It has been a busy start to the month for the Propeller team, with the administration portal, Android and iPad applications getting new releases containing improvements and new functionality.

Due to the scope of the new features and improvements, this article provides links to dedicated articles for some of the more significant updates.

Here are the highlights from this release:

Finance Improvements

Please read this separate blog post which deals with improvements to the finance section separately – Propeller Blog – Finance Improvements & Additions

Updates include:

• Nominal Codes by User Groups
• Engineer charge rates and automatic labour cost charge creation
• Invoice and Purchase Order approval process
• Addition of Purchase Invoices to log against Purchase Orders
• Deposits for Quotes
• “Payable By” now available for quotes

‘New Visit’ Creation Page Improvements/Modifications

We have made some changes to this page in order to streamline some processes after feedback from clients. The update allows you to create both a new job and visit on the same page, without having to first raise a job, and then create the visit.

The ‘new visit’ creation page (Visits –> Create New) now contains a new Section 1 “Job Details”. This allows the user to either create a new job or attach the visit to an existing job at that property.

 

Going forwards, visits for existing jobs can either be created directly from the job page itself, or added to the job from the create new visit page using the above dialogue.

Propeller will now automatically create a job for a ‘new visit’ which is not assigned to an existing job. We strongly recommend customers take full advantage the ‘Jobs’ functionality alongside every new visit. The job function means that if the visit turns into a multi-visit “job” (more than one visit to the same property e.g. for the same repair) – the job will group all costs, invoices, photos and certificates under the single job – allowing for easier navigation and reporting.

 

User Groups and Wall planner Modifications

Another big change in this release is the addition of User Groups. Administrators can now set up groups for their Web and Engineer users – for example “Servicing Team” or “Electrical Engineers” and assign either Web or Engineers (or both) to these groups.

• Groups allow for easier grouping of Engineers in the wall planner. Rather than selecting each engineer individually, you can now select a group e.g. “Electrical Engineers” and all engineers that are part of this group will be loaded.
• From a finance perspective, the use of Groups enables use of default nominal codes for different sets of users, for example, a “Service Team” user may have a default Cost Code of “5000” and a Sales Code of “4000” – these will be automatically be applied for any user in this group creating an Invoice or Purchase Order
  

  Setup:

  To setup a user group, navigate to Settings –> Company Settings –> User Groups

  On this User Groups page – new groups can be created via “Create User Group”

Once a group has been added, it can be modified via the Edit Symbol.

This allows an Acronym, colour, cost code and sales code to be assigned to the group.

Selecting the group allows users to be assigned by dragging from “Available Users” into “Assigned Users” or unassigned by dragging from “Assigned Users” into “Available Users”

Note: If a user has more than one group, one of these groups is set as the “Default” group – which means that group’s nominal codes will be applied. The default group for a user can be set via the User Manager –> Website users OR Engineers and clicking on the relevant user’s profile.

The user’s assigned groups are shown under “User Groups” along with the option to change the default:

Wall planner:
Once your User Groups have been set up – these can be used with the wall planner to filter engineers.

Under “Choose Engineers” – as well as having the ability select the engineers, a new option of selecting a group or groups of engineers is available. Select the group(s) required and then click “Load” to load the group(s).

 

The header for the wall planner will display the group each engineer is associated to (Acronym) along with the colour of that group.

Hovering over the engineer’s name will show the full names of the groups.

Ability to have multiple contacts per Property

It is now possible to have multiple contacts for a Property, to add a new contact or contacts to a property:

• From the “View Property” page, there is now an additional section called “Additional Contacts” – to add contacts, click “Edit” next to “Additional Contacts”
• This will open the additional contacts dialogue box which display the main contact attached to the property along with any additional contacts that have been added
• Additional contacts can be added as a Family Member, Owner, Officer and Landlord.

 

Properties managed by agencies, on behalf of a landlord.
If additional contact type of ‘Landlord’ is selected at a property set up as ‘tenant’, this prompts a change in the invoice template to be displayed as:

‘New Landlord Name’
C/O ‘Management Agency Name
Agency Address

 

Feedback:

We are always open to receiving suggestions from our users on improvements or new features. We always log suggestions for consideration for future releases.

If you have any suggestions to improve Propeller, whether this for the web portal or for one of the apps – please let us know via the below options:

For feedback: website-feedback@teampropeller.co.uk

For support: support@teampropeller.co.uk or call us on 0333 207 0037