Release

Fall is almost upon us and we thought it would be the perfect occasion to summarize some of the enhancements we’ve released over the summer. We know you were busy, so most of these improvements have been applied to your account without disruption and you may have already noticed them. These are the highlights:

– Order materials for multiple phases in one single Purchase Order: If you use Knowify to send POs to your vendors, you’ve probably discovered this new feature that has been one of the most requested enhancements in Knowify history! Now, from Plan&Track, you can order budgeted materials for multiple phases in one single PO. Just click on “All phases” in the footer of this pop up and select the items.

– Check in/out reminders set by the office: We’ve had reminders in the smartphone app for a while, but they were mostly set by the mobile user. Now, you can set them from the office and apply them to all mobile users in your account. Just go to the Admin section, Customize tab, and open the section Phone Reminders. There you can set the time for both the check in and check out reminders.

– Total counts in Review Time: Managing a large number of time entries in the Review Time section can be tricky, but we have added a feature to simplify the process. As a first step, you can see that we’ve added a new count (‘Total period’) in the footer of the Review table. Now we also show you the total number of hours and $ for the entire group of entries matching the search parameters (the period), not only the count for those being displayed in the current page of the table.

– Unallocated buckets: In the Internal module you can now see the Unallocated buckets for each of your departments. This will help you keep track of any expenses that remain unallocated in Knowify.

– Improved activity feed: We are gradually making the Activity Feed of Dashboard much more user friendly. Now you can have a better understanding of what’s going on in your company across jobs. We’ve improved the look and feel over the summer and we plan on adding some actionable features before the end of the year. Stay tuned!

– Re-opening Purchase Orders: Admin or users with unlimited approval can re-open Purchase Orders now. Just go to the details page of the PO and use the drop-down menu to find the option.

– Wizard to fix $0 time entries: Often, we create users but forget to assign them a burden hourly cost. If they track time, the entries will have a $0 cost. Now you can fix these issues in the Review Time page by clicking on the wrench icon next to the time entry cost.

– Search items by Item Number: When searching items in the catalog, now you can search by Item Number as well.

– Editing job in check in/out entries: In the Check In/Out View we let you modify the job for a given entry. This is perfect for those in the office that have to correct check in/outs against the wrong job.

– Notify Crew via Service Ticket: Now you can notify your crew with smartphone push notifications without leaving the Service Map. Just click in the service ticket and expand the dropdown menu.

– Catalog items in plan templates: When applying a Project Plan template, now we also take the Catalog Items from the template and apply it to the new plan.

– Working in the field with poor signal: We know that many jobs sites don’t get great signal, so we’ve been working hard to make the app work seamlessly even in low connectivity environments. Please make sure your crews are running the most recent versions of the app. If they aren’t already, you can always send a push notifications to all the phones via Dashboard to remind them.

– Contract Jobs Overview in Dashboard: We’ve strengthen this feature to account for estimated values in Cost Plus jobs in the Opportunity Section.

– New Phases Report: New report listing all phases for all active jobs. This is a perfect tool to make sure you are not missing anything, especially if you run many jobs at the same time. It’s a good complement of our Manage Phases section for those that prefer spreadsheets.

– New Billable Items Report: If you run Cost Plus jobs, you might benefit from a report that shows all billable items for the job. You can also filter it by date range, in case you are looking for billable items for a given period. This is a useful report to have when you are preparing a invoice for a Cost Plus job, especially when there are many billable items involved.

– [Growth and Enterprise Plans] Job Progress Report filtered by Tag: For those running this report, you can filter the results selecting a specific tag. This is convenient for those businesses running multiple divisions, like commercial vs residential, or construction vs service.

– [International Plans] Improvements around taxes: For our international friends, we’ve been enhancing the way we manage taxes in purchases and bills. As you already know if you use QuickBooks, tax management has been changing a bit and we are making sure all our features involving taxes work seamlessly despite these changes.

– [QuickBooks] Use catalog defaults for expenses: We’ve adjusted the logic for expenses pushed to QuickBooks so that if you use a Catalog Item, the expense will be pushed to the Expense Account associated with the Catalog Item. If there is none, then we’ll fall back to the default Vendor Expense Account. As a last resort, we’ll use the default Company Expense Account. This gives you more flexibility when allocating costs.

We are thrilled to announce the official release of the improved Manage Job Phases section. Now you can easily manage phases across multiple jobs and make sure you are not missing anything at the phase level. With this new section, located inside Contract Jobs, you will be able to make your project management even more productive!

Last weekend, Knowify’s minor release of new features contained many small changes requested by the Knowify community. These are the highlights:

1. Enhanced experience to select subs for your phases: Over the next few months the process to select a sub for a job phase will be simplified. For starters, now you can select an existing job or create a new one right from the project plan. No need to go back to the vendors section any longer.

2. Job column in Manage Bills: Even if you have allocated bills against multiple phases, we’ve developed a new feature that will let us display the main job involved in the bill.

3. Improved experience with purchases against multiple jobs/phases: Similar to the previous feature, now we can display the main job involved in a purchases even if the purchase is made against different phases of the job.

4. New sync of payments with QuickBooks: We’ve strengthened our ability to pull bill payments from QuickBooks Online, even if the payment is against multiple bills and you don’t have all these bills in Knowify. We’ve also improved the management of voided/deleted payments.

5.[BONUS] Service templates in Contracts: This is like a hidden gem. Now you can drop service templates in a draft contract, enter the number of units and Knowify will automatically come up with the price and breakdown. Preparing an estimate has never been quicker!

We just released a new version of Knowify with a large number of new features and improvements. All these changes are based on your feedback so we hope you are as excited as we are!

This is the complete change log:

1. Ability to invoice fixed priced jobs at the line item or job level: Now, when you have a fixed price job that requires regular invoicing, you can invoice progress for each line item or just invoice a part of the entire job. For those of you that, for instance, invoice 10% upon signature, 40% when the job starts, and the rest when the job is complete, you can now easily do that and you don’t have to deal with each line item included in the proposal.

Additionally, we’ve improved the user interface in the progress invoice popup, which will give you information about the total value of the job, previously invoiced value and current invoice.

2. Unsaved changes warnings: Losing changes because you didn’t save them is a bummer and now we’ll help you avoid this issue in the Plan&Track and Contract sections. If you navigate away without saving the changes, Knowify will give you the option to go back and save your changes.

3. Enhanced mobile onboarding: We always wanted to make the onboarding of mobile users as seamless as possible and now we are one step closer with our new Mobile Onboarding wizard. With this wizard, you’ll be able to track the onboarding process of your mobile users and help them if they get stuck. Knowify will help you communicate with them in both Spanish and English with predefined help messages. Meanwhile, in the smartphone app, the mobile users will go through a simple onboarding wizard that will guarantee that they can check in, check out and provide location information.

4. Quickly build an itemized budget from a accepted proposal: Many of you rely on our Simple and Advanced modes for your jobs because they allow you to create proposals and send them to your customers very fast. Now, if you use these modes, you can also create a complete and itemized internal budget in Plan&Track once the proposal has been approved.

5. Enhanced RFI management: We have made RFIs even more powerful and with these changes you can now set the RFI number or the expiration date. We’ve also improved the user interface so that you can also easily determine the expiration date and extend it if necessary.

6. Easily include job comments in invoices: When creating a new invoice, you can view and add any comments connected to the job, either from the field or the office. This way you can collect the necessary pieces of information while completing the job and provide them to the client to craft a more complete and thorough invoice.

7. Minor improvements:

– Products and services used in contract breakdowns will automatically calculate markups based on your catalog prices and costs.

– Now you can easily access the client contact information from the job section.

– Subcontractors can be created in the Users section without having to create them in the Vendors section first.

– When creating a new invoice you’ll be warned if there is an existing draft invoice for the same job.

– Invoices for service jobs will rely on the company default payment terms.

– When creating a new invoice for a cost plus job you’ll be warned if there is unapproved time for the job.

– You can undo the rounding in time entries in the Review Time section.

– For non-US companies, jobs with holdback will not allow the users to modify the price or quantity in the invoice to preserve the progress calculations.

– The Manage Contract Jobs section will now provide information about budgets when available.

– Fixed issues about formatting manually typed dates in bills and purchases.

– E-signature reminders can now be sent from the contract section.

– Item description can be edited after the Subcontractor PO has been issued.

– Fixed issues around invoicing change orders approved on the same day as the invoice.

– Improved performance in the Purchases History section.

– Fixed issues around calculating the opportunity value for copied jobs.

– Improved user interface in Plan&Track where we’ve grouped some secondary actions (scroll top/bottom, collapse/expand).

– The check in/out view will allow you to change the date of the check in/out.

– New beta Subs Report with all the contact information for the subs involved in the job.

– Improved users interface in the map section of Service Jobs.

– (QuickBooks) When creating a subcustomer for a new job, the subcustomer will take the email of the client’s job.

– (QuickBooks) When sending invoices to QuickBooks, the invoice will include the email of the client.

– (QuickBooks) Improved widgets in the user interface to view the sync details.

– (QuickBooks) Automatically trim long descriptions in invoices and bills to prevent QuickBooks errors.

– (QuickBooks) Setting the default catalog income and expense account are now part of the mandatory QuickBooks setup.

– Visual cue in the footer of Knowify to let you know if the real time connection has disconnected and allow you to reconnect it.

Do not hesitate to reach out if you have any questions!

Our new release is out! As usual, this release includes many improvements, most of them based on your feedback. Please pay attention to the first two items below, which will definitely change the way you use Knowify (for the better!). Also, stay tuned because we’ll be releasing additional new features before the end of the year.

This is the complete change log:

1. We have changed the names of our job-types. Following your feedback, we are simplifying the names as follows:

This is just a change in names; all these job types will behave as usual. You can find more information in this video.

2. We have also simplified the status of a job in Plan & Track. From now on, the Plan & Track section will be Active by default when the job is active, and will stay in Edit mode while you are budgeting or bidding a job. You don’t need to remember to switch the status any longer; Knowify will do it for you.

3. Job creation: We are moving the Job Name to the top of the page. This will create a more logical flow and will allow us further improvements in upcoming releases.

4. Anti-spam filter measures: We continue to optimize the emails coming out of Knowify to ensure that they are delivered. Even though our tested delivery rate was already very high, this new release goes one step further and adds extra measures to avoid spam filters when sending emails via Knowify. While there is no technical way to guarantee 100% email reception, in large part because it depends on how each email user sets up their spam folder, these changes will continue to push our delivery rates up toward the targeted 100%.

5. Taxes for non-US companies: We’ve strengthen the rounding system to make sure there are no discrepancies when adding taxes to your invoices or purchases. Also, for those syncing with Quickbooks, we’ve been able to circumvent a Quickbooks API bug to sync purchases and bills with taxes.

6. Improved bidding process: We will be gradually including improvements in the process to prepare proposals in Knowify. For starters, you’ll see that breakdowns include now a way to label each line as labor, materials or other. This is just in preparation for upcoming releases where we plan on radically simplifying the breakdown process and giving you more options to display them to your customers. These labels will also help Knowify automatically build budgets and list of materials when working in Simple or Advanced job costing modes.

7. Time & materials work: We have strengthened all workflows related to time & materials work. Now, before invoicing, the system will prompt you to enter the timeframe for the invoice, which will help identify the correct billable items. The invoice will also give you internal information about the value in materials, the value in labor and the total number of hours included in the invoice.

8. Improved sync experience with QuickBooks: For those using QuickBooks, we’ve added a few improvements:

– After creating a bill, invoice or any other QuickBooks-related transaction, you will not need to refresh the page to see if it synced properly. Knowify will automatically display the updated status as soon as the transaction syncs with QuickBooks.

– Time entries will now take the Service used in Plan and Track (if any), which will take precedence over the general default service for time entries.

9. RFI link: In RFIs, we’ve seen recipients struggle at finding the attachments given that they didn’t think they had to click the link View RFI to get there. To make it clearer, if you use attachments in RFIs, the link in the email will read View RFI & Attachments from now on.

10. Improved display in contract jobs: We’ve restyled the display in the manage contract jobs page, to make it easier to read. Total values for jobs are now on the revenue side to give you a sense on how much you expect to generate for a given job.

11. Save reminders: While building your bids, Knowify will prompt you to save your work every 10 minutes. This is the first step towards making sure that you never lose any of your work. In upcoming release we’ll include additional enhancements.

12. Minor improvements:

– Faster search in contract jobs, and fewer display issues in low internet speed networks.

– PO numbers can be added or edited right in the invoice page.

– Both phases in the project plan and line items in proposals have a new sorting feature.

– Client and vendor exports include the full address.

– Sorting line items in the schedules of values are being properly displayed in the final invoice.

– RTF files are not accepted as attachments.

– Invoice items can be removed in bulk.

– Time overview page offers new filters.

– After deleting an invoice, you can return to the invoices section or to the job.

– Service tickets include PO number field.

– Job tags can be added when creating a new job.

– For those using pay apps (in our Fixed Price with AIA billing jobs), now you can set a default for your preferred invoicing style. Wiping values in the invoices will also be easier.

– In non-US companies, there is a new display of holdback amounts.

– Fixed issue around marking phases with deleted resources as complete.

– Fixed issue when updating Advisor users.

All these improvements will help you work faster and spend less time in the office. Do not hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.

Another exciting new release of Knowify is here! Our mission to modernize the contracting office continues!

This is the complete change log:

1. New job logs section: In order to improve your visibility and control over your jobs, we have created a new section that will display chronological job logs. This new section will merge user actions, comments, documents and emails to capture the whole job history, giving you the ability to see and analyze how the job has evolved. No better way to stay on top of your jobs than by having the full job history.

Along with this new section, we’ve added the ability to capture the email correspondence around your Knowify-generated proposals, change order, invoices, and more. This feature adds a unique ID to all your email subjects, which will allow Knowify to retrieve the emails and display them in the job log. If you wish to enable this feature, contact support@knowify.com.

2. Improved scheduling: This new release includes significant changes in the way you can schedule in Knowify. We’ve been collecting feedback over the last year, and we feel the new changes will translate that feedback into a smoother experience around scheduling. For starters, the Corporate Calendar will be the default view in the scheduling section, and you will be able to schedule and make changes in the Corporate Calendar itself.

Also, we have adjusted the look and feel of Job Board to display more information when scheduling your crews. Last but not least, scheduling dates in Plan and Track is back. You will be able to set dates or just go to Job Board if you also need to schedule your crews.

3. Improved management of time and materials jobs: While our support for T&M jobs was already very solid, we’ve strengthened certain areas around recording bills against POs, editing POs, and other edge cases.

Also, when invoicing your clients, we have created a new feature that will help you easily group your invoice items based on certain parameters, like labor vs materials, job phases, etc.

4. New form for purchases: We have improved the user experience around creating POs and expenses. The most relevant change is the ability to allocate items to multiple jobs within the same PO or expense.

5. Setting budgets in Simple and Advanced job costing modes: The popularity of our Simple and Advanced modes has grown so much that many of you have been requesting the ability to set cost budgets once the contract is approved. Now you can do it. Just go to the Plan and Track section and set materials, labor and subs budgets.

6. Feature to copy jobs: You can now copy a whole job. This is perfect if your jobs look alike and you just need to change the client information and adjust the quote values. (available on 9/8/17)

7. More powerful import of data from QuickBooks: We have added support to capture expense items with negative values and expenses against multiple jobs. We have also improved the logic behind the QuickBooks import to prevent duplicates and errors.

8. Hide/display contract breakdowns in customer outputs: Many of you have been using the BOM/breakdown feature in Contracts to come up with your bid values. However, you didn’t want to display the breakdown to the customer. Now, you have the ability to show/hide these values in the contract.

9. Service ticket history page: This page will look the same, but it should be working much smoother than before. We’ve changed the technology behind it to speed it up, which will be really convenient for those of you with many service jobs.

10. Advanced e-signature features: If you are using our e-signature features, now you will be able to prevent Knowify from attache the proposal pdf to the email (in case you want to force your customer to click on the e-signature link) or produce an e-signature link without sending any email (in case you prefer to use your our email to send the link, outside Knowify).

11. Improved exports of vendors and bills.

12. Improved display of information in Work Order outputs.

13. Editing job names will sync with QuickBooks Online.

14. Improvements in Pay Apps, like the ability to set retainage with decimals or invoice in full after just having invoiced for stored materials.

15. US companies can enable/disable taxes in purchases.

16. For non-US companies, we have improved the tax support in expenses and bills and now you can exclude certain tax rates from job costing calculations.

17. Complex tax codes in non-US companies will now be broken down into their individual rates in contract and invoice outputs.

18. Ability to add a contract summary page to your invoices to help your customer understand your progress billing. Contract support@knowify.com to enable this feature.

19. Ability to disable the recording of payments when using PaySimple. This will avoid duplicate payments in QuickBooks if you pul data from your bank feed.

20. Resolved glitches:

– Deposit invoices

– Deleting invoices and restoring billable items

– Welcome emails for users

For those of you interested in learning more about QuickBooks Online, click here.

Stayed tuned, because we have more enhancements in the immediate pipeline. In the meantime, do not hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.

Our new release is out! Get ready for a long list of new features and improvements, including some of the most requested features in Knowify history.

This is the complete change log:

Our version 2.19 contains exciting improvements to Knowify.

This is the complete change log:

1. When creating owner contracts, you have the ability to select whether you wish to user regular invoice or schedule of values to bill your clients.

2. We have improved the experience around adding subcontractors to project plans. Now you don’t need to save the changes before selecting the subcontractor.

3. Taxes in proposals and estimates have improved to rely on the existing list of tax rates. If your account is connected to QuickBooks, you can create new rates in QuickBooks and Knowify will pull them automatically. If you are not connected to QuickBooks, you can create new rates in the admin section of Knowify (Customize / Tax Rates). If you connected to QuickBooks at some point and then disconnected, please contact our customer service team for assistance on how to create new tax rates.

4. With catalog templates you don’t have to itemize materials and labor any longer. You can just enter materials, labor and subs budgets for the unit of work and they will be automatically calculate when used in the project plan.

5. If you are connected to QuickBooks, your account will rely on any payment terms you have defined in QuickBooks. This way the sync of invoices with QuickBooks will always respect the payment terms you have included in the invoice.

6. In the Customize section of the Admin panel, you can now set your default payment terms.

7. We have improved the user interface in many sections, especially by grouping icons into a drop-down menu. This change will simplify the interface and help you identify the available options. This new interface is available for new users only but will be rolled out to everyone over the next month.

8. The interface in plan & track has also changed and there are two new drop-down menus grouping ‘allocate from inventory’ and ‘order materials’, and also ‘schedule resources’ and ‘enter time’.

9. We have introduced a large number of improvements to job board, including the ability to unschedule jobs, filter resources, group by departments and allocate entire crews into a job, or real-time information about check ins.

10. The welcome email for new mobile users has been improved to include easier-to-follow instructions on how to get started.

11. Now you can use catalog services when adding new phases to a project plan. By doing so, the resulting contract will rely on the same catalog services.

12. Line items in owner contracts and GC bids can be edited even if the contract is active as long as they have not been billed, which means you will no longer need to revert the contract back to draft mode.

13. We have improved the information around the connection between phases, line items and catalog items. You will also be able to change the catalog connection even if the contract or the plan are active.

14. If you are connected to QuickBooks, we now support Locations when sending invoices and bills into QuickBooks. You can set a location for each job in the QuickBooks section (jobs tab).

15. For our international customers, we now support multiple tax rates in proposals and Schedule of Values invoices.

16. The PNL report will include subcontractors budgets when applicable.

17. Now we have the ability to import certain Estimates from QuickBooks.

18. Simple and advanced jobs reports include a new tab for rejected jobs.

19. We added Excel copy-paste functionality to Plan and Track, which will allow you to quickly create your list of materials.

20. The project plan report includes better information around subcontractors and budgets.

21. The ‘Dispatch Jobs’ section has been renamed as ‘Service Jobs’.

22. Payroll report includes now information about the department and job location.

23. Ability to edit time entries even if they have already been billed.

24. Now other agreements can take catalog items in the setup to create deliverables.

25. Time entries will now sync with QuickBooks with more accurate job information.

26. Work order outputs have been improved to better display the available information.

27. You can now convert QuickBooks subclients into Knowify jobs.

28. Improved access from project plan into foreman view.

29. We have strengthened our ability to pull payments from QuickBooks, including payments against multiple invoice.

30. Editing an invoice will now preserve the comments in the original invoice.

31. When importing phases into a project plan, you can set subcontractor budgets for these phases.

32. We have fixed minor bugs in the following sections:

– Payroll report (hours outside range)

– Catalog (more actions buttons)

– Re-assigning purchases to service jobs (billable item creation)

If you have any questions or wish to share your feedback, you can find us at support@knowify.com.

The Knowify Team