Hey SynkedUP Gang! Hope you had a great holiday season. We've been actively working (we took some time off with family🎄🎁, but got right back to it. 😊) We are happy to be bringing you some new time-saving features for managing maintenance contracts year after year. Been planning for this ability for maintenance contracts for many years, and excited to start seeing this come to fruition. You can also expect to continue seeing more features coming around managing ongoing maintenance contracts in the 2021 season.

Additionally, we added a few quick niceties like adding new items to an estimate without having to go to the Item Catalog to add the item. The mobile app got a back button in the full-screen image viewer so iOS viewers can close the full-screen view, and a few more things. Read all the details below.

We added a time zone setting in My Company settings. This clears up some limitations we had with defining what time things occurred, such as when we exported Consultations to a calendar via a web link. Or recording when Internal Notes were left on a timecard, and so on.

Creating a client and property was kind of a redundant two-step process: you had to create the client, and then go to the property section and also create the property.

Clunky no more!

You can now create a client and property all in one shot via the new toggle, which simply takes the same address you entered on the client profile, and automatically creates a property with that same address. If you do not want the system to do this, simply turn that toggle off before saving the new client.

Maintenance Contracts in SynkedUP allow you to define, track, and manage maintenance work for your customers on an annual basis.
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Our vision had always been to make this an "indefinite" workflow instead of only on a year-by-year basis. On a year-by-year basis, you had to create new maintenance contracts each year, which was time-consuming and added very little value.

Now we are one step closer to the "indefinite" maintenance contract model. Instead of creating a new maintenance contract each year, you can copy the previous year's tasks and items, and copy them to the new year, all inside of the original maintenance contract, without creating a new separate maintenance contract.

The way this works is with a new year-selector inside the User Interface for maintenance contracts. This allows you to select what year's tasks you want to work on or view.

Let's say you are approaching the end of the year and you want to begin planning the next season's maintenance work for this customer. You can click on this button to Create Another Year's Tasks

Or, instead of creating new year's tasks one by one, you can also do this in a single bulk action. The system will search for and alert you of any maintenance contracts that are Active but do not have any tasks for the current year. It will ask you if you want to copy all the previous year's tasks and create tasks for the new year for all of Active contracts.

You have controls in this popup to define what jobs you want to copy. In this popup, you can bulk mark jobs as inactive, or bulk copy tasks to the new year in all selected jobs.

Here is a tutorial offering some context behind the intent of this tool:

Multi-year feature for Maintenance Contracts

You now have better control over defining what is taxable and what isn't.

You can now search for customers by tag name.

Yaaay! You can now add an item to an estimate directly from the screen where you build out an estimate. This saves you from having to go to the Item Catalog and adding the item each time you run into the scenario of needing to add an item to an estimate that did not exist in the Item Catalog.

This is a little plus button in the Catalog Browser. Click on it to add an item that does not exist yet in the item catalog.

When using this new feature, you can define whether you want to save this item to the item catalog for future use, or just keep this as a one-off item for this particular estimate.

We had an issue where if you dragged and dropped items to a certain visit, it would not always auto-select that visit you dropped it on when you let go of the item. This caused the item to disappear from the Visit you were trying to add it to, and it randomly got added to a different Visit. This is now fixed. Additionally, we also fixed an issue with dragging and dropping an item to a specific workarea in the Costing & Analysis screen.

You used to only be able to edit a user avatar by logging in as that user. This was frustrating for office admin or managers that were trying to set up user accounts. We now added the ability to edit the avatar from the User profile in the Users section

SynkedUP used to only allow an email address to be linked to a single customer, meaning the same email address couldn't belong to 2 different customers. This had a negative impact in the Customer Portal when reviewing proposals. It was quite common for a SynkedUP user to add their own email to a customer profile, and send the proposal to themselves so they could see it first. Doing so linked their own email to that customer. The next time they repeated this for the next customer, they would still get the email, but the customer name in the greeting was still the same as the first customer they had tried this on.

So, we solved the issue. The same email can now belong to multiple customers. It will just relink each time they initiate a new proposal so that the name in the greeting is correct each time and the user can authenticate and view the proposal in the Customer Portal without the error message.

We had a screen that did not show when a workarea was marked on hold. We updated this to now show visually with a red line and font when the workarea is on hold.

We added some more info and improved the layout of the list of tasks on the Task tab when viewing maintenance contracts in the mobile app.

Before...

After...

When viewing attachments in the mobile app on full screen, there was no back button to get back out of the full-screen view. This wasn't really a problem for Android users, but it put iOS issues into a dead-end, as there was no button to close the full-screen view of the image. We now added a back button, iOS crisis resolved. 😜

Thanks folks! Let me know what you think of the new features, and hit me up with any questions. Cheers! 🥂

-Weston & Steph

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