purchase” button now appears below the original estimate as soon as you have items listed to buy. Pressing that button copies all the detail (supplier, part name, part number, etc) to a “purchase order” page. It also knows how many you’ve already bought, if any, and fills in the remaining estimated quantity.
4) Once you have locked the original estimate you will see a link to create Change Order Requests. The Change Order Requests work exactly like the original estimate. For larger jobs you can now have several Change Order Requests open at the same time and keep working on all of them. When you “lock” a request it gets copied to the Job Detail page as an active Change Order below the original estimate.
5) On the Support->Templates page you will see several new “tags” that are available now. The new tags provide access to the new data fields on the estimates, and with the new materials tags you can create something like a purchase order template, or internal materials list.
One important note on these template tag changes. The tag called $itemname$ has changed. Originally $itemname$ was the “name” of the line item category. But, now that we have “product/part names” available in the estimate it was confusing. So we had to change the “line item name” tag to $itemtype$ and the tag $itemname$ is now the “part name” from the estimate. You should check your templates to make sure they are working as you expect.
6) Managing the time clock is now easier if you have Supervisors verifying the hours on their jobs. Make sure that your permissions are set so that Supervisors have access to the “Employees” menu, and that they can see only their own jobs. With those settings a Supervisor can go to the Employees->Verify Hours page and they will see only their own jobs listed. When they confirm the hours are allocated to the proper job and press the “Save” button, only their jobs will be affected. Previously, that action would have locked in the hours for all jobs, regardless of who was in charge of them.
If you have questions about any of these changes, or just want to up your game a little, write to support@workglue.com and we will schedule some one-on-one training time.
Workglue will be a sponsor at the PDCA Commercial Forum Conference next month. We hope to see some of you in Greenbriar West Virginia.
If you don’t get to West Virginia with us we hope you enjoy the final days of summer. Drop us a note to let us know how you are doing, and what we could be doing better.