Release 5.28

Several requested features have been added in this release, particularly continuing with an earlier addition of job holds. The trajectory with consolidation groups is also continuing, as we flesh out more functionality.

At the back end, we’ve upgraded to newer servers, both web and database. We encountered some growing pains, and it appears that those have been addressed.

We’ve been watching and addressing several issues as we encounter them. There is one known issue with bulk adding job items that we are continuing to explore solutions for.

What’s New

Allow custom default job hold for employees

• If you are interested in using holds to distinguish jobs by the manager, there is a new field: “New Job Hold Preference” on the employee edit form.

• When adding a new job, the hold field will be pre-filled with the employee preference. Otherwise, it will stay at “New.”

Allow editing hold in the job edit form

• The hold field shows on the edit form for jobs, allowing you to change the hold when creating or editing a job.

Pre-Delete Validations

• Rate Styles and Discount Rate Styles

  • When attempting to delete rate styles, the system will search for and list customers that are using those rate styles, preventing confusing errors.

  • There is an existing Customers tab in the edit rate style form, allowing you to also manage usage of rate styles.

• Job Types

  • Added pre-delete validation logic to prevent deletion of Job Types in use by Customers, Employment History, or Jobs.

  • When attempting to delete job types in use, a list of customers, employees, or jobs will be shown to help you reassign to another job type.

Add invoiced/uninvoiced job filtering to Monthly Jobs Report

• There is a new option to select invoiced or uninvoiced jobs in the Monthly Jobs Report form.

• The option defaults to invoiced, consistent with current behavior.

• Previously, only invoiced jobs were listed, and only if they contained one or more job items (expenses, materials, or labor).  This change will still only list uninvoiced jobs that also contain one or more job items.

Consolidation Group Enhancements

• Added more help text to the Detail Type field on Consolidation Group view and edit forms to explain the function of each type.

• Added Item Cost and Price Summary table to quotes and consolidation groups

• Added subtotal text to consolidation groups

  • The subtotal text is what will be shown next to the subtotal, such as “SUBTOTAL OF MATERIALS”.

  • This is now editable for consolidation groups.

• Add From Template functionality

  • Consolidation groups can be added to an invoice or quote from a template.
    

Summary Table Sample

Fixes and Improvements

Refactor Autocomplete for Catalog Lookup

• The database query involved with catalog lookups has been improved for efficiency.

• We are still evaluating an issue with adding multiple catalog items to a job in a row.  This change helps, but does not fix the issue.

Fixes related to server migration

• Certain database queries needed updating to reflect stricter rules in the database engine.

• In some scenarios, the intermediate result of a calculation was causing errors when looking up materials records.

Fixed errors in creating some invoices

• When a job had scopes but were not specified when creating the invoice, the automatic assignment to update job items with the new invoice was failing when presented with an empty scope list.

Fixed an error deleting discount rate styles

• Discount rate styles did not correctly identify the type of rate style to delete, preventing the deletion from occurring.

Fixed errors with employee roles on Jobs and Customers

• Employees without labor types configured are highlighted when assigning roles.

General code cleanup and refactoring

• More work has been done to improve code quality.