August 18, 2015

The June, 2015 release of 4castplus delivered a number of new features in Construction Management, Approvals, Reporting and Document Management. So since then, over the past two months, our product development team has been busily fixing, tweaking and enhancing the system to meet customer requests and bug fixes as a result of those new features. Some of those enhancements & tweaks are described below Also, we did, nevertheless, manage to add a few new things along the way, including:

Multi-level Customer Invoice Approvals (AR) Workflows
New Data Sets in BI Custom Reporting
Vacation Accrual Tracking, Reporting and Draw-downs
Field Receiving. A new PO Receiving module is now available as part of the Jobsite LEM tracking system

These new features – along with extensions of existing features – are all described in more detail below. We’ll be happy to discuss them at greater length, so please contact us if you’re interested to learn more.

AREA: Approvals

Administrator Approval Override

In this release we’ve added the ability for administrators to insert themselves into any approval workflow and override the approval. This is very valuable for situations where approvals are bottlenecked due to an unavailable approver or delegate. Anyone with administrator rights can approve any Jobsite Timesheet approval stage.

Customer Invoice Approval Workflow

This is a new approval workflow added for organizations that require AR invoices to go through an approval process. Similar to other multi-level approval workflows, the customer invoice approvals work by configuring one or more workflow stages in the configuration area (see screenshot to the right). Once an invoice is submitted for approval, it will appear in the Approvals area of the various approvers as needed through the stages (see second screenshot).

Labor Timesheet Approvals – Improved Usability

After changing the labor timesheet approval in the last release to enable daily approvals, we received a number of suggestions for ways to improve the usability of that interface. We’ve responded and updated the interface to make it easier and faster – with more clarity of information – to perform approvals. Once again we welcome your feedback.

AREA: Business Intelligence Reporting

Redesign of BI Folder Structure

With the introduction of many new reports and reporting areas, the business intelligence area has undergone some organizational restructuring. There are now the following top-level hierarchical reporting areas:

Projects
Resources
Resource Management
Finance/HR
Custom Reports

Each of these areas has a selection of corporate-level reporting to discover.

Extensions to Custom Reporting in BI

A number of new datasets have been added to the custom report builder in Business Intelligence. This reporting tool provides a powerful way to gather project and resource data from all desired projects & resources over a selected date range – and view that data in a tailored report format. See screenshot to the right.

Data Exports

In addition to the ability to export Labor and Expenses (with full export controls, meaning those transactions cannot be exported again. Allows users to export transactions on their own), users can now export equipment transactions.

AREA: Overhead and HR

Vacation Accrual Tracking, Reporting and Employee Drawdown

You can now set up vacation accrual amounts per employee. Every pay period, an accrual amount will be recorded, tracked and reported. The accumulating vacation accrual is Visible to both the employee and management. As the employee uses vacation, they’ll enter that onto the timesheet, and it will automatically draw down from their vacation accrual balance. Full controls and reporting are built-in to ensure complete visibility and control.

The screenshots to the right show configuration of the company and employee record. The third image is of an HR report that includes vacation accruals.

Configuration of vacation accruals

Labor Record showing vacation accruals fields

New HR Report showing vacation accruals

AREA: Jobsite LEM Tracking

Field Receiving

The Jobsite LEM Tracking system has been extended to include the ability to receive goods & services committed onto purchase orders. This easy-to-use interface allows field personnel to identify vendor, purchase order and quickly enter receipt information & quantities received.

Extension of Vendor Attest to allow for Direct Bill of Jobsite Timesheet Transactions

There is now a new option to allow for financial to bypass the requirement that all transactions be Attested (meaning: a vendor invoice has to be recorded) before being invoiced. The finance group now has the option to send a jobsite vendor transaction directly to billing after it’s recorded and approved. Using this option, when the vendor invoice is later received, the AP group can come back, attest it, adjust the accrual; and then subsequently bill their client for any adjustments that might have happened on the vendor invoice.

Those are the big things that happened over the past 6 weeks or so. There are a gajillion other little tweaks & fixes that our talented team of software dev guys have been busily fixing that didn’t make the list here – but are all there to make things better, faster, & smarter; so go take a look and let us know what you think.

If you want to learn more about this software upgrade and more – and we hope you do – please feel free to email us at info@4castplus.com. Or, if you’ve landed on this page and you’re not already a customer, here’s where you can sign up for a free live demo of 4castplus.