Release Date: 16th of December
A big month for little enhancements!
Improved visibility on major servicing: We've added major service / post-annual servicing dates into the programme maintenance calendar on a property. See at a glance how many assets are due for which major service and when, as well as which assets have been quoted or appear on a task.
Fire steps on task variations: We've begun the process of adding a formal variation process to tasks. The first change is that additional materials added to a quoted repair task will no longer automatically affect the total billable amount on the task's invoice. Instead, you will need to manually mark materials as billable. For un-agreed variations to a quoted task, this will both speed up the invoicing process and reduce the risk of over-charging your customer.
Protection for post-completion actions on tasks: Tasks can no longer be completed or archived by office staff if there's remaining post-completion actions. To help with process or quality control, we've also made actions assignable to office staff (e.g. requiring an operator to upload the service report into a customer system before closing out the task).
Accreditation management for subcontractors: To ensure your subcontractors are sending a qualified technician, any missing accreditations for a subcontractors techs are shown to them when they are assigning a task.
Changes and Improvements
Uptick now supports multiple remarks being raised and linked against a prompt when servicing an asset.
A Supervisor field has been added to Service Quotes which will help manage project quotes. The service quote author is also editable so that the appropriate person can be referenced in the quote PDF.
Reports now have an "approver" which can be configured to be visible on your template. This can be useful for annual compliance audits where the report auditor and signatory are different.
The task documents tab will now show any documents from the originating quote. Note these documents won't be available during dispatch or to the technician.
Remarks can be manually "published" via the remarks list (accessible via Customer Data or per property), making them visible on the customer portal. Typically remarks are only visible on the customer portal after a service report or similar is published.
Custom fields can now be made visible to contractors via the contractor portal allowing them to view other relevant information on the task. Contractors will be able to add information into these fields when adding/editing assets or remarks.
In order to make sure all assets on your property's registry are being maintained, if enabled, a monthly report will now be sent to your Uptick notifications email. This will list all assets not covered by routines set up on the property. Contact support to get this enabled now. Alternatively, you can use the 'Covered by Routines' filter on the Property assets tab. This is only available for customers on routines.
The Completed Task Profitability report now includes a labour and material cost breakdown. This will help to determine which areas of your business have affected your margins.
The 'staff' checkbox has been removed from the account setup, reducing the risk of misconfiguration at account creation. If you provide mobile app access to contractors, contact the Support team if you wish to remove or add access.
Aligning your accounting system with Uptick, suppliers can now be manually linked to Contractors via a 'Supplier' field on the Contractor's account. Making a contact inactive or on hold in your accounting system will make the linked contractor inactive as well. This will prevent those contractors from being assigned to tasks and reduce the risk of not assigning the right contractor to the job.
For customers on Routines, the character limit on the billing contract line item description has been increased so that more information can be entered on invoice line items.
When using the Uptick rectifications module, an email is now sent to the creator if you have rejected their rectification so clients can easily provide proof of rectified remarks. This will help them know if they need to provide more supporting documentation without sending any external emails.
You can now configure Single sign-on directly from your Uptick control panel. This allows your staff to log in with your company's identity provider (such as ADFS) rather than using their username and password. We've also included an option to mandate that your staff use this login method if you wish to enforce it strictly.
We've made it easier to visualise complex applicable inspection setups by updating the asset type maintenance tab into a matrix view.
For our Quickbooks accounting integration, we now sync the default pricetier sell price and product description so that Quickbooks remains the source of truth and this information can be used in Uptick accordingly.
The Security Group configuration has moved to its own tab in the Security section of the Control Panel.
Showcase
Major Servicing Improvements
We've added major service / post-annual servicing dates into the programme maintenance calendar on a property. See at a glance how many assets are due for which major service and when, as well as which assets have been quoted or appear on a task.
Quoted Invoicing workflow rework
We've begun the process of adding a formal variation process to tasks. The first change is that additional materials added to a quoted repair task will no longer automatically affect the total billable amount on the task's invoice. Instead, you will need to manually mark materials as billable.
The task will clearly warn you if additional materials have been added so that you can manually review those items and process them as needed.
Accreditation improvements
To ensure your subcontractors are sending a qualified technician, any missing accreditations for a subcontractor tech are shown to them when they are assigning a task. Accreditations requirements can now also be set up per Asset Type.
