Release notes are published each time our production servers are refreshed. The notes contain information relating to new features and enhancements to existing functionality.
Booked or claimed expenses are classified to a customer, project and task combination, or to a department for costing and optionally for billing purposes. Employees and consultants can only book expenses to a task which allows expenses (by task type), to which the employee is assigned as a resource and where the task planned start date is prior to the date the expense was incurred. The claim date on the expense report header is not checked, so if you are for example booking flights three weeks ahead of a client on-site task and need to claim for that flight ahead of time, claim an expense with the date the flight was purchased as the expense claim header date and the date the flight actually takes place as the expense item “incurred on” date. iBE has also been enhanced to allow flights or other expenses to be booked as “incurring” up to one week ahea of the task’s planned start date, for example to account to flights or hotel accommodation prior to the start of an on-site task
A number of small fixes were applied to iPhone expenses app including the ability to save $0 claims, automatic generation of expense claim item numbers and to manual edits to unclaimed transactions downloaded from your bank on the phone app
A significant enhancement to our hugely popular time & expense list application to make it the perfect tool for paying contractors who are paid on a check, voucher or invoice basis was delivered today including:
We will be delivered a “mass-print” option and further tweaking the time it takes to load this popular report as well as building enhancements for clients who pay contractors via payroll and wish to calculate their pay and expenses to send to a connected payroll system
There is a new tab in iBE projects called “Customer Contacts” which looks the same as the contacts tab in iBE customer app. This new tab is hidden by default so either work with your iBE consultant or create a project mgt. screen layout and custom fields property folder to make this tab visible. You cannot add or remove customer contacts from this tab, you need to open the customer app to do this, which you can do by right mouse-clicking on the customer name. But if you click on edit contact it will automatically open the leads/contact in a new browser tab allowing you to edit and view detailed contact information including for example custom fields
Our project mgt. app was enhanced to create resource specific billing rates even when “all resources” is checked for a task (accessible from the task > details > resources tab) or when the task does not have a service. Bear in mind you still need to assign a service as well as a billing rate to bill for work done on a task
If you use our CRM and have a ton of “leads”, customers and contacts who are still prospects and have not yet been sold anything, it can be confusing to see these leads and prospects in the project key info and resources tabs. We now limit the customer list to non-prospects and the resources list to employees and customer contacts. When an opportunity is closed the customer of that opportunity is also automatically changed from customer type “prospect” to “customer”. This is particularly important if you automatically create a project automatically when an opportunity is closed
We fixed a bug where leads & contacts were only showing leads or prospect not customer contacts. Now all of these leads & contacts are displayed. We are working on a subsequent enhancement to the leads and contacts app with display options for leads, customer contacts, employees’ contact information or candidates by user selection. More information about candidate tracking for recruitment will be released shortly
Two significant enhancements were delivered today for a major client
A fix was applied to recent document display with lazy loading lists (long lists which do not load all records initially for performance reasons delivered with our “harrier” release). Recently opened documents will appear at the top of the search list only if you did not sort the list by any particular column, otherwise the search list will be in that column’s order. Recently opened documnts also appear under the open/folder button and in the left panel recent documents widget or mini-app. You can also click on the search list column menu (accessed by clicking on any column heading) and select “Restore Default Sort” or “Sort by Recents” to remove column-specific sorts and put recently opened documents back to the top
A fix was applied to how dashboard measures with a formulae or based on other measures are aggregated
Employees and contacts are stored in two separate databases in iBE with employee contact information stored on the contact database. Custom fields for a resource until now could refer to an employee or to a contact, but other options to limit the list of resources coming (e.g. users, non-employees, teams and so on) were limited. We have created a new “field type” for custom fields called a “Resource Look-up” which allows you to configure what kind of resources to display in the drop-down list, and uses the same custom person drop-down list – showing name, job title, department, email and main phone number as well as each person’s photo – as iBE delivered person fields. Contact your iBE implementation or support consultant for more information on this or select field-type as “Resource Lookup” in your custom fields screen layout set
You can use iBE’s data import utility to create multiple objects at once for example importing customers and their associated contacts at the same time. Now you can create the primary object (e.g. contact) and update the secondary object (e.g. customer) at the same time
A fix to year end procedure and balances when accrual is set up “on last day of month” as opposed to on the first day of the month will be pushed up to production very shortly
We introduced a marvellous feature for clients with large teams using project templates today. While a project template allows you to predefine and then copy project by project the task structure and breakdown it is often difficult to assign resources to template tasks because it varies with each operative project depending on who is available. So clients have to assign resources individually to each task or to the project and select one of the “quick-add” resourcing options in the project RESOURCES tab such as assigning selected resources to all tasks. Now you can pre-assign a dynamic or field-based resource to your template task, by opening task > details and going to the RESOURCES tab in task detail and selecting a field name from your project in the “Automatically assign resources based on” field. For example if you instruct your template task to automatically assign resources based on the project leader then when the operative project and tasks are created from this template the project leader selected on the project header or key info. tab will be automatically assigned as a task resource. You can even refer to custom fields on the project to assign as a resource to the task (provided these fields refer to our contacts database or use a new resource lookup field type coming very shortly)
A fix was applied to customer invoices configured to automatically include expense receipts. Now if you email these invoices to a client from the more toolbar button “Send Invoice” menu item it will include expense receipts. Expense receipts are still not printed with proforma invoices
A new invoice layout or printed PDF form was developed which keeps track of the total amount funded or budgeted, amount previously billed and amount of budget remaining by task within a customer invoice project. This information of running total invoiced and remaining contract value by task is printed on the invoice before the line item detail. Contact your iBE support or implementation consultant if you want to make use of this invoice layout as an option
A fix was applied to clicking “Save & Back” from the save button menu to make it work the same as clicking on the Save button and then clicking browser back key
Mappings were fixed for analytics dashboard reporting for a number of fields including invoice department, product purchasing data, opportunity source and referral method
You can now make a claim for a cash advance or an advanced payment. While it is reimbursable and not normally billable – you record, approve and reimburse cash advances just like any other expense item such as hotels or flights. The difference is that when you fully reimburse the final claim with actual specifics, the value of the advance is not considered in the total amount to reimburse even though it is part of the amount previously paid to the employee or consultant. In other words iBE calculates the difference between the total claim amount (excl. the cash advance) and the cash advance
We added a number of additional fields to the employee bank information tab including benefactor (for accounts in the name of someone else such as a trust), forwarding or intermediary account (for accounts which your company cannot pay into directly but must pay via another bank) and percent of payroll (for employees who wish for a certain percent of their pay to be directed into one bank account and the rest of their pay to go to another account, perhaps in another country). Payroll is being enhanced to take this into account. There are also more user friendly options for creating new banks from the employee bank account screen in order to share bank details from one employee to the next
We delivered a significant enhancement today to allow you to:
Time and Pay Calculation was enhanced to support pay or compensation changes part way through a pay-cycle, considering for hourly compensation types the actual number of payable hours recorded up to and after the valid from date of a mid-cycle pay change. Only one mid-cycle pay adjustment is supported. In addition retro pay was refactored and completed. Retro-pay deals with the impact of making retrospective compensation changes which need to be applied to closed pay periods. When the retro-pay option is enabled by entering a date in “Process retro-pay changes from” pay is recalculated for all periods from this date and compared to employee payroll data. Any differences are added as retro-pay using retro-pay earnings codes in the current pay period. In background mode retro-pay calculations are triggered if compensation rates are changed for previously closed pay periods
A fix was applied to include file meta-data in global search. Access iBE’s global or elastic search by entering text in the search box in the top-right corner of your app
A number of fixes were applied to our Android app for timesheet capture including making our application more stable and resistant to unexpected crashes, making it easier for users to enter hours and automatic sync’ing of timesheet data to our web app when users back out of a timesheet
By default invoice items are sorted based on the summarization criteria for example if the invoice is summarized by task and then by resource then the items are in task text order and the sub-items are in resource name order. You can now choose in the billing method invoice item type set-up to sort by other attributes such as sorting by code or ID or by the creation date, so that earlier tasks are listed first and later tasks second in the invoice
A fix was applied to team calendar display of team absences
A number of small cosmetic enhancements were applied to iBE’s project mgt. app including allowing you to set project start later than project end (auto-pushing out project end date accordingly), allowing users to select a milestone service for pricing before entering the milestone description, defaulting the milestone description if blank to the service description, updating service rates on the MILESTONES tab without having to reload the project even when these rates were changed on the RATES tab and making column titles for percent completion more consistent between project vs. task
If you use multiple time types such as overtime or night shift premium it was necessary to blank out the time-type to revert back to standard. Now standard time appears in the list and selecting it blanks out the time type for you
An enhancement was applied to adhoc queries to remember grouping or sorting options from running a query or report one time to the next. A fix was also applied to deleting dashboards or queries
A fix was applied to some client logos not appearing in login screen. Contact us if you encounter this ever in future
You can define business rules which based on certain conditions being met can block updates, update in draft, send messages and update certain fields to take values from other fields. Now you can also define formulae in fields being updated from valid rules. For example you might calculate the number of committed hours based on the number of resources assigned or quantity delivered, or calculate a commission payment based on sales volume. The possibilities are really quite endless since you can now update any iBE delivered or custom field from a formula based on the values of any other fields including custom fields. Contact your iBE support consultant for more information
Customized workflow messages or workflow/approval emails can be set-up via Setup > Screen Layout > Message Texts, or by contacting your iBE support consultant. You can now include custom field values in workflow message texts as well as standard iBE fields
As well as showing planned and actual quantity in a fixed price or quantity base task detail (DATES / QTY / COST tab) we now display the quantity that has been previously billed. This gives you at a glance information on how much you can still expect to bill, as normally actual quantity minus previously billed. You can even manually edit the previously billed quantity to manually correct invoicing errors or invoicing done outside iBE. Recurring tasks – where the actual quantity is billed again and again from one period to the next – still display “Billed Up To” date instead. We are now working on an enhancement to show previously billed amount in timesheet admin
We enhanced our bill to and attn to fields in iBE’s customer invoice header to make it easier to display name/email but only print the bill to’s name on printed invoice PDF, while still allowing you to manually enter email addresses to send invoices to in case the bill to contact was not yet maintained. Now there are two fields in the invoice header
A new customer mgt. app was released today which loads significantly faster when you have hundreds or thousands of customers and prospects because it now uses a lazy or on-demand loading technique, only bringing up the first 50 or so customers and loading more when you scroll or search down the list. In addition we delivered the following enhancements:
Following on from our harrier-release of remote stores on Nov 20th we are pleased to announce a new leads & contacts app (with a new customer app to following shortly after) making use of on-demand or lazy loaded contact list and more:
An enhancement to desktop timer to allow start-stop timers for tasks where all resources are allowed to book time, even if user is not explicitly assigned as a resource
An enhancement to billing to consider task specific billing rates in addition to resource rate code or service specific rates. Now task can be used as one of the factors influencing pricing, as defined in the project mgt. app MILESTONES tab
Following an audit by Quickbooks we today completed our security related enhancements with a new feature to automatically lock users out of iBE if they get their password wrong six or more times in 24 hrs. Now instead of closing and re-opening the browser if you get your password wrong six or more times in a row you are locked out of iBE.net for the next 24 hours, unless you contact your system administrator or iBE support consultant to request a speedier unlock. We will be making it easier to unlock users locked in this way in the near future
We are pleased to announce that iBE.net is now listed as an official add-on app for Quickbooks in their app store. Go to this link for more information
A fix was applied to dragging and dropping files or receipts using Windows
The iBE delivered or hard-coded expense claim type was replaced in our iPhone and Android phone apps with a system defined expense claim type including now an option to select a specific claim type for an individual resource. For example contractors or managers or buyers might wish to use a different claim type by default
The expense mileage rate per mile can now be expressed in three decimals not two to allow for current USA Govt. recommended rate of 57.5 cents/mile. While the rate per mile now allows three decimals the resulting total for the expense claim item and so on is still rounded to 2 decimals or to the nearest cent
We configured a new activity and menu item called “Vendor Bills” under a new menu called “Finance”. This is the start of increased finance support including future developments for purchasing and asset management as well as tighter integration with more accounting systems. You won’t find “expense admin” under hr anymore, unless you have a customized role-based menu both expense admin and vendor bills are under a new “Finance” menu. Vendor bills work the same as expense claims except that the supplier is at claim or invoice header level not item level and instead of recording the employee on a travel expense, you enter the buyer. Vendor bills are of course company paid and therefore non-reimbursable, plus they normally have a different approval workflow assigned, but they are classified and invoiced to clients the same as travel expenses
The popup asking users to save changes even if nothing was edited, because tasks assigned to the employee are being automatically pulled into their timesheet, was fixed today
A fix to reducing available time-off balance in the correct year was applied specifically for cases where a request was raised in one vacation year and approved in the next vacation year
A fix was applied to the screen where you can customize your own priority codes. You can define a priority code, name and sequence to ensure the highest priorities appear first
A major enhancement code-named “harrier” was released to production today to improve performance. Instead of loading a search list in full – a process which can take 30 seconds or longer with hundreds or thousands of projects, customers or contacts – we only load the first 50 records or so. This is way faster to initially open the app and requires the next set of records to load automatically as you scroll down. This is called “infinite scrolling”. We also had to take care of filters (filtering results not based on the 50 records in view but on the entire database), sorting (sorting not just the 50 records in view but the entire database) and search, not to mention download to excel, grouping and display of recently opened documents. You can move a “performance slider bar” in user preferences by clicking on your photo or initials and then clicking on “advanced settings” in the popup. All in all this is the culmination of four months effort and while the difference is not immediately visible, it will go a long way to positioning iBE for larger clients and to address client concerns about performance
If you modify columns widths in a pivot or cross-tab in iBE’s dashboards this is now saved and re-applied next time you run the same report. This is consistent and already supported in multi-column tables for iBE analytics dashboards
As opposed to setting the default start and end dates as last week, as would be the case for clients submitting weekly timesheets, we now look at the client’s customized timesheet period first. If for example that company submits monthly timesheets then the default start and dates will be for last month and not last week
An enhancement to pay calculation was delivered today to consider task specific rates of pay and not just the employee’s basic compensation or standard cost. Task specific rates of pay are maintained in the employee’s COMPENSATION tab after checking the compensation details box and making sure that the columns for project and task are made visible in the compensation details table below
You can upload an employee’s signature from the employee details screen by clicking on the “Upload Signature” menu item under the more toolbar button. Select a jpg or png scan of your or the employee’s signature to upload it. This is in turn used when printing an invoice with the billing administrator or client delivery project manager’s signature on it
A fix was applied to display $0 invoices in the list invoices report
If you mark an item as “do not bill” in the customer billing preparation screen the bill quantity and $ are cleared and the item is marked as “do not bill” which means it will come up next time you run billing. If on the other hand you change the quantity to zero it will now marked at “fully billed” with zero quantity and $ which means you do not want to bill it now or later. You can also modify the quantity to bill and then mark the item as “fully billed” to avoid it being picked up again in a future invoice
You can manually add items even to an auto-generated invoice. Tax is now calculated correctly on manually added items based on the product or service assigned
We delivered some months back a new feature to automatically generate a project when an opportunity was closed, or based on one of the opportunity sales stages or workflow steps. We enhanced this further to create the project from a template where the template project or task-list may be assigned to either the opportunity type (in settings) or the primary product or service of that opportunity (in the product/service catalog). Today we are further enhancing this feature to:
The expense claim item detail view has been enhanced to display data imported from your bank or credit card including the transaction data, credit card description (which also defaults to the claim item text but you can over-write it) and the merchant and bank transaction category
A set-up screen for expense claim types was created to allow you to create multiple claim types for example travel expenses vs. vendor bills and to control expense report behavior such as non-reimbursible, single vendor, approval workflow and claim numbering
Various enhancements and fixes were applied this week to the T&A or missing time report including defaulting the from/to dates based on the user’s previous timesheet period, display of error icons and messages for abnormal attendance, sending missing time reminders from periodic totals, expand/collapse all groups, and corrections to manual editing of individual time clocks or attendance records from the main report
Following a security audit by Intuit as part of our certification as an approved Quickbooks Online add-on we made the following security enhancements to iBE.net
A fix was applied for Russian VAT tax and reporting of tax in the customer invoice summary when tax rates are maintained directly in the pricing or calculation sheet
You can customize your own timesheet period in iBE either weekly (starting on any day of the week) or a custom period such as two weeks, monthly, weekly with splits at month-end for billing or bi-monthly (1-15, 16 to last day of month). If you modify the timesheet period configured against a work-schedule, or change the work-schedule an employee or contractor is assigned after some timesheets have been created iBE now scans the current active timesheet period to see if there are any pre-existing timesheets overlapping the current period, and automatically cuts short or trims down the current timesheet period to avoid any timesheets overlapping with each other. This means you can modify work schedules or timesheet period definitions after entering timesheets in the system without worrying about a conflict between new and old timesheet data
A number of new fields including country were added to the employee search list as hidden columns and/or as filters
Our revenue and cost calculations in both project and task and the Time & Expense list report were both enhanced to consider task specific compensation rates. Billing is being enhanced to consider task-specific billing rates next
The “<“ icon in top left was replaced with a “DONE” button in our iPhone and Android applications for timesheets, timers and time-off requests. This update was based on customer feedback where users expected phone data to sync with the web without backing out of the current timesheet. The DONE button indicates it must be clicked to save the document, even though functionally it does the same as clicking the back arrow, that is to sync the object with our back-end web server and return to the prior screen
We recently enhanced from-to date slicers or filters in an analytics dashboard to work with more than one date dimension at the same time, particularly useful when the dashboard is bringing together date-based transaction data from multiple tables such as time and time-off. Today we further enhanced the date slicer to allow AND (both dates must be between the from-to date range selected) and OR (either date must be between the from-to date range) conditions
A fix was applied to the display of files from the tags widget. You can display any document from the tags widget on left-side provided that the document is tagged accordingly
Billing remark and department was added to the analytics dashboard reporting table
A new formula for “elapsed time” was introduced into our analytics dashboards allowing the report to automatically calculate the elapsed time in work hours between from/to dates in the date slicer. This formula can now be used for example to dynamically calculate utilization as total billable hours between from/to dates divided by elapsed time
A fix was applied to consider probation before allowing time-off. You can specify how many months service are required before time-off requests are permitted by time-off type
The send invoice menu option from the customer invoice “more” button menu was upgraded today with:
The task reminder feature was enhanced to allow quick selection of standard reminders from the task list in a project or my tasks in addition to the definition of a custom reminder based on user input of reminder frequency pattern e.g. every two weeks, every month on 10th and 20th or every day at 10 am
An enhancement to pay calculation for additive time types was completed today. When an added time ratio overtime rule is processed instead of converting timesheet hours to that specific time type, time is added. This is used for example for training preparation time where only classroom hours are recorded in the timesheet and preparation time is automatically added
A column to display the equivalent T&M revenue even on a fixed price task was added to the Time & Expenses list report
Reimbursement or payment of expenses was enhanced by adding a list of payments to each expense instead of a single field for total amount paid
The popup to classify expenses was enhanced to bring it in line with timesheet classification, only loading applicable tasks on demand and considering “all resources” checkbox in task > details > resources tab
A number of enhancements to the expenses supplier were delivered today including a quick-add option to create new suppliers from within the expense claim
Based on customer feedback we moved the link and delink buttons in files or receipts popup toolbar to the left to be next to the button to upload a new file or receipt
“Birthday Within” was added to the employee filters so that only employees with upcoming birthdays within a specified period of time from today are displayed
You can now create custom or client-specific help texts, if required on an app by app basis, and link these custom help texts to a specific activity. Contact your iBE support or implementation consultant for information on how to do this and for help creating custom help documentation
The sender for data change notifications sent to concurrent users was changed from iBE system to the user causing the data change notification in the first place
A couple of enhancements were applied to expense suppliers including the option to combine supplier lists which come pre-delivered in the iBE application with suppliers you or your employees create as they claim expenses. We added a checkbox in supplier type screen to indicate if suppliers of this type can be included in expense claims. The other use for suppliers is in our upcoming purchasing module. At the same time some fixes were applied to the option to require an expense claim or report to be classified to a single customer or project and to the deletion of receipts
A fix to attaching or taking photos of receipts using your iOS phone was approved by Apple yesterday and is now available to update your iBE mobile app. You could always take photos of receipts in your phone and sync these as receipts back to receipts in iBE and then link them to an existing claim in our web-application. Now you can also take photos of receipts and create a claim from your phone and sync the entire claim, with receipts, to our web-application. Just don’t forget to back out of the expense claim item screen on your phone to trigger its sync back to our servers
Credit memos are now printed more clearly in the pre-configured invoice printed output with “CREDIT” printed in the invoice header
A number of enhancements were applied to how files are uploaded and documents such as expense claims linked to existing (uploaded) files or receipts. This includes auto-selection of a file if there is only one attached, allowing thumbnail images of existing files to be linked to be zoomed or scaled and cosmetic improvements to the files toolbar. We will soon roll out an enhancement to memorize a file’s rotation and zoom since last adjusted or looked at by any user
A new feature was rolled out this week to allow you to check out files. If you download, modify and then replace a file – something which has been available for this past year – someone else might modify the same file at the same time. Using our optional Check-out feature the file becomes locked, so that other users can download or preview but not replace the file, until you check the new version back-in. You can also see who has checked a file out
Some improvements were rolled out this week to our missing time report, the report used to check daily hours planned, clocked, recorded in a timesheet or taken as time-off for your team. The from-to dates now default to the last closed timesheet period with the option to modify these dates and recall them next time you run the report relative to today. A fix was also applied to grouping of rows by week, month or payroll period and a new column was added to highlight typical issues encountered with a team member’s time or attendance such as:
We added a calculation of “Equivalent T&M revenue” for time booked to fixed price tasks in a timesheet, based on reading the employee’s hours multiplied by their billing rate code, either the standard rate or a project-specific one if it was maintained. Now you can maintain billing rates (or use your company rates) for fixed price projects and report on “Consultant Profitability” or produce a P&L by consultant. We will be further enhancing this in the near future to reduce hourly rates by pay cycle to account for unpaid overtime and to report the same in analytics dashboards
You may have noticed iBE now says “Bye” when you log out. iBE.net might be a software program but it is writen lovingly by humans
Custom fields were introduced six months ago to allow you to store and recall any information which is not part of our typical data model. You can now create custom fields which display existing information or fields projected onto another screen. Think of it like a report or query running inside the custom tab or field-set, pulling data from an object linked to the document you have open. We also added our address panel (with mapping feature) as a possible custom field type to complement our existing custom fields (date, text, number, percent, quantity-unit, value-amount, duration, text, email, lookup text, look up list and so on). At the same time, an issue causing custom fields not to save or to save and not display was fixed
The user preferences summary screen was tidied up somewhat, with a new link in the user prefereces summary to clear the cache in case of any out of date files or table layouts you want to clear. Locations are now “lazy-loaded” or loaded from our server on demand to improve performance
One of the widgets in the left panel is a quick-add. Select the document you want to create e.g. customer, project, task, timesheet and click on the + button. You can now select the document type at the same time
You can now include files or attachments with automated workflow messages. Contact your iBE support consultant to customize the workflow message to your needs
Whenever contacts or customers are updated iBE now syncs the company-contact data and links between the person and company objects both ways. This allows you to, for example, upload customers and their contacts from an imported file without having to be concerned about uploading the links between these two objects
We moved the calculation of opportunity probability of closure by comparing stage min/max/default probability to the current value, from the browser to our server. This means that any way you update an opportunity, whether from our web-app, mobile, mail, API or file, will calculate the default probability properly based on the assigned sales stage
A fix to how timesheet minimum booking increments, rounding and total hours calculation was applied
We made some improvements in how iBE is displayed in IE10 and 11
As part of our program to get Quickbooks certification and premium placement in their app-store, we delivered OpenID authentication and login to iBE.net using your Quickbooks Online account. There is a new “Intuit” button in our login panel, clicking on which logs you into iBE using your connected Quickbooks Account credentials
We added information for mobile phone users to our audit trail, such as device ID. This will help us in future trouble-shooting
Several enhancements to how you manage unclaimed or imported bank transactions from your bank or credit card were delivered today including:
Some cosmetic improvements were applied to the set-up and on-going maintenance of billing rate codes
You can adjust filters, such as employees to show missing time for; columns to display, such as time booked, time off or missing time; sort and totals. We fixed a problem with saving these filters & layouts so you can now save the report layout and share it with others (admin users only)
A significant enhancement was also promoted to production for our missing time report for employees who work shifts or work-schedules with defined start and stop times. Instead of calculating holidays and standard work-hours per day from the company holiday calendar, for employees and contractors with work-shifts we now calculate standard working hours based on the definition of each shift. This allows working hours to potentially vary in length from one day to next as well as from employee to employee. We also mark days with no work-shift as off days instead of company holidays. Finally we applied an enhancement not to show “missing time” if the employee’s time capture method is for time-off and overtime only, and to display the work-schedule name not code in this report
A couple of fixes were applied to our template task lists including logic to automate start/finish dates for tasks included from a template as well as defaulting rules for assigned or responsible person
We made hire date optional unless you are running time-off or payroll out of iBE.net. We also added an option to assign a specific expense claim type to a subset of your employees, allowing you to for example have some users record travel and living expenses and another group (buyers) record vendor bills. Or have partner expense claims follow different workflow approvals to other employees
Go to https://app.ibe.net/index.html?activityid=measurecontrol.busanalytics.dashboardruntime&docid=532A9356E4B07C877B022492&client=470&id=setupd&hidemenu=true to access our interactive dashboard allowing you to navigate through a range of pre-canned consulting industry reports. We have worked hard to add realistic data to these dashboards so that you can “try before you buy”
You can now limit which iBE apps your users can access on their mobile phones. By assigning mobile phone activities to installed components and user roles, the iOS / Android phone landing page will now grey out unauthorized or inactive apps. So if you do not use time-off or expenses your users won’t be able to access these apps on their phones
Some small enhancements were applied to our customer invoice list including allowing authorized users to update invoice status and send invoices to customer right from the overview page, as well as autolinking of real invoices to outstanding proforma invoices where possible. A fix to invoice item numbers was also applied when the configured item interval is 1, instead of 10, 11, 12 we number invoice items now as 1, 2, 3 …
Previously you could control whether employees book their time to a department, project/task or both. Now you can also restrict the departments which can be added to a timesheet by checking a field called “Single Department” in the employee compensation tab to stop the employee from booking time to any other department
We applied a fix to how time is calculated for night-shift employees clocking in and then forgetting to clock out. Rather than assuming a clocking event on the next day is the start of a new shift, for employees with defined shift start and stop times including over-night or night shift workers we detect if the next clocking action is closer to the start of the new shift – in which case we assume they are clocking in – or to the end of the old shift, in which case a clock-out event is adopted. For example someone working 10 pm to 6 am who forgets to clock-out at 6 am and clocks again at 8 pm will be detected as clocking in for the new shift whereas if they clocked at 10 am earlier the same day it would be assumed as clocking out from the earlier shift. Break hours are now deducted for work-schedules where you want to automatically deduct breaks only if the total time worked exceeds a new configuration settings called “minimum hours before deduction of breaks”
Some fixes were applied to our work-assignment tab in edit mode, allowing admins to assign projects and tasks to employees without having to open up each project one by one. We fixed the search for tasks within a project and added a feature to select and add multiple tasks at the same time
A few weeks ago we introduced the concept of rolling up progress through a task hierarchy, allowing you to for example plan resources, hours and budgets on a task-list or project and then aggregate actuals from sub-tasks calculating the % complete, earned value and earned revenue on the parent task as actual hours rolled up / planned hours on parent task. We now further extend this concept by closing sub-tasks automatically when a parent task is closed, rescheduling sub-tasks in line with changes to parent task dates (if scheduling method is “down” that is) as well as fixing a bug where deletion of the parent task was not deleting all of its sub-tasks
As opposed to planned values representing a single baseline vs. forecast values being the up to date plan we introduced a feature to allow you to take a snapshot or baseline copy of the project’s plans, progress and financials at any time in the project’s life-cycle. You can create multiple baselines and compare or calculate variances between current and baseline data for a project. Subject to customer demand we intend to further enhance this in the future to support copying of baseline data back to the active project planning data
Today we are pleased to annouce a major upgrade to our project financials. We have rebuilt the static “form” into a table or grid allowing you to expand and collapse rows, show and hide columns and even rename columns to suit your own terminology. We now present the project financials based on the following information in columns for actuals to date, remaining, forecast (actual + remaining), base plan and any number of baselines and variances between:
We added fields for project long text, comments and project leader to our invoice print-out. We also allow you to automatically retrieve and print signature images from either the project leader or customer account manager, depending on how your invoice print-out is configured
A number of improvements were made to our pipeline or opportunities today including
We added a suffix “days” or “hours” after the display of each time-off type in the employee time-off tab, to better delineate between daily vs. hourly time-off rules. You may remember that we recently rolled out a major enhancement for hourly time-off types for part-time staff based on their actual hours recorded from month to month
Some fixes were applied to layouts in Firefox and using files or attachments with IE11
Emails sent from iBE.net and forms or invoices printed out when in “test mode” now feature the words “Test Mode” clearly in the email subject or printed form header. You can log into iBE.net in test mode at any time to create data which you won’t see in normal mode, either prior to going live with iBE.net or for training or testing purposes
Up until now you can specify the maximum allowed days to carry forwards as well as a deadline or timeframe to use up any carried-forwards days. When you request vacation before this deadline carried forward days are always consumed first. Now we have introduced a “carry forwards ratio” on request from one client, so you can for example carry forward 50% of the employee’s current balance at the end of your vacation year. Years of service for calculation of varying entitlements is now based on start date + minimum service period required before accruing vacation (typically probation time)
As well as capturing any time booked to a different department to the employee’s home department to feed to payroll, we now capture time booked to a project assigned to a department other than an employee’s home department. So if employees are borrowed to work on projects in another department their pay file will note this
Some fixes to business rules were pushed up to production including fixes to how our list of “rule operators” vary according to field type (e.g. equals, <, > for numbers; contains, starts with for texts and equals, before, after for dates). A fix to “any criteria must be met” vs. “all criteria must be met” was also applied
An improvement to drilling down to iBE to open a timesheet, expense etc. from a workflow or approval email means that when you drill down you either open time or expense admin which often allows you to edit submitted timesheets, if you have authorization for that activity, or you open my time or my expenses if not authorized. We also shortened the URL when clicking on “approve” or “reject” links right from your workflow email to make it more compatible with different versions of MS Outlook which truncates longer URLs. We also tweaked some of the status column tooltips particularly in timesheet or expense claim list when workflow is being managed on timesheet or expense claim classification / project level
Filters for stage and service (product) were added to our opportunities dashboard, as well as a widget or graph showing potential or factored deal value by close date, aggregated into weeks or months
In the project resources page you can select one or more project resources and click in the “Quick-add Resources to Task” link in the resource table toolbar to get a menu of options to assign selected resources to all tasks, all resources to all tasks or all employees to all tasks. Mass resource assignment to task was moved to the background on our servers so that assigning a number of resources to a number of tasks – and corresponding calculations of utilization, planned efforts, costs and revenues, does not slow down your browser
Instead of having to insert a “shout out” by typing @ followed by selecting the desired recipient’s name in a comment to get it emailed, we introduce a new checkbox on task type to automatically email new comments or the ticket long text to whoever requested the ticket automatically
You can now add rows to editable tables everywhere by simply pressing ENTER or RETURN button on the last row
A fix was applied to generation of work-shifts or defined work start/stop times over summer time zone changes
We completed an enhancement to allow tasks to be marked as for “all resources” without having to assign each employee individually. New hires are automatically able to book time to this task, very useful for general tasks such as company meetings or training development. We enabled this new “all resources” flag to be considered in our timesheet, expense claim, desktop timer and mobile phone apps
Validation of time entered via iPhone was enhanced to consider timesheet type settings for checking location, comments and hours, same as how our timesheet web application works already. A fix was applied when selecting location from time entry screen of iOS apps
The option to enter a workflow delegation was added to our Groups app as well as currently in iBE.net’s time-off request app
Some improvements were applied to manual adjustment of invoices including corrections to roll-up of sub-item quantities and amounts to invoice item level if sub-items are deleted, added or updated. You can also now manually edit invoice items which were created automatically from time or expense data or fixed price task milestones. Any updates to such auto-generated invoice lines will not impact or update the underlying source data
Service tax codes and rates for India were updated
Our mobile data read code was merged into our web application data read so that both are now based on the same utilities which include a full authorization check on the user’s authorizations, as well as blocking out private data from the wrong users
Our new “guided form” or wizard-style application to install and set-up the iBE apps is proving very popular with new clients signing up, as well as making it quicker and easier to do implementation / set-up calls. While this app. does not cover everything you can customize in iBE, it covers the key things you need to do initially in a guided format. A bug where users were being asked to save changes on leaving this application was fixed
Three minor cosmetic fixes were applied to the payment terms setting screen
The parent task is now populated with the task description on any tasks which are not in any kind of task hierarchy, so that summarized reporting on, for example, parent task description, picks up both sub-tasks and stand-alone tasks not in a hierarchy. To properly report on parent task we need to regenerate your analytics data for you, something we have done for several clients. Please contact us immediately if you report on parent task and require us to regenerate this information
A fix was applied to ensure that zero value or free of charge invoices are displayed like normal invoices in the invoice list
A missing file type (or “mime-type”) for a specific kind of PDF document was added today, allowing users to properly print these kinds of receipts in expense claim or invoice prints which include printing of receipts
Yet more layout fixes for Firefox browser users was applied. We are now pretty good in Chrome (recommended), Safari and Firefox. Only IE10/11 are still a little behind in being brought up to date and in optimizing performance
We now store and allow you to view detailed execution messages from the last few executions of a data import/export or of a background job. You can specify in the job definition how many history records you wish to maintain (default = 5); and you can access historical job history data by selecting the historical run date/time from the menu list coming when clicking on the “view last run” icon
Under the task details RESOURCES tab you or any authorized project lead can view people’s timesheet data classified to that particular project and task. This can be viewed by resource & task or in a separate report across multiple resources, tasks or projects for a given date range. We have now enhanced the task RESOURCES tab to show open or un-transferred TIMERS as well as time-sheets, to give project leaders a sense of what is coming (when timers are transferred into the latest timesheet) as well as what might have been missed the first time
A few minor fixes to attendance clocking via a ZK Technology clocking device were applied today including a fix to picking up the device’s time-zone, an enhancement to the decision logic when two unspecified clocks are received in sequence and fixes to how error situations such as attendance clock not having a user in iBE or the employee not having a home department. The ZK Technology attendance devices we use have the option to specify the event type (IN, OUT, OUT TO BREAK, IN FROM BREAK) or not. When the event types are unspecified or in the wrong sequence – for example a clock IN followed by another clock IN for the same employee – we assume the second clock is in fact a clock OUT unless the second clock is on the next day. We have enhanced this decision logic to handle local time-zones and over-night work-shifts so that someone clocking IN for their night shift at 10 pm and then accidentally clocking IN again when it is time to go home at 6 am will be treated as a clock OUT not as a new day or new shift
A fix was applied today to the generation of work shifts with defined shift patterns and start/stop times going over the start or end of summer-time for a particular time-zone. Now shifts will start and end at the same (local) time in normal and daylight savings time both, as opposed to shifts starting at the same (GMT) time
We enhanced our ACTIVITIES tab in our contact, opportunity and customer apps to show the total count of open tasks in the tab label so that users can see if there are any open tasks before deciding whether they need to click on that tab to view the list of open tasks, or not
Up until now any project or task relevant to resource planning calculated planned effort by default as task duration multiplied by task resource utilization factor. This is fine for clients who generally check and maintain planned efforts by task. Clients who do not can turn off resource planning and not plan task resources at all. However several clients who do not wish to default the calculation of planned effort have asked to use our resource planning tool, so we made an enhancement today to allow you to make planned efforts when maintained by a planner relevant to the resource planning tool but not to calculate planned effort by default. You do this by turning on planning & utilization in your project type and turning it off in your task type setting
We recently enhanced our project > task > resources tab to allow the option of selecting “all resources” for a task instead of individually assigning resources. This avoids you having to add new hires to a myriad of standard projects and tasks, rather “all resources” means all employees and contractors in your company. It is also beneficial for performance as the number of resources explicitly listed on each task is now limited to who has actually booked time as opposed to all your employees or contractors. This enhancement has now been rolled out to time-sheets, allowing anyone to book time to a task marked up in this way. The same enhancement will shortly be rolled out to expenses and to our mobile timesheet apps and desktop timer. At the same time a filter of time-sheets by status was added to the time administration search screen
We inform you whenever you run billing if there is unapproved T&E in the past, just in case you missed it by mistake. Some clients complained because they are billing late so their billing dates are also in the past. We therefore enhanced this check to give a more meaningful message and only to bring the message when there is unapproved T&E prior to the billing “from” date
A fix was applied to the processing of emailed receipts and to the security or privacy settings for receipts in general. Receipts (the attachment type for receipts) are “semi-private” meaning that no-one other than the person who uploaded the receipt and people authorized to open / approve their expense claim in expense admin mode can see someone’s receipts. We are still working on improvements to the handling of receipts emailed to receipts@ibe.net with embedded images as opposed to attachments
Since we now show resource cost (from employee master standard cost rate) as a separate hide-able column in the project > RESOURCES tab, we decided to remove the cost display from the billing rate code mouse-over tooltip. You can of course define authorization profiles based on job roles to make any table column (such as cost rate) hidden to specific users
We enhanced our workflow messages to allow in task related workflows the display of parent or superior task-list. You now have many choices of fields you can embed inside a message including a toolbar button to include an HTML table and special keyboard characters “?” to bring up the list of tables or classes to search for fields in and “-“ after the table or class name to get the list of fields to insert. Contact your iBE support or implementation consultant for assistance in configuring appropriate workflow messages
The From/To Date Slicer in our analytics dashboards allows you to quickly filter or slice a dashboard only reporting on transactions between a “from” and “to date”. We earlier made enhancements to this from/to date slicer around default dates and flexible widget size. From today in the designer mode you can check a box called “Relative dates” which changes the from/to date slicer to a selection list of “last year”, “last month”, “last week”, “yesterday”, “this year”, “this month”, “this week”, “today”, “tomorrow”, “next week” etc. While the relative date is recorded and defaulted next time, the actual data in the report of course is based on the calculated dates for example “this month” means 1st to end of the current month when the report is being run
We introduced today a trend widget to our analytics dashboard, using a combination of color (red vs. green), text (key metric value and description), % change and arrow (up/down trend) to show key metrics and how they are changing over time. You can define in the dashboard designer whether “up” (increasing trend value) is good/green or bad/red. We will introduce target measures and planning values in the near future
You can insert a list of tasks from a template within or inside an existing project by selecting more > insert task list from the project > TASKS table toolbar “more” menu. This makes a copy of the tasks from the selected template after the point where you opted to insert. Some enhancements were made today to the way inserted tasks from a template are sorted. Now if the template was previously sorted by SEQUENCE (the task code which increments for each level in the task hierarchy e.g. 1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.2.1 etc., rather like MS Project) and the new project is also sorted by sequence, then the template tasks are inserted in sequence order with task codes based on the point where they were inserted. If the new project is sorted by something else for example date or task description then the template tasks are sorted instead by date or description (the same as new project) while of course keeping any task hierarchies intact with the same child tasks under the same superior or parent task-list
We are pleased to announce that we completed our Java 6 to 8 upgrade across all our application servers. This makes our application servers more robust. We apologize for a temporary downtime this weekend due to monitoring being disabled during the upgrade and the application of Murphy’s law resulting in both servers going down when monitoring was disabled!
One or two clients are marking up different expense types or categories on the same project by different amounts, for example living might be marked up 10% and travel 5%, or some vendor bills marked up 15% and some 10%. Instead of a single mark-up for the whole project we now allow you to mark up each expense type separately
Employees requesting vacation etc. in a future year normally do not have a balance for that year, because the balance is not carried forwards until the end of the year. For this reason the available balance is the maximum carry forwards allowance as defined in the time-off type, for example five days. But we discovered some clients are maintaining balances in future vacation years specifically to over-ride the standard carry forwards policy on a case by case basis. So vacation requests especially made at the end of the year around the Christmas and New Year holidays were not accurately reflecting the true carried forward balance. We therefore enhanced our future year time-off request balance check to consider actual carry forward balances when available on an employee-by-employee basis, and the standard / maximum carry forwards amount per the time-off type only when actual balances are not available
We have always informed you when a resource is assigned in parallel to another task as the one you are currently assigning them to, and when a resource does not have sufficient hours in the day left to complete their assigned task from today until the planned end date. While these messages are “logical” they make less sense when, for example, no-one is maintaining planned efforts for a task. Now we show resource overload through display of remaining effort or utilization in red font with the descriptive message as a mouse-over tooltip rather than a message. You can see resource overloads as before in the task > RESOURCES tab. We also deployed a fix to display of superior / parent task-list in task details GENERAL tab
The holiday calendar in iPhone was determined from the company default holiday calendar. Now it has been enhanced to check first for any holiday calendar assigned to the employee’s work-schedule, thus allowing different groups of people in the same company to have different holiday calendars sync’d down the time-sheets on their mobile phones
An issue with downloading our dashboard pivot table or cross-tab into Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2013 was fixed. Dashboards with a “,” in the title will no longer cause any issues. Also a minor cosmetic issue with from/to date slicer was fixed. We are now working on a relative date option e.g. “this week” or “last month”
An issue with updating custom fields especially ones in the employee master which were not saving correctly has been fixed. You can assign custom fields to any tab in any object and even create custom tabs or re-order and relabel the existing tabs
We originally made the ticket requester a required field in the ticket console. This is now optional because the ticket portal is being used for more than just helpdesk tickets!
We now allow you to include comments and other fields in task workflow messages. Contact your iBE support consultant for information on how to configure custom or specific workflow email messages including timesheet hours by day or other properties from the document workflow is about
You can now force users to enter time in minimum increments of say 12 or 15 minutes, irrespective of when time is being recorded
The employee billing rate code and billable hours / utilization targets have been moved from the COMPENSATION to the JOB DATA tab, because this information is more useful under JOB DATA and it is fairly common now to hide the compensation tab but not hide the billing rate code
Deleted contacts or leads should now appear in the deleted items list, of the lead/contact application
We now allow admin users to edit their own compensation, unless the payroll module is installed meaning that employee compensation stores specify payroll details and should not be updated carelessly. There is also a minor fix to the phone number validation
Quickbooks Online requires the job code to be of a certain length and not contain special characters. To avoid issues in the interface we now perform these checks – as warnings only – within the iBE Project Mgt. module as well as in the QB Online mapping run
While project financials such as cost, revenue and progress are automatically updated whenever a project is changed we provided a menu option “Update Financials” based on various client requests. Selecting this option forces the system to update the project costs, revenues, margins and amounts ready to bill ensuring that this information is bang up to date
When the “classify all” option is selected – now organized as a menu in the expense claim application with classify single and selected – existing claim items were not previously reclassified. But they need to be reclassified in case the expense type requires all items to be classified to the same project. So we added a checkbox to reclassify existing items at the same time as indicating that unclassified and new items are assigned to the same project
The task type can be configured such that actual quantity which is billed on a recurring basis is reset each month after billing is run so that it has to be entered fresh
You can now configure a regular background job to run and create invoices. Contact you iBE support rep. for help on setting this up
Various enhancements were applied to the custom fields properties panel including the option to customize table or grid column labels
A fix was applied to reading and sending source doc. address information when that address is stored centrally under Locations (because user checked “re-use in future” to make it shared)
A fix was applied to revert remaining funds on a customer purchase order back up again, if an invoice is deleted. Amounts previously paid are also checked when deleting an invoice
Some clients experienced time-outs during billing for large invoices (in excess of $300k in one invoice). To avoid this we now provide an option to create invoices in the background – either from the billing button menu (bill in background & bill in background proforma) or by displaying a new column in the billing summary for “bill now” including in the background
A fix in usability was applied to how reasons for loss are recorded in opportunities. A reason for loss is important to differentiate between lost and not lost but zero % probability opportunities
The iPhone and Android time entry apps were enhanced over the last week or two with:
Users can now create a linked document from within a timesheet and display the list of linked documents from the toolbar menu (“more” button). Time item type or overtime code was also added to the timesheet detail screen
A fix to tax data was applied to our database analytics tool
Very many client-specific invoice layouts were delivered during June and July. While we won’t go into the details of each client specific layout the enhancements to invoice printing which made their way back into the core platform are as follows:
The billing message warning users about time or expenses which are still ready to bill but prior to the from date selected for billing has been improved. The message should now be self-evident
Previously billed hours for a timesheet can now be seen in the timesheet weekly overview (GENERAL details tab) with the single row for summary totals now in two rows to give six summary metrics (total, billable T&M, billable fixed, overtime, time-off and previously billed)
A new option to show tickets created by the current user was added to the tickets console
Up until now you could configure a mapping exporting data out of the iBE to only send data once – never resend – or to send everything every time based on the filter rule even if not changed. Now you have a third option, to send data which is new or which has been modified in iBE.net since when the last mapping ran
A number of enhancements to expense receipts went live today and over the last few days, as follows:
Some cosmetic enhancements were applied today as follows:
A fix was applied to the employee work assignments tab to filter the list of tasks which can be assigned based on the selected project. Load time for employee admin was also improved for companies with many employees but only querying back from our server employees with the selected line manager or department
A new value for the ETC calculation strategy now assigned to the progress method allows tasks to be auto-closed if actual effort in timesheet > planned effort for task
In time admin mode authorized users can now directly assign employees to new task from within the timesheet. Check out the “Assign to Task” option in the sub-title bar above the time-sheet, allowing the user to select a task and assign the current employee accordingly
Loading masks were improved based on the animations which were available
The “manage teams” menu label was changed to “Manage Groups” to avoid confusion with my team selections in most apps denoting people who report to me
Workflow owners or recipients can now be assigned in a workflow template from any field in the document workflow is for, or on a joined document, which refers to a person. This also includes custom fields referring to the person’s contact. For example in a timesheet workflow if you add a custom field to the project or task referenced in the timesheet for client delivery manager, QA lead or mentor then the value in this custom field can be a workflow owner
Modification of “Name” of opportunity to “Opportunity Name” and “Lead” to “Lead / Contact” to avoid users thinking they should enter contact name in opportunity name
Columns for comments and files (both as icons) were added to the Project List or Search view. You can also filter projects by department
Five enhancements to our time and expense list (T&E list) report
A variety of minor cosmetic enhancements apply to our timesheet:
A field for parent task, including the option to select task to book timers to based on parent or task-list, was added to our Chrome plug-in desktop timer. Timers are automatically imported into the timesheet when it is opened, or users can click not the “transfer” icon within each timer row
Expense claim or report date and overall description/remark has been added to our analytics database for dashboard reporting
A label for each entry in a series was added to grouped bar-charts. Pivot or cross-tabs can also be expanded or collapsed by default for new users
An issue with displaying invoices in customer portal was fixed
Permission to open opportunities is a sensitive topic with each client having unique requirements. We deliver a solution today based on each opportunity listing who can access it in read/update/admin mode, defaulting to the person who created the opportunity, the opportunity sales rep., their managers and their managers’ managers
To make it easier to upload contacts from a file we now accept a single preferred email or phone number as opposed to a list of contact addresses or numbers by comms label
A fix was made to applying the preferred or default project > task list or table layout. Table or list layouts can be saved with filter, sort and grouping options using the grid layout menu (setting gear cog icon in top right corner)
A paid/not-paid “stamp” is displayed in the top right corner of expense claims, similar to how it is shown in customer invoice
The look and style of our login panel was improved and made more consistent with our desktop timer login panel
We added an option to display comment published date as a date, rather than as “two days ago” and so on
A new range of cross browser mostly IE9/10 and Firefox issues were fixed today
Some small cosmetic enhancements to customer invoice print went into production today including an option by company set-up to display all amounts as $10 instead of 10 USD and so on
You can now edit billing remarks for auto-generated invoice items as well as for invoice sub-items. Timesheet entries with no remarks will not copy any text into the billing invoice remark. A fix for reading product or service tax codes with multiple companies was also applied today
Up until now if you selected to bill a certain project from say June 1 to June 31, all expenses incurred during June regardless of when the claim was submitted would be included. But expenses submitted late (and don’t we all do that!) may not get picked up because if the expense claim is filed later on in July the June 1-31 period might have already been processed. Now you can filter expense claims for invoicing by expense claim date, representing the date the entire claim was input and should post, without paying much attention to the incurred on date of each expense item. If this option is selected, the invoice item and sub-item still displayed the claim item incurred date
A fix to task actual quantity update when timesheets with quantities are deleted was applied today
Columns for last % complete as a number, updated by and when, last comment posted and number of closed vs. open tasks were added to ticket admin, my tasks and the project > task screen
As well as the “Record time off” menu option under the “more” button menu, you can also enter “s” or “S” (for half or full day sick), “v’ or “V” (for half or full day of vacation) and other letters right into the timesheet weekly overview cells. If you enter for example “s” then the appropriate time-off request is created a half-day of sick leave, subjected to existing approval workflows
A problem with duplicate timesheets resulting from importing multiple desktop timers in quick succession for the start of a new timesheet period, for example importing 4-5 timers on the first Monday of the timesheet period has now been fixed
A couple of weeks ago we added a column to show the parent task description from within the timesheet. Now you can select from the list of parent tasks within the previously entered project, and select the task to book time to from the smaller list of sub-tasks for the chosen parent. A column showing the workflow owner was also added to timesheet overview
You can now display timesheet header or time entry remarks in dashboards
A fix to the project department passed across to iBE.net’s analytics data-warehouse was applied today. You can also drill down from most reports to automatically display the original source document in iBE.net
A button for Logout was added the relogin panel, which comes when user session is inactive or user’s security token is invalidated for example from the same user logging in from another computer
A number of issues specific to Firefox such as long loading times, remember me not working, and some screens with squashed or overlapping fields were fixed
We have just added a new table to our analytics data warehouse for tracking gross pay calculations. Now you can build graphical dashboard reports on top of actual pay calculation data
Our security certificate was updated and expanded to cover a broader range of *.ibe.net and *.ibenv.net domains
A fix was applied to hide paid invoices from the customer invoice portal
We have extended our already large list of possible revenue distribution profiles over the life-cycle of an opportunity (such as linear, up-front, at the end, by month etc.) with the following additional distribution profile options:
Per diem, mileage or other rate based expenses can be automatically calculated based on a predetermine rate and the number of days, miles etc. in the expense claim item. For all other expenses the employee enters how much and the total amount for each expense item is validated against a predefined maximum limit…until now. Now you can have rate based expenses such as hotel nights were the user still enters the total amount being claimed, as well as the number of nights, but the total amount claimed divided by the number of nights is compared to the allowed maximum. This way you can check hotel etc. expenses on a per diem basis whilst still entering a multi-night stay hotel invoice just once
Most people would consider billable time and productive but time booked to a fixed price or milestone billed task is not billable yet it is still productive. To support clients who perhaps pay bonuses based on productive vs. billable time we have added a productive time property to our time entries table and set this automatically as true for all time booked to fixed price deliverables
Time Evaluation allows you to convert timesheet hours into overtime codes and gross pay based on predefined rules and overtime item types and compensation codes and amounts in each employee’s compensation tab. Pay data sent to ADP and other payroll systems can be split by department so that financial postings created from payroll data can post salary accruals to the correct department or cost center based on where the employee was working at the time. If you book time to a department as opposed to a project then the department is now carried through to time evaluation, pay calculation and the ADP gross payroll interface or exported file
The cost budget by task has been added as a column to the project > task list and to my tasks. This column is hidden by default, so select to edit it from the column chooser menu (available when clicking on the purple arrow in any table header bar) first
Several enhancements to our timesheet module went live today:
We are pleased to announce several enhancements to the way costs, revenues and expenses are calculated on projects:
Up until now if you created a report showing for example the number of open or closed tasks by project, customer or time interval you had to select some random measure like task planned effort or planned cost and use the “count” aggregation formula to convert this to a count. Now there is a measure for the task etc. count
The invitation email which goes out for new users has been tweaked for inviting “external users” (your clients and customer contacts) to access iBE.net’s ticket or invoice portal. A bug causing duplicate users when created directly from employee when badge numbering is not system assigned was also fixed
The latest Chrome update released last week has caused several issues with our browser interface which were fixed today
You can now adjust the maximum allowed time unit (day, hour, week etc.) which is displayed in bar-charts on dashboards
A fix was applied to changes made to task which are subsequently hidden from view by entering filter conditions such as project, customer or task type which the updated task does not meet. When you click the save button even hidden tasks are properly updated
We are pleased to add exporting contractor timesheets as vendor bills to our existing list of Quickbooks Online interfaces. Now you can create contractors in iBE, have them record timesheets just like your other employees, automatically cost their time based on hours times their cost or compensation rates defined in HR, and then export this information as a properly formatted vendor bill in Quickbooks Online. We even allow you to define job or task-specific pay / cost rates for your contractors. No other system provides this much flexibility without the overhead of deploying a procurement module
The parent or milestone task you are recording time to is now displayed inside the timesheet as a new (hidden by default) column called PARENT TASK. So if you keep on repeating the same set of sub-tasks you can distinguish one from another via the parent task
A fix was applied to display of the department (for booking time to a department not to a project) in the time and expense list report
The remaining effort for a task can be automatically reduced based on time recorded. This is very handy if you want to burn down the remaining effort and automatically update progress or percent complete based on time recorded. We even give an option to manually edit the progress from the timesheet. It is however quite a pain if you book too much time to a task and the remaining effort is set to zero, closing the task and preventing subsequent time entry. So we have enhanced this calculation to never close the task by default, stopping the reduction in remaining effort once it reaches or goes below 10% of the original planned effort. You have the option to auto-close tasks from timesheets but it has to be configured based on the progress method assigned to your project type
The way invoices are loaded was enhanced today to reduce load time and a fix was applied to the option to filter this list by customer
For data imports & exports via APIs or other on-line options such as for example to Quickbooks Online we now provide an option to schedule these interfaces to run automatically in the background. We are also working with Quickbook’s web-connector tool (QBWC) for clients who use Quickbooks Professional or Enterprise, and will share more information on this in the near future
Some minor enhancements were applied to the QB online integration module including updating the Quickbooks record ID in iBE.net after a record has been successfully transmitted to Quickbooks Online, so that the same record can be transmitted again in future in update mode. Also the iBE.net to QB Online connection was made more robust (it used to disconnect regularly based on time-out settings in Quickbooks)
User’s uploading large files > 2 MB in size were using up too many resources on our servers causing other user sessions to hang. We now automatically upload files larger than 2 MB in the background. You can still continue working and your uploaded file will be available to you and other users in a matter of a few minutes. We also applied a fix for upload of zip files
Some cosmetic enhancements were applied to the relogin and password reset screens today. A problem with password expiry date was also fixed at the same time
The following cosmetic enhancements to list invoices went live into production today:
Up until now you had the option to copy timesheet or expense claim item remarks into customer invoices and print these remarks in the invoice. We adopted a fairly standard format showing employee’s name and time entry date followed by the remark text, in multiple rows if multiple time entries were summed up together to form a single customer invoice line. Based on customer requests for all sorts of other information to be copied from the timesheet or expense claim into the customer invoice, such as for example location, we now allow you or your support consultant to define a customized message template for invoice remarks, embedding fields such as the employee’s name, remark text, comments, location, date and overtime code into the remark text as desired. You can even put html formatting commands into the remark message template. Contact your iBE support consultant for help creating custom messages for workflow approvals, notifications and now customer invoice item texts or remarks
A fix was applied for import and export of xml file formats e.g. for xero integration
We now support the addition of custom fields in CRM objects like contact, opportunity and customer. Custom fields can be used to track company specific information not in iBE.net existing data-model. Custom fields can be added to the bottom of existing tabs or in new custom tabs. Contact your iBE support representative for help creating custom fields that you need
We have introduced the concept of rolling task progress up through the task hierarchy allowing you to plan at parent task or project level but record actuals such as time at sub-task. The way this works depends on how you structure your projects:
A couple of cosmetic fixes were done in project and task resources, namely writing UTILIZATION as column heading in project resources tab in place of MAX UTILIZATION and changing the icon for project leads to record time on tasks for their resources from a pencil to a clock. Also the alarm clock “send alert” icons were fixed in our project mgt. application
A fix to currency conversion within dashboard reports was applied
One client requested the option for multiple people to be set up as workflow owner (the person with complete access to change any document status). We have provided this by allowing you to assign a team or group as workflow owner
You can now download comments for example timesheet or expense claim comments in the time & expense list report, as text. The full comment text will be downloaded to xls
The search results “drop down” which comes from searching locally within a table or list in iBE.net has been made wider to better show the result texts
A fix was applied to the iBE delivered print out for manual or ad-hoc invoice line items
Rather than simply calculating planned effort for a new resource from utilization factor times the task duration we now consider the task’s start and end dates. If the task started in the past iBE calculates planned effort of a new resource based on remaining time or duration (end date minus today). If the task was meant to finish in the past (i.e. it is already overdue) then planned effort for a new resource is calculated as zero. To turn off planned effort calculation entirely set up your project type with “resource planning and utilization” unchecked
Up until now it was quite tricky to modify a task type once initially set-up, unless both task types were basically configured the same way. Now we have refined the checks which happen on change of task type, ignoring some unimportant things such as defaults or what gets inherited from parent to sub-task, and checking really important stuff like moving a task from billable to internal when stuff has previously been invoiced. Messages provided when changing the task type are also more helpful
The messages displayed when importing multiple leads from vCard or file were improved
The look and style of our table column chooser and status filter menus was made more consistent with other multi-selection lists
You can select all sorts of fields or attributes in our dashboard builder application to show in a multi-column list. Up until now at least one of the columns had to be a measure or number of some kind. Now you don’t have to select any measures at all, all the columns can be texts, dates etc. Of course only measures will get automatically summed!
You can define filters in your dashboard for example ‘only show tasks of type = “client deliverable” ‘. Unlike list or date slicers users who run the report cannot modify or access these filters, so they are very handy to restrict access to certain data. Some fixes were applied to the dashboard filter, to make rule operators (equals, greater than, contains text and so on) more consistent with other business rules and filters in the iBE.net application; variable according to not only the kind or type of field being filtered (date etc.) but also the data currently within our analytics database
iBE.net has two options for tracking payment of claims and invoices in the system – workflow or entering paid amounts. Up until now if you used both options together they were not properly integrated. Now if you update the workflow of a customer invoice to paid it automatically sets the paid amount to the full invoice value
If pricing on a project is by both service and resource there is a table where you can maintain service based rates for fixed / milestone tasks as well as not to exceed caps for T&M tasks, and resource billing rate code rates for T&M tasks. Some clients complained because they had to repeat resource billing rate code rates for each service when you cannot price by resource only. Now we automatically copy the resource billing rates from row to row as new services are added, if billing rates for T&M work are consistent throughout the project. In exceptional cases where T&M billing rates are by task/service only and not based on the resource doing the work we copy the billing rates from column to column instead
A background or weekly job has been constructed to look for missing timesheets and automatically send reminders. Contact your iBE support representative to set up this job based on your preferred schedule
Fix to employee as workflow owner for timesheets created by a central admin function
A fix was applied to sync’ing currencies and exchange rates to mobile phones
A fix was applied to the “Remember me” checkbox which was not working in Firefox. Make sure that the delete or clear the cache and cookies in Firefox and then completely close and reload the browser for this fix to apply as it is a deep-level change that was required. Refer to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-and-disable-cookies-website-preferences for more information on how to do this
The logging of internal admin messages for inbound emails sent for example to leads@ibe.net or tickets@ibe.net or comments@ibe.net was improved. Now we log every email coming in or sent out from iBE.net including whether it was successfully processed or not.
Comment emails are now from whoever made the comments with comments@ibe.net on copy / reply-to so that replies to these emails can be automatically processed by iBE.net and added back into your iBE database as a reply comment
As well as supporting duration inputs as 2h 30m or 2.5h we now support user inputs in the format 2:30. So we are now super-flexible!
You can now drill down from charts and tables in reporting dashboards to open the original or source document (when the data displayed is from a single source document)
A fix was applied when updating task actual hours from a timesheet for time booked against a department combined with time booked against tasks. In addition performance improvements were applied when updating a single task within a large timesheet, especially when clicking on the “Book time” icon from my tasks screen. Don’t forget you can also use our new desktop timer
A client booking time to very large timesheets from a fairly extensive my task screen reported that the app was not responsive after booking time. We investigated and fixed this issue and we are in the process of making more performance tweaks to how time is transferred from my tasks to timesheet and back to the project and task, in the next few days
A small enhancement was made to the invoice date calculation as the “to” date for the billing period when in the past (earlier it always defaulted to today’s date)
Terminated employees or employees who have left your company are not shown in the employee list by default, unless you click on the advanced search checkbox called “Show terminated employees”
A fix to expense claim status when printing. While receipts print in the same PDF as the claim today, we are looking at how receipts printouts can be enhanced. We also allowed you to add comments and view history on expense claims. And don’t forget you can ask us to set up emailing of receipts to receipts@ibe.net as well.
Finally we added a restriction in expense claims preventing normal employees from changing the claim’s company. This is automatically set based on the employee’s company code, though you can still change it in expenses admin
Improvements to job or task specific compensation were implemented making it easier to edit the rates paid to contractors or associated for doing work for you. Now you can edit their cost rates in either the employee work-assignment or compensation tab, though we recommend project managers use the work-assignments and HR admin use the compensation tabs. In either case task-specific pay rates will be considered in pay calculations
Our teams application – used to create ad hoc groups for planning or workflow purposes – has been enhanced to support more options to base a team or group on: department, job role, project, manager and billing rate code. This last option is useful if you use teams to plan projects using a generic team representing for example “senior consultants” or “junior java programmers”. You can assign a rate code to any team to calculate revenue and estimate the cost of your planning project
A couple of clients asked us to limit the task types permitted in a given project, especially important when you have a combination of delivery, support and sales tasks types in the same database. Now in the project type settings screen you can specify which task types are allowed. Existing projects with invalid task types will need to be corrected when they are updated
For some reason tickets from client’s customers using the @yahoo.com domain appeared in the email to come from tickets@ibe.net. We use the combination of from, original sender and reply-to in the email we receive at tickets@ibe.net now to work out who the real client is. We also made an enhancement to the automatic generation of the contact and the customer record from emails received at tickets@ibe.net, the contact is created with what is before the @ in the sender’s email address and their company is created with what comes after the @. Generic domains (such as @yahoo.com) are ignored even though tickets are always still generated. Contact your iBE support or implementation consultant to set up ticket emails to meet your own requirements and data mappings
We have improved the look and use of our login screen with a background image, better alignment and a new option to logon to iBE.net in test mode. Accessing iBE in test mode is for during your implementation project to test out the system including new settings or installed applications. Any data created while you are logged into iBE.net in test mode is test data and is not visible in production mode. However you can still view production data when logged on in test mode, you just cannot update it. This way if you want to try out new features or train new employees you can do this testing or training while viewing but never updating production data. Contact your iBE support representative for more information on this new feature. Since the same user and password is shared between test vs. normal mode you cannot invite users in test mode and any changes to user preferences or passwords apply to both modes
We have made a number of small performance improvements including using multiple sub-domains for API requests to our server to allow more requests to be processed at the same time. We have also expanded the use of master lists (like customers, projects, employees and so on) with fewer fields in your browser memory, only getting the extra fields when they are really needed. This has improved the time it takes to load opportunities and contact lists
Task duration was moved down to a separate row in the DATES/QTY/COST tab. Remaining cost was modified to be based on remaining effort as opposed to planned – actual cost as it was before
We added a check for paid amounts being zero before allowing users to delete invoices
Up until now anyone with access to the Billing Summary application could create real or proforma (draft) invoices. Now you can set up a user’s custom role-based menu to give “display only” access to the Billing Summary which means they can create proforma or draft invoices but they cannot create real invoices. Use this to allow project managers to create proforma invoices but only allow your billing admin to create real invoices. You can also edit proforma invoices from the list invoices application even when you only have display mode access
Some clients have hundreds or even thousands of open projects and tasks which they assign to everyone so that anyone can book time to them. While it is better to limit who can book time to what task by assigning individuals to each task only when they need to work on it, we improved the speed of loading a timesheet when you do have hundreds or thousands of tasks. Now if there are more than 150 open tasks for an employee the task list is no longer downloaded to your browser, instead the tasks come “on demand” i.e. when you start entering some text for search for a task to book time to. If there are <150 tasks they are still downloaded, and project/customer lists are still downloaded, but if you have alot of tasks you now search for them by entering the search text or scrolling down the task list which loads as you scroll
We now allow users to copy expense claim items
We extended default from/to dates in time & expense report so that more data (and more projects/customers) can be seen initially
A fix to phone number validation for South African and some other numbers when entering + country code into phone number field in contact or employee was applied. You can enter phone numbers using any international or local format
The default delivered invoice template has been enhanced to look better, with larger fonts for key information like total value and due date, and comments shown as rows vs. a separate column in the invoice item list. Customers can still request customized invoice layouts and we will continue to deliver tailored invoice prints for every client. Our invoice form-builder application is still a couple of months away from being ready for beta-delivery
You can now import multiple contacts or vCards at the same time. Select “Import Leads from vCards” option under the more toolbar button and select one of more vCard or vcf contacts to import. You can export contacts as vcf from any address book or contact database. As leads or contacts are imported the email is checked to see if it already exists in iBE and if it does then the two contacts are automatically merged into one
We are pleased to announce integration with xero. We are initially delivering interfaces for customer invoices and expense claims and will be rolling out interfaces for customers, projects and employees in the near future. Contact your iBE support consultant for more information; we will help you configure the interface mappings including account determination rules. We are hard at work on enhancing our Quickbooks desktop integration to be based Quickbook’s web-connector (QBWC) at the same time
Comments are normally private to your company by default with the option to mark them as public or define permissions. You can now make comments public by default via a setting on the object type (e.g. task) which you are commenting on
You can now enter a reimbursement currency on the employee compensation tab which is different to your company’s default currency. If you have consultants who live or normally work in a different country to where your company is based you can default the currency on their claims to the country where they live or work as opposed to your company’s currency. Your consultants can still modify the currency as today, with the system automatically calculating the equivalent amount in both reimbursement and company currency using spot rates from xurrency.com. Changes by the employee to the equivalent reimbursement amount are noted in the expense claim for audit purposes. When new expense claim items are added the currency now defaults to the same currency as the previous row
Two new columns were added to the time & expense list report for Expense Claim Header Remark and Reimbursement Amount which can be different to the expense claim amount in company currency when employees are being reimbursed in a different currency to the company’s default currency
The following enhancements have been made to the opportunity application
When replying to a comment emails are now automatically sent to the person who logged the original comment you are replying to
A fix was applied to the license limit when locking and unlocking users. iBE support users can now modify the license type / user license limit directly without having to update the database
Default task start/finish dates has been enhanced not to copy the previous task’s start/finish dates when in the past. Now these dates are set to today if the previous task’s dates are in the past. A fix was also applied to the default calculation of planned effort. If your resource default utilization is 100% then when resources are added to a task the planned effort is calculated as duration
Up until now we always followed the philosophy of summing up resource planned efforts to task level, but not rolling down planned effort from the task to its resources. This caused confusion because clients were editing planned effort at task level in the task list and it was not updating the resource planned effort. Now we also roll down planned effort from task to resource if there is only one resource assigned to the task. If the task has more than one resource you need to open the task details RESOURCES tab and edit planned efforts for each resource
We now print the company’s logo and name on invoice headers instead of the client’s logo and name. This is useful for clients having more than one company code for example who operate out of more than one country. You can have different company names and logos for each country you bill from
We are pleased to announce the release of a new Chrome plug-in or desktop timer. Download this timer from the app store using this link and check-out a new video highlighting desktop timer features. Our desktop timer falls between the iPhone timer and web-app timesheet in terms of simplicity and allows users to quickly track time spent on tasks by starting and stopping a timer as well as having the option to type over or modify the elapsed time, add remarks and transfer or push timers to iBE timesheets. Stopped timers are automatically imported into timesheets when they are created
A bug was spotted whereby it was possible to create duplicate timesheets. This bug was fixed three days after it was spotted and we did an audit to find out and fix any existing duplicate timesheets. If you find more than one timesheet in my time or time admin for the same person for the same period please either contact us or delete one of the duplicate timesheets
The project resources tab has been enhanced with the addition of columns showing total planned effort for that resource across all tasks, total planned cost for the resource, actual effort for the resource and of course actual cost
We used to show columns for rate code when pricing is by service and rate code combined. Now we show rate code description as the column heading, for consistency with the resources tab where rate code description is also shown. Remember that you can decide by project type whether to price by service only (for fixed price projects), rate code only (for pure T&M projects) or by a combination of both (for mixed projects, or fixed price projects where you wish to travel equivalent T&M revenue)
This is a brand new module we are excited to launch this month, allowing you to view interactive resource loads on your employees, contractors and teams. You can decide which projects and tasks are part of resource planning through a checkbox on project and task type settings (resource planning & utilization). Estimated or remaining effort (for tasks which have started) are timephased over working hours of each task’s duration to calculate a combined utilization factor for each resource over each upcoming day, week or month. The Resource Planning application available in our standard menu under “Projects” allows you to view graphical load by team member or team, color coded to represent over/under utilization and showing in each time period for each resource either the combined % utilization, total required hours in that period or remaining available hours in that period.
Finally showing color-coded load profiles (red for overloaded or 100%+ vs. yellow for under-utilized or potentially on the bench) would be of little benefit if you could not modify work assignments from within the same report. Clicking on the wrench in each cell gives a view of the tasks making up each person’s load for your selected projects or customers, with options to delete or add work-assignments, modify planned effort or utilzation for a given resource on a task and in the near future, modify start or end dates of a task. Date modifications will impact all resources assigned to the same task.
My Tickets was originally designed for technicians, team leads and helpdesk managers to view their own tickets or tickets they are responsible for. We have delivered a ticket or task administration application to compliment my tickets and my tasks. This ticket admin. app shows all tickets in your database with filters by assigned technician, person responsible, client contact or customer, status, open/closed, priority and so on. You can still make the same updates as you can in my tickets such as adding comments, files, booking time or updating ticket workflow status
Several customers requested reports on customer invoice revenue based on the employee’s department as opposed to the project’s department, to more accurately reflect revenue by source when employees are borrowed from one practice or department to work on another. Based on our experience of this and the need to report revenue based on the product or service’s department we have added two new configuration options to the billing method as follows:
A number of fixes to deleting invoices were applied including fixes to how source data such as timesheets or expense claims are linked to their invoices in the first place, so that the correct source data can be back-tracked and re-opened correctly when invoices are deleted. Proforma invoice deletions will not attempt to re-open source data since proforma invoices never mark source data as billed in the first place
A fix was applied to how credit memos are displayed in the invoice list, so that they now show as a negative amount and show with unpaid invoices. For normal invoices you can select whether you want to see paid or unpaid invoices in the invoice list
For times when you log an opportunity several days after the customer inquiry was initiall received – and created on date is no longer accurate – we added a field for the inquiry received on date
Instead only seeing your own opportunities or opportunities for people in your team you now have the option to define exactly who can see which opportunities by assigning permissions to each opportunity. Click on the share toolbar button for an opened opportunity to bring a popup screen where you can define who has access to the opportunity (me, my company, all) and list individual people together with their access level (read, update, admin). We also enhanced the permissions pop-up across the system to allow both the person who created an object as well as the person responsible for that object to edit permissions of other users
The employee compensation tab was enhanced with the addition of job or task specific cost rates or rates of pay. There are hidden columns in the compensation tab for time off or absence type, time or overtime code and task. By selecting one or other of these fields – after making these columns visible of course – you can define compensation elements that are specific to a time-off type, an overtime or time type or to a job or task. For example you might pay 50% of normal pay for sick leave or jury duty (time-off type links) or pay 150% or 200% of normal pay for overtime or holiday work (overtime type link) or pay a higher rate for a specific job or task
Employee work-assignments are now by task not project showing every task the employee is working on. You can also edit their work assignments directly from the employee record by adding new project/task combinations (to create a new work-assignment) or by deleting rows (to close down a work-assignment). This way if you are responsible for that employee or contractor’s overall contribution and what they are working on you no longer have to open each project they are assigned to and edit the task resources individually. The work assignments tab also has columns for start and end dates which can be used to filter down the number of work-assignments in view at any point
You can now define permissions for individual comments by listing specific people who have access to the comment. The lock icon which we had previously in the toolbar to mark comments as private or public has been replaced by a menu with the same private/public options plus an option to make the comment private to the author only as well as the option to define permissions by name. Permissions can be useful to share comments with a specific subset of people or to share comments with clients or external users only for example to share confidential billing information with clients which you don’t want other colleagues in your company to access
A fix was applied to duration fields such as timesheet hours or task planned efforts allowing you to now enter duration as “4 day” in addition to the previously supported “4d” option
The workflow email can not only be customized but you can now build tables within workflow emails, for example showing timesheet hours by day within the body of the approval email. You could previously include your clients in workflows for example to approve consultant timesheets but you needed to create an external (free) user for them to be able to perform workflow updates from their emails. Now your clients can perform workflow updates on any object (ticket, timesheet, expense, invoice) without having a user in your iBE system
A fix was applied for parallel workflows. If you want to send a workflow to multiple people at the same time you can either configure it so that anyone completing their step moves the document forward to the next workflow (in which case you have a single workflow step with multiple owners) or so that all or several people must complete their step in parallel before the document moves forwards (in which case you build parallel workflow steps into your template)
The message informing a user when a table or list is empty including the instruction to click here to add a row was made much bigger and more obvious
We are finally launching a new client set-up guided form, the form which appears when you first sign up for a new client. The older four page form with inputs for how you found us, apps to install, basic company settings, users and contact information has been replaced by a more extensive multi-page form with dynamic pages for
A fix was applied to password expiry. It was possible before not to define an expiry time and at the same time indicate that passwords should expire. Now if you don’t define an expiry timeframe (which can be any duration you like but we normally recommend 30, 60 or 90 days) the system will assume you don’t want passwords to ever expire. You have to reset your passwords once to trigger this new feature as the expiry date is assigned when passwords are reset
We enhanced the way table filters, sorts and columns are stored in your browser cache or as a saved table layout to include also storing whether you have the advanced search box in search (show results matching text input in a drop-down) vs. filter (reduce data in grid to match text input) mode
Some minor enhancements were made for pushing workflow etc. messages directly to the inboxes of other users who are already logged into iBE.net, so that they do not have to reload their inbox. We use web-sockets to push notifications the same way Google docs pushes document updates to other users. It works on all our supported browsers except IE, and does not work when you hibernate your computer, close the screen or if your computer goes to sleep. We always recommend reloading the app when you first start using it after a period of inactivity
When drilling down on a task within a project it is not always clear where you are and how to get back to the project overview. You can still click on browser back or select back from the “more” button menu, or click on the main navigation option for projects to return to the project search list. Now there is also a link displayed in the top left corner of the screen “Go back to Project” for you to navigate easily back to the project overview
Some fixes and enhancements were applied to our timesheet update of actuals on projects and tasks which time was recorded for. We stopped the task from being marked as complete if planned efforts for other resources was zero. Now if the resource planned effort is zero (because you don’t wish to plan) the task and relevant resource remain open so that you can book more time. We also introduced the concept of a remaining effort calculation strategy on the task type in question with the following options for you to choose between:
Attendance records are no longer shown for employees before their hire date or after their termination date
An enhancement was made to our time evaluation and gross pay calculation engine to allow time to be added not just transferred to a different overtime code. This was in response to a customer who needed to automatically add “preparation time” to their employee timesheets based on classroom teaching time, without having each person record their preparation time. This can be paid or unpaid depending on your rule. It can also be used for example to generate time-based daily allowances or payments processed via payroll such as meal allowances
Following a client request we now have the option to capture department in the invoice and to summarize or group invoice line items by department. This department can be configured as either the employee’s department or project department. They are normally the same, except when one department borrows resources from another
We applied a fix to how invoice amounts are rounded and specifically made sure that rounding of values takes place before summarization so that the summarized or item level invoice result is always exactly equal to the sum of the (rounded) sub-item invoice amounts. We also applied a minor fix to how daily rates were being converted to hourly revenues based on different work-schedules. Finally we enhanced the conversion of expenses from their original transaction currency to the customer’s billing currency giving you the option to choose whether to:
We added legacy account number to customer mapping to support interfaces to external systems
We are pleased to announce the deliver of a brand new dashboard builder application coming out of beta-test today. Using a more user friendly guided form taking up the whole page (as opposed to a pop-up) you can now build queries and dashboards using the same tool. Dashboards provide more flexibility including charts to report on aggregated data offline whereas adhoc queries are more suited to listing transaction data tables. Features worth a special mention include:
We enhanced the list of services displayed in the task list within a project to show the unit of measure and recurring billing interval for recurring services
Some fixes were applied to the menus in billing preparation and invoice creation screen to make them more consistent. We now support regular, manual adhoc and proforma invoices as well as credit memos and matching payments for credit memos against open (unpaid) invoices
A fix was applied whereby the remember me checkbox in the login screen was not working when using Firefox. Remember me logs you back in automatically if you reload or close and re-open the browser
Some fixes were done in the calculation of overtime particularly in relation to weekly overtime rules such as paying overtime when working more than 40 hours per week. Weekly overtimes are automatically allocated to the last days or hours in the week first
While the currency for an employee’s standard or burdened cost defaults from your company currency you can now edit it in case you wish to maintain their standard cost in a different currency
Our project and task lists previously allowed you to select any status and filter only showing project or tasks for that status. This is also possible for other objects such as timesheets or expense claims. Now you can select more than one status at the same time, showing all objects (Project, Ticket or Task List Status Selection.) matching up to any selected number of status codes. When you do this, the link will display the text “Multiple States” with the option to select “All” status codes right next to it. Your selection is automatically remembered next time you login, or you can store it as part of the table layout and personalization
As well as creating projects from a template you can now include template project tasks lists within an existing or operative project. Select the task you want to insert the template after and then from the project / task list table menu select “more > Include from template” from the menu and select the template project or task list you wish to include. The tasks from the template project are automatically included after your selected task even if you have other tasks already created. You also get a warning if you try to include the same template project twice
You can now classify expenses to your department. There is a configuration option on the expense claim type to default your home department or enable you to classify expenses to department vs. only to a project/task combination. You can also create special tasks in your projects for examples by using a task type which allows expenses and preventing expenses from being recorded to other task types
You can now permit your employees to login using their employee ID or badge number (the employee number or code). To enable this option to to System > My account & Users > Security Settings and check the “Login via badge or ID” option
We fixed an error which came when accessing number ranges from within another document type settings screen. You can also access number ranges directly via System > Data Set-up > Document Numbering
We are pleased to announce a major new enhancement to iBE.net with the addition of custom fields. You can define custom fields and assign them to any existing tab within a document, or create new tabs just to hold custom fields. As well as defining the custom field panel row and column position (up to three columns and any number of rows) you can define custom fields as being text, number, number with decimals, value/currency input, date, time, duration or labor effort input as well as custom fields which reference an existing iBE.net or a new custom list. When defining custom fields which refer to a list you can specify the list name and then add the list values directly. And there is no limit to the number of custom fields you can add. Unlike systems which use SQL tables to store their data where you can only add a limited number of custom fields, we use an object-orientated data store so you have the option to add an unlimited number of custom fields on any object or object’s sub-document. Please contact your iBE Support representative to help you define custom fields as this is still in beta-release mode for the next four to six weeks
A fix was applied to the billing method settings screen
A fix was applied in the process of re-opening timesheets when invoices are deleted
Before you can delete a resource from a task the system checks if actual hours have been recorded and if so then you need to close the task for that resource instead of deleting it. There was a “back-door” meaning that if you deleted the resource from the project resources tab then that resource was removed from all tasks, after confirmation, without checking actuals. We now check for actual hours booked in case of deleting a resource from a project as well as a task and in case there are actuals we automatically close that resource’s work on the task instead of deleting it
You can now save the preferred column layout for many of the sub-tables within the employee master such as compensation, work-assignments etc. Either change the columns and the layout will be remembered next time you login to iBE.net using the same browser and device, or click on the gear icon in the top right corner of these tables to save a preferred layout. Give your desired layout a code and name and don’t forget to check the “preferred” box if you want the saved layout to be adopted in preference to what you last changed it to in your browser
Up until now the time & attendance or missing time report grouped daily data by week. Now you can group by month or by payroll period as well as week, by selecting the group-by menu at the top. If you group by an option other than week the daily totals for timesheet vs. attendance vs. absence vs. work-schedule hours are still shown, but the group totals are now calculated on the basis of a month or payroll period. Payroll periods can be defined under System > Set up HR > Periods
A fix was done to the order of projects both in the search list and the project list within task details PROJECT tab. Now in the search screen if you do not sort by any column – or you select from the table personalization menu “Restore Default Sort” – the most recently opened projects etc. are automatically pushed to the top. But if you select a column to sort by then data is sorted by that column irrespective of when that document was last opened. This same enhancement is gradually being applied to all of our other apps
You can now optionally assign a selectable list of values for ticket origin, accessible from the HELPDESK tab within ticket details. If you do not assign a list then you can still freely input any text for ticket origin
Various small enhancements were made to the layout of expense receipts based on customer input. Some enhancements were also applied to the expense claim print-out
Holidays are now displayed within the timesheet similar to how other time-off or absences are displayed. There is no need to record or request time off for public or company-wide holidays, they are simply defined in your holiday calendar under System > Setup HR > Holiday Calendar
We have been having issues these last few months with our analytics database, resulting in the need to rebuild it every couple of weeks (a process that takes several hours and relies on someone spotting a discrepancy). We decided in December to update our analytics database and after some research elected MonetDB, an open source in-memory column based SQL database ideally suited for high speed analytics reporting. After extensive testing and parallel running we are pleased to go-live with MonetDB this weekend so that now all your dashboards will be coming from MongoDB as opposed to the previous database. There are no functional changes and existing dashboards will continue to work. We did take the opportunity to do some minor SQL table field clean-ups
We enhanced our data import tool to create template or draft documents from an external file, as well as active documents
Some enhancements and fixes were applied to the popup for conditions or business rules for example in data import/export (filter conditions), queries or workflow responses. Now you can resize the conditions pop-up and some of the missing values lists were added
A fix was applied to stop users clicking back twice in quick succession
We added who and when a document was created to the top of the timeline or history tab for all objects
We stopped clients from editing their own license type or user limit. You cannot add more users than the license limit of 3 for solo and 9 for team licenses. Contact us to modify your license type
A fix was applied to the print menu option for invoice prints. At the same time it was enhanced so that if more than one printed form layout was defined the print button gives a drop down menu with the different forms to choose from
iBE’s invoice generation engine was enhanced to copy the latest comment from a task into the invoice so that comments for fixed price or recurring deliverables can be maintained in a task and automatically transferred into the customer invoice. We are now working on an enhancement to make these comments private or accessible to only a specific named set of individuals
Enhancements were made to entering payments directly in iBE.net. Now you have two options to enter payments:
You can now integrate CRM opportunities to project in iBE. There are multiple ways in which this new feature can be used, as follows:
Scroll bars were enhanced to adopt the style from each user’s local operating system or browser setting, to reflect different preferences for Mac vs. Windows users. A fix to scroll bars for 1024 px resolution screens was also applied
iBE.net is somewhat unique among professional services automation tools in that customer invoices can be summarized according to how your clients wish to see invoices – for example by employee, task, date incurred and so on. This allows you to organize your invoices based on how you want information to be presented to your clients. We have just added summarization options for employee department, billing rate code, parent task or task-list and project or task phase. This is in addition to our existing summarization options for product or service, task, employee, expense type or code, date time or expense was recorded, user type and billing period (for recurring or usage based billings)
A fix was applied to stop pricing calculation sheets from freezing or loading without items from time to time
The search screens for time and expense admin were enhanced to allow the selection and display of timesheets or expense claims for multiple employees at the same time. Remember to click on the “reload” button after selecting your employees! We also made the menus and buttons more consistent between these two applications, such as moving the reload icon to the main toolbar
Our dashboard reporting tool has been enhanced to better manage amounts in multiple currencies. You can still assign currency as a dimension to group data by source currency but you can now select in the dashboard run-time to automatically convert all amounts to company or dashboard currency. In either case the amounts being reported are automatically converted to your company or a user selected dashboard currency as the report is being run, using daily spot rates from xurrency.com or using your company defined exchange rates
Our proforma or draft invoice was enhanced to provide a quick and easy comparison tool between real and proforma invoices. By selecting “Compare to Proforma” from the more toolbar button menu when a real invoice is open, the system will search for the most recent proforma invoices for the same project(s) and customer as the current open invoice and compare the amounts invoiced on a project by project, item by item basis. The difference between total amounts invoiced by project in the real vs. proforma invoice is displayed in a popup, so that you can quickly see any discrepancies and trouble-shoot the differences
Performance enhancements were applied to the invoice list and billing summary including faster downloads of data and initial display of an estimated amount to be billed based on storing all approved timesheets or expense item revenues on the project ready for the billing summary to use when needed
We recently enhanced expense claims to allow individual items to be split between two different customer/project/task combinations or classifications, for example an airfare which is to travel between two different client project locations. You can now split expense items between departments as well as between projects & tasks
The project funds tab – a tab which tracks how many funds were made available from customer purchase orders, change orders or contract line items – was enhanced to display the total funded and remaining as $ and % at the top, as well as automatically alerting the project leader when the remaining funds fall below a certain % threshold of the total funds. You can also configure alerts based on the total expense cost exceeding a threshold of the total revenue, or when the actual cost exceeds a certain % threshold of the cost budget. You can configure additional alerts as needed; contact us for more information on this extremely useful feature!
A number of enhancements were applied to our email auto-responder to create tickets in iBE.net’s support module from emails sent to tickets@ibe.net. Now you can configure the email auto-responder to not only create a ticket but to also create the sender or original sender (in case of forwarding emails to tickets@ibe.net) as a lead or contact and their company or what comes after the @-symbol in their email address as a customer. While you still have to create the project in advance we enhanced the email auto-responder to automatically search for and adopt a project for the right customer of a given or specific project type used for support tickets. If you have one support ticket project per customer then our email auto-responder will automatically find and use the right project code. This in turn allows you to bill for time worked on each ticket according to the contractual terms and project parameters
The icons used for remark or comment columns in tables were cleaned up to better reflect the difference between rows which have or do not have comments in both display and update modes. Downloading a table to excel with comment or file columns now downloads the total number of count of columns or files vs. attempting to download the icon
A fix was applied allowing you to attach files better using Safari
A lot of users are getting confused between our code or ID (field on the left) vs. description (field on the right). We have now added a prompt in the code or ID field when blank asking the user to enter the code or ID. There is already a prompt in most description fields asking the user to enter a description. Remember that you can configure document codes or IDs to be internally or system generated for any object, based on rules you define. To do this open the setting screen for the document type concerned or go to System > Data Set-up > Document Numbering
A new sign-up panel was implemented today to go with our new web-site at www.ibe.net. It is now easier and quicker to sign-up and we automatically capture your country from browser settings. You can click on a link post sign-up to log into iBE without checking your email because we check that your email is valid for you, preventing spam sign-ups and random or nonsense emails being used for sign-ups. We will be rolling out a brand new client set-up guided form in the near future. We also default activity coaching to be enabled for new users. Activity guidance is available for projects and timesheets and is being extended over the next couple of months to cover all applications
Our customer invoice portal was initially released in beta form, allowing your clients to see their invoices online. Enable the customer invoice portal activity via System > My account & users > External Portal Activities, creating external users for key clients if applicable. We will be adding features to allow your clients to make payments or add comments in the near future
A number of client-specific invoice layouts were delivered with enhancements that could be used by other clients being rolled back into the core. We will be releasing a library of invoice templates in the near future, together with a form-builder application in a few months from now. Watch this space or contact us with your unique invoice or expense claim printed layout requirements
Project task rescheduling performance was improved including a fix to prevent rescheduling from going into an infinite loop
A number of cosmetic enhancements were made to the look and feel of our dashboard reports including improved look for pivot or cross-tables and improvements in font size and alignment for our date and list slicers
A series of additional filters were added to make it easier to search and select projects for billing from the billing summarization. You can now also directly update the project status from the billing summarization screen and list / open the last invoice generated for each project. Amount to be billed is calculated in the background and stored on the project so that billing summary screen loads faster
Some small fixes were applied to our recurring billing enhancement introduced last week (January 1st)
Some cosmetic enhancements and a fix to sorting bar charts by a measure (e.g. bar length) vs. a dimension (e.g. date). Also a fix to product or service in analytics for reporting on time booked to a task.
An enhancement to set planned effort as zero by default when resource planning is turned off for that project type. Rather than hiding the task’s RESOURCES tab when resource planning and utilization is unchecked in your project type setting screen, we now show the task resources tab giving users the option to manually add planned effort if they wish to. But planned effort defaults to zero if resource planning is turned off. This enhancement was done partly in response to customer requests to keep the option open to manually edit planned effort on projects even when resource planning is not carried out normally, and partly to prepare for our upcoming resource planning application, to avoid defaulting planned effort = duration for long-running tasks which are not being resource planned.
We are decommissioning or turning off our Griffon release now that all customers are using our newer Osprey release.
We also fixed the display of department in System > My Company > Account & Users > Users, and replaced the short client name in the header with the go-live date. This go-live will become more important when we release “test mode” as users logging into iBE.net prior to the go-live date will be defaulted into test mode.
We fixed a formatting issue to workflow emails and added the timesheet hours or expense claim amount to the workflow approval email by default. Contact iBE support if you want to create client-specific or customized workflow email templates.
We have created a new form of billing called “recurring billing” which works similar to fixed price or quantity/output based billing but bills the same quantity each billing cycle. With iBE.net’s fixed price or output based billing you edit the actual quantity on the task and this quantity, minus any previously billed task deliverables, is billed each cycle at the unit price for that task’s service. For example if you are delivering web-pages at $50/page then in the first billing cycle or month you might enter and bill for an actual quantity of 20 pages ($1,000) and in the second month you might deliver another 25 pages to the same client. Increasing the task quantity to 45 causes the total quantity minus previously billed (the extra 25 pages) to be billed in the second cycle ($1,250).
With recurring billing you define a recurring billing interval on the task’s product or service master, normally your actual billing cycle for that client, and the task’s actual quantity is billed again and again each cycle irrespective of what was previously billed. So in the above example if you delivered another 20 pages in the second cycle you would not have to change anything, the client would be automatically charged for another $1,000. If you delivered 25 pages then you would increase the quantity from 20 to 25 rather than from 20 to 45.
It is important to use recurring billing correctly, being consistent between how you update task delivered quantities and the recurring billing intervals defined on the task’s product or service. Use recurring billing for fixed monthly (or other cyclical) payments such as a services contract for monthly flat fee. Also be aware that if you go back and rebill for a historical cycle it won’t charge the client again for a billing cycle on or prior to one you already billed. Instead of keeping track of the billed quantity, recurring billing keeps track of the date up to which a recurring task was billed, and new invoices cannot be created for that task prior to the date of the last invoice for the same task. Finally if the billing from/to dates do not correspond to exactly one billing cycle (they normally should) then the system will estimate how many complete or partial cycles fall between the invoice from/to dates and multiply up the quantity accordingly. For example if the task’s service master has a recurring billing interval of “week” and you create an invoice from Jan 1st-31st 2015, then five cycles or five times the task’s quantity would be billed.
We extended the range of possible invoice summarization options including summarization by department. For time and materials based contracts this summarization is based on the department of the employee who recorded their time or expense, and for fixed, recurring or quantity based contacts or deliverables this is based on the project’s department.
We also fixed a bug in the billing method and pricing sheet set-up screens whereby you could not earlier open these setting screens without first refreshing the browser. Finally we fixed a bug in the deletion of fixed price invoices which was not reducing the previously billed quantity in the task on deletion of the invoice to allow the task’s quantity to billed over again. Now when you delete a fixed or quantity/output based invoice the task can be billed again for the deleted invoice quantity (for non-recurring) and from the start date of the deleted invoice (for recurring services).
Finally we added more filter options to the billing summary: by customer, by project or by project leader – so that if more than one person in your company creates real or pro-forma invoices you can now sort and filter the billing summary project list according to each user’s scope of responsibility. For example project managers can create proforma invoices for their own projects by putting in their own name as the project leader. We also have a major client using project workflow to release projects for billing from the department to the central billing team. We added the project status as a column that can add to the billing summary, showing the project status and allowing you to edit this status from the billing summary without jumping back to the project management app. This saves users a lot of time if they wish to for example create a proforma invoice and release the project immediately to billing. Project workflow can also be used by any client wishing to keep track of project life-cycle status or progress both in project execution and billing.
We added a retro-earnings code to the compensation details. Compensation elements are created and then assigned to your employees to calculate gross pay. In each case the export to ADP – or another payroll system, if you want us to map one contact us – uses the earnings code on the compensation element as the ADP etc. pay code. If pay is changed for a historical period then it is too late to adjust the original payroll, instead a retro-pay calculation takes place to find out the difference. Rather than sending this data to ADP etc. in the current payroll period using the same pay code as the original payroll period, you now have the option to send the data for retrospective adjustments using a special earnings code. You can use the same retro-earnings code for one or for all compensation elements.
Fixed an issue in inbox when grouping by document such as timesheet or expense claim to approve all line items within a timesheet or expense claim in a single click. Also applied a fix to user preferences for items being followed.
Fixed an issue with our third party email verification service (Bright-verify) which was set-up to be overly aggressive and bounce back valid customer email addresses. It should be ok now but please tell us if you see any warnings about email addresses being invalid. Part of iBE.net’s service offering is to verify not just the format of contact emails you enter but the actual email to see if it is a valid email domain. This is a very handy tool for cutting down on spam that you send out and will really be useful when you use iBE.net as your contact store or in future to manage email campaigns.
Added who created a document and when at the top of the timeline (it is also visibile if you scroll right down to the bottom). The last person who changed the document is shown as the first entry in the timeline.
Fixed one issue where users were being asked to save changes from task details needlessly.
Applied a layout fix to the popup which compares real and proforma invoices on a project by project basis, useful for companies who wish line of business to create draft or proforma invoices and centralized billing team to create the final invoice. Also added project status to the billing summary to allow project workflows for billing to be updated from both projects and billing summary screen.
Added an option to show dates in printed forms as “Dec 15, 2014” and to print amounts with or without their unit of measure. You can also decide whether you want to print the currency code or the currency symbol in printed forms. All these settings are in the company settings page in client maintenance and soon to be available in a new enterprise structure setup application.
We added a billing period to company settings screen for recurring billing. This is taken as the billing period if it is not maintained in the customer record, both fields being used in our upcoming enhancement for automatic billing in the background. We also fixed the recurring billing interval in products or services so that the actual quantity in your task is billed each time an invoice is created. If your product or services is defined for recurring billing there is no need to increase the actual quantity each month. For example a retainer fee of $10,000/month will be maintained as “1 month” in the task actual quantity and a recurring billing interval in the service as “month” and project rate of $10,000 and then the same amount will be invoiced each month.
We fixed alignment of various fields in the company settings screen and added fields for:
Fix to display of timesheet or expense claim task in inbox for approval messages. Prior to this fix, it was not clear without drilling down if you are approving several rows (tasks or projects) in the same timesheet which one was which. Now you see the project and task description right in the inbox – just remember to set your columns widths accordingly
Enhancement to expense claims to allow selection of expenses supplier from a list. Up until now expense supplier was a free text input. Some customers asked to select from a list and even to look up local or nearby suppliers in the smart phones based on Yelp or similar APIs. This is now supported in our iPhone app. In our web app you can select suppliers from a list and add suppliers on the fly by clicking the + icon at the bottom of the list. Expense suppliers will be integrated to purchasing suppliers when we build a purchasing module in the near future.
Modification to classifying expenses to fixed price tasks, defaulting such expenses as billable as opposed to marking as non-billable as we do for time booked to fixed price tasks. If you do not wish to allow employees to book billable expenses to fixed priced tasks then create special tasks for expenses and disallowed the fixed price task type from booking expenses in your task type setting
Fix to performance of editing territories by making it a remotely loaded store
Changed scroll-bars to be based on browser/operating system default rather than our our almost invisible “Mac-style” scroll-bars which we implemented when Apple’s new user interface guidelines came out.
Added a user date formatting option for “Dec 13, 2014″ to help people who get confused whether dates are dd/mm/yy or mm/dd/yy. Remember date formatting is by user so this is a personal not a company wide decision. All dates are stored the same way internally. At the same time we removed two date formatting options no-one is using
Fix to how time is handled for data imports or uploads including setting dates without time as midday GMT (as we did already for user input dates without times). We also added the feature for uploaded data being imported to iBE to call a custom API or service to update our database. Normally we rely on our core update which is extremely feature-rich, however for special use-cases you can now contact us to build a custom import API
Addition of department to project header. Performance improvements to opening task details and assigning resources to a task.
Revamping the pop-up for input and maintenance of project customer purchase orders into a separate FUNDS tab on the project with input of either customer purchase order, fund, department or even customer to support splitting a single project’s revenues among multiple customers in the future. Individual funds can be entered as:
Improved look of currency selector in dashboard
We added the option to split time or expenses into multiple tabs on an invoice and apply different pricing rules or pricing sheets to each tab. For example let’s say you charge a 7% service fee on some but not all time for a project, perhaps for on-site work only. Now you can configure two time-related invoice item types in your billing method each one invoking a different API (which you currently need to contact us to set up for you at no charge). They in fact both invoke the same API but with different customized filters. Each time-related invoice item type or tab can now be linked to a different pricing sheet
Support in billing was added for:
Invoice printed or PDF output enhancements to:
Added a feature to show people’s images – when they have not uploaded a photo – as a grey circle containing their initials in white letters. Before this people’s images without photos was a missing photo icon. If you upload a photo your photo will be displayed not your initials
Enhancement to expense claims to allow splitting of a single claim or a claim item between two or more projects and tasks. The % or $-figure assigned to each project, customer and task is billed accordingly, or not if the split is marked as non-billable. You will see a new icon in the billable and classification columns showing an upside down tree or org. chart if the expense claim item is split between multiple customers, projects or tasks
Enhancements to pay calculation to allow compensation elements to be linked to specific time-off types or even to specific tasks as opposed to overtime types as formerly supported. This allows you to pay a different ratio for time-off (e.g. disability at 50% of regular pay) or to pay a different rate for a specific task time is booked to (e.g. double-pay for working on an offshore oil rig). If you do link compensation to a specific task you should create an overtime type for it as well.
Allow departments to be a pre-defined list as opposed to a free text. If you define departments for one or more of your companies then the employee’s department is a selection list. We also added department to the project header so you can assign projects to a department also (this one is only a selection list). A new app to set up departments is coming very soon, please contact us in the meantime to set up new departments
Firefox formatting improvements as well as testing and fixing issues encountered in other browsers primarily IE9 and IE10.
We applied a fix to browser back button being pressed twice in quick succession. Rather than going back twice we now only go back once
Improvements to the projects RESOURCES tab to show and allow edit of the billing rate for a resource right from the RESOURCES tab, as opposed to clicking on the RATES tab. You can only do this when pricing is not by service.
At the same time we modified how clients can decide to turn OFF resource planning at project type. Instead of hiding the RESOURCES tab on a task we now default planned effort and utilization as zero, and suppress the check for a resource working simultaneously on two tasks. Now even with resource planning off you have the option to maintain task resource level planning.
Enhancements to template projects to support sub-tasks on templates as well as allowing the creation of a billable type project as a template without a customer and hiding the progress icon.
We now allow the customer on a task or ticket to be different to the task/ticket’s project’s customer. This is required for example when your contact is with a head-office or primary service provider (the project customer) and yet you still want to keep track of the site or final end customer requesting support (the task customer). We still require you to maintain the task or ticket customers as “sites” of the project’s customer.
In addition if the project customer is changed rather than changing all tasks or tickets within that project to match the new project customer, we only change tasks or tickets which matched the old project customer prior to being changed.
We also made it easier to add resources to several tasks at once by including a button to “add resource to all tasks” in the project level RESOURCES tab
Improvements to how quantities are input on a timesheet including a check for the allowed number of decimals, a warning if the time is or is not getting defaulted from task unit time based on the quantity input and a warning if the task type is not properly configured to transfer quantity to the task. We will be including quantity input in our cell details “tab” in overview mode in the near future – currently quantity input is only available in timesheet list entry or details mode.
Removal of “paid” or “unpaid” from the time-off display within timesheet
Time-off for new hires was always calculated for their first month (or first year in the case of time-off with annual not monthly accruals) based on the ratio of the number of calendar days post-hire in that period over the total number of days in that period. This has been enhanced with a new selector for time-off calculation for new hires with two additional options as follows:
Cosmetic improvements to time-off type set-up as well as a new property for calculation of absences for new hires
Stop sending emails when password is changed (unless specifically requested). This was requested by a couple of clients for added security
Performance improvements when initially logging into iBE.net including re-establishment of a content delivery network or CDN and improved packaging of our images, icons and java-script files to result in fewer http requests and less data transferred
Pay Calculation is a new module which runs after Time Evaluation and which takes the clocked or calculated attendance data as input and calculates gross pay as output. This can be in turn extracted to external systems such as ADP or Paychex. Our pay calculation module supports:
Enhancements to how invoices are sent including display of the primary contact’s email address in the invoice header and the option to edit the email address the invoice is being sent to as it is being sent. You can also send the invoice to others (including copying yourself)
Enhancement of opportunity and customer type to allow end users to add and delete sales roles. All contacts on a customer or opportunity take on a role such as “pay”, “sell to” for customers and/or “coach”, “budget holder” for opportunities. Before this enhancement clients had to contact iBE to set up new roles
Fixes to expense claim equivalent amount in company currency (for expenses entered in a different currency) to prevent user from editing the equivalent or company currency code and to re-apply the current exchange rate from xurrency.com if not defined in advance in iBE.net. Users can still override the exchange rate to match their credit card receipt.
Fix to expense item tax details pop-up, showing in display mode and allowing users to edit taxable amount or base amount, tax amount and tax percentage in the tax details popup.
Allow user the option to override the mileage unit (from miles to km or vice-versa) to cater for consultants from a country using one unit driving in a country using another
We created a new setting app for “time capture method” which allows you to define for employees whether they record total time vs. just overtime and time-off and whether they clock in or out instead of submitting timesheets. This information is used by time evaluation
Cleaned up the different icons used to show different kinds of documents in search results and other lists
Cosmetic improvements to the “breadcrumb” displayed in analytics dashboard when users drill down on a particular value or bar. Now it is easier to work out how to “go back up”
Improvements to the way in which new tickets are generated from emails sent to tickets@ibe.net including:
We have also developed an email set-up screen so that clients can set up their own email handling scenarios, as well as the option for clients to use their own mail servers to send out replies. We still recommend that you contact iBE to set up email responders!
Show task long text as a tooltip when that task is selected within a timesheet.
Time evaluation was set up as a background job (running each night).
Cosmetic enhancements to the task timer with improved clock icons and simplified list display with fewer options and icons.
Enhancements to printed (e.g. invoice) forms for currency display, showing tax code description and rate instead of just “tax”, right alignment of monetary amounts such as fees and taxes, and consistent display of all money amount decimals. Also added the option to print items or sub-items net of tax and to print the product or service “sales text” instead of the product name or title when there is a sales text.
We added a manual invoice option to create ad hoc invoices manually without defining a project first and then billing it.
Cosmetic improvements and bug fixes to the set-up screen for payment terms.
In addition we added an option to delete or cancel an invoice and re-open the source data (e.g. timesheets and expense claims) for billing again. Up until now if you cancelled or deleted an invoice the source data remained “previously billed” and would not come up for billing again.
Addition of tax and VAT rates for the rest of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, India and Russia to compliment our 60,000 or so US state, federal and local sales tax rates as well as Canadian HST/GST and UK and northern European VAT
Finally but perhaps not visible to users we moved the printing procedure from the client or browser to our servers, allowing us to print out complex forms or PDFs without interruption to your session or slowing you down
Enhancement to allow certain tasks to be excluded from booking expenses (by adding a checkbox to task type to not allow expenses)
Fixes to company or public calendar holiday generation for defining your own custom holiday schedules. You can now create a repeating pattern for example “repeat this holiday on the same date each year” or “repeat on the same day of the week which falls closest to this date each year” or even “repeat on the Friday before Easter each year”. We do not provide patterns for every religion so there is still a need to check the generated holidays comparing it to enter the name of the holiday and the year into Google. You can then easily manually correct any individual holiday dates.
We have also extended the number of predefined holiday calendars now not just US, UK and Canada but also Germany, France, Switzerland, South Africa, India, Australia and New Zealand
You can now create custom fields or define your own fields on tabs or as columns in tables. Our screen layout concept which we developed initially to change field properties (hide, make required, change labels or defaults) have been extended to also manage custom fields. Now you can define a custom field on any tab or table and updating this new data in our database is automatically taken care of. Reporting queries can access these fields in your custom reports and we will be extended our analytics module to cope with custom fields in the near future
Improvements and fixes to project and task type set-up screens including placing recently added configuration options in optimal positions
Automatically create reusable locations from company work and employee’s home address, to avoid the need for people to click on “re-use in other screens” when they enter either of these addresses. Also in the case of selecting a location for a ticket we are now showing locations from customers in the same organization as the project customer at the top of the list
Time evaluation and pay calculation are new modules to automatically determine overtime from timesheets and overtime “rules” for your employees or sub-sections of employees (based on their work-schedules) and to automatically calculate and feed gross pay to payroll system based on the compensation elements maintained in the employee compensation tab. More specific features of our time evaluation module include:
Enhancements to timesheets to allow manual input of start and stop times in HH:MM format (as opposed to selecting from a list) and to not check timesheet hours vs. work-schedule hours if the time capture method for that employee is set-up to record overtime and time-off only.
At the same time we enhanced our details or time entry list input mode to remember and default the same mode (overview vs. list entry/details) and whether the list entry was for a single day vs. the whole timesheet period. We also support column personalization and admin. users saving/sharing table layouts with other users for the timesheet overview, details and list entry tables
Various cosmetic and usability improvements to opportunities including fixing which fields are shown as required, pencil in search screen and fixes to assigned contacts, tab order, factored deal value and stage text
Fix to the total compensation and standard cost calculation from compensation details in the employee compensation tab. Now you can choose the default unit of measure for compensation details based on the compensation type concerned or the employee class, and decide in advance which compensation elements should contribute to total salary (e.g. regular pay, bonus) and/or to the standard cost calculation (such as regular pay, bonus, healthcare premiums, long term disability and mobile phone allowance). This allows clients to get closer to a burdened cost calculation for employee standard cost.
We have also developed a salary history report showing specifically changes to compensation over the life-cycle of an employee. Since compensation changes are date effective, or always based on a valid from, you can maintain compensation increases ahead of time and make date-effective compensation changes to model for example changes in compensation policy when someone is terminated and under notice.
Fixes to copying job roles regarding positions: positions are copied and their IDs are now reset based on the new job role’s ID rather than the old job role ID. Also if employees were assigned to the old job role (= staffed positions) this is not copied to the new job role
Fix to screen layout personalization to allow re-ordering of tabs (as well as changing tab labels or hiding tabs which we already supported). With our custom fields enhancements clients will also be able to create new custom tabs, as well as adding custom fields to the bottom of any iBE delivered tab
New report builder application allowing end user to create queries or dashboard reports using the same user interface. Now from a single application you can choose whether you want to create a dashboard report (with charts and so on) or a simple query (which looks at our transaction data). Then you can search for or choose fields for your report which are automatically split into dimensions (report by) and measures (report on). Query tables are then generated automatically while with analytics dashboards you are reverted to our existing dashboard designer where you can pick and choose from a variety of reporting widgets such as bar charts, grouped bars, stacked bars, pie charts, pivot or cross-tables and multi-column lists or tables, as well as date and list/value selectors or slicers
We are continuing to build up our library of pre-delivered dashboard and queries with the addition of dashboard reports for opportunity pipeline, project and client profitability and cosultant utilization plus a new query for employee time-off balances. But with this new report builder application administrators can build up a brand new dashboard report or query in minutes, by simply choosing the fields you want and then organizing them into tables, pivot-tables, bar-charts or more. Contact us if you get stuck or want some help navigating the fields, plus we are always happy to build new reports for you (now it only takes us a few minutes)
Improvements came in Osprey in performance of billing, to both the initial load of the summary page and the reload of the summary page after input of from and/to dates based on considering only timesheets, tasks and expense claims overlapping the from/to date range input. Rather than calculating billed amounts and hours from timesheets and expense claims when the summary is called up, we now store this information in each project and calculate it in the background. This only applies if the from/to dates are blank, the amounts to be billed are still calculated on the fly if you enter dates.
Speaking of the billing summary from/to dates these were also enhanced to serve two roles: as a filter for calculation and display of amount to be billed on the summary page and as the from/to date selection when clicking the $+ button to prepare and create a new invoice. If you enter from/to dates and click on the reload button the summary page is reloaded; if you just click the $+ button without reloading then a new invoice is created for your input from/to dates with waiting for the summary to be reloaded.
Credit memos and invoice payments including a popup to show and add payments and match payments entered from the billing summary screen to unpaid invoices for the same customer. Credit memos are automatically offset against existing invoices and behave similar to payments. In the future we will add payment merchant account integration for systems such as stripe, paypal and authorize.net.
Finally we applied a fix to conversion from daily rates or hourly fees for customer invoices and the time and expense report, as well as in project revenues
Improvements in the input of comments when for example rejecting a timesheet. We enhanced the title of the pop-up window which comes to enter comments depending on whether the recipient is also required or not. We also fixed a bug to allow rejection comments to automatically show in the inbox message for the next person in the workflow (e.g. the consultant who has to resubmit their timesheet)
Cosmetic improvements to customer master including more consistency with other apps (e.g. pencil in search screen) and more clarity on the SITES tab to indicate which site is the “head-quarter” or parent customer organization and which sites (the remainder) are “subsidiaries”. Also enhancements to the icons and tooltips in customer contacts tab to make it more obvious what is meant by a client contact being an external portal user, as well as adding the option to invite a customer contact to become a portal user from within the customer record directly.
Improvements to customer activities tab including having similar columns on show by default as leads and opportunities and providing the option to drill down to task details
People search application allowing you to quickly look up contact and basic job role information for employees, customer contacts and leads.
Fix to employee numbering to allow system generated or user input employee codes, as well as controlling whether employee IDs can be edited or not after initial generation. When inviting a new user if their user type is set-up to create employees automatically – which is the default – we now check and error if employee numbering is not properly set-up. This prevents the mistake of generating a new user which refers to an employee which never got created
Fix to password reset expiry date as well as scroll bars not always appearing in Safari. Fixes to the save changes pop-up coming even when changes were not made in various objects were also applied.
We applied a variety of fixes to screen layouts for users with older laptops having a screen resolution of just 1024 px. We now support a variety of popular browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox and IE) down to a minimum screen resolution of 1024 px.
Various fixes to product tax codes: tax codes e.g. US sales tax or Canadian HST/GST need to be assigned to your product or service before customer invoices can be subject to automatic sales tax calculation. Tax codes are dependent on the country you are based, but because we also support multiple company or entity organizations you can be based in more than one country. We consequently enhanced the product tax code screen to vary according to which company or companies you are setting up your product or service to be applicable, with different tax code selections appearing based on which country your assigned company is based
Milestones task strategies with integration to billing such as marking a task as ready for billing when completed, based on task status (when billing is an allowed activity in the process or workflow template) or based on task or project percent complete. You can even define multiple project milestones for different % complete thresholds as separate tasks
We also added an option to automatically update task billing quantity based on quantity input from the timesheet.
We added the option to not default project start/end dates as 1st and last date of current month
We enhanced calculated measures for dashboard reports allowing you to create and report on measures based on a formula such as utilization (billable hours / total hours) or profitability (project revenue minus project costs).
At the same time we improved our formula input box with a pop-up option to compliment our excel-like text based formula input. The popup allows users to select fields, operands (like +, -, * or /) and supported formula from selection-lists or button panels
New Android application for timesheet input. Please download it from the Android app-store to your Android device!
Work-shifts were added to work-schedules, allowing you to define specific start/stop times for each work-shift as opposed to a standard number of hours per day (flexitime) which we always supported. Now workers who have to start and stop their shift at a specific time can have shifts defined up-front and their standard working hours, overtime and even holidays are determined from their work-shifts and not from the public or company holiday calendar. So for example a maintenance worker who is on duty from 6 am until 6 pm Sunday to Wednesday each week will not have Sunday as a “weekend day off” but will instead have Thursday and Friday as normal holidays in addition of course to Saturday. And their standard daily work-hours would be 12 hours and weekly work-hours would be 48 hours (unless they also get breaks)
Added columns to timesheet search screen
Billable revenues tracked on project level: as well as tracking planned (planned hours or task quantity times rate) and actual (actual hours or task quantity * rate) revenues we are now tracking billable revenues. Billable revenues are the sum of hours * rate for all approved timesheets and expense claims as well as actual task quantity * rate for fixed price tasks, as well as the qty * price for billable task components. This information is visible in the billing summary when you first go to this app, i.e. before you enter from and to dates.
Improvement in list and display/edit invoices including additional (hidden by default) columns in list invoices, additional selection or filter options such as paid/unpaid invoices and include subsidiaries, and enhancements to the edit invoice screen including the option to edit the quantity, unit price or service for any invoice item or sub-item (when sub-items exist) for an invoice and display of whether the invoice is sent or paid as a “stamp” font in the top right corner
Fix to customer purchase orders defaulting from project to invoice even when there are no remaining funds
We removed buzzboard tabs because no-one really understood or used them. Instead with our new Osprey release we just show one buzzboard tab accessible by clicking on the “messages” icon in the main toolbar. This buzzboard tab now “floats” above the existing screen rather than squashing it down, and it can be moved and resized as before when clicking on “pop-out”. You can still hide or mark individual buzzboard messages as read and show/hide read messages.
The buzzboard and inbox are now more consistent with each other, both having the option to show all types of messages (not just workflow messages in our previous inbox application). The inbox being a full screen application has more options than our buzzboard with user filters, sorting and table layout/columns. The display grouping all workflow messages for projects/tasks on a single timesheet or expense claim into one group with a single-click approval for all have been rolled into the new inbox application as a group-by option (and will be a sub-title button in the near future). Finally we added columns to our inbox for number of hours or value of expense claim items to make it easier to approve or reject timesheets or expense claims from the inbox without having to drill-down
Improvements to how expense types are set-up.
Some cosmetic enhancements to expense claims for consistency with other apps (e.g. pencil in search screen) and general usability
For our Osprey release we made too many user interface clean-ups to mention but we hope the new look of the application speaks for itself. It is much cleaner and simply devotes more space to your application with the removal of certain user interface elements like the footer or the open left panel. We also added an * next to required input fields to make it more obvious which fields are required input.
Changed the left panel from Griffon to Osprey. Rather than always showing the left panel with widgets either expanded or collapsed, which took up valuable screen space and left users with reduced space for the main app, we now only show an icon strip by default. If you click on any of the icons the left panel reappears and you can show or hide left-panel widgets as you wish by clicking on their icons. The left panel widgets always appear in the same order top to bottom as the icons and if you try to show too many rather than hiding the lowest one below the scrolling bottom we simply hide it again, unselecting its icon automatically. This is why sometimes when you click on an icon to show a widget the current one is hidden, and sometimes it is not hidden.
Aside from the user interface the main enhancement for Osprey was in performance. Performance improvements were made for navigation and loading of long lists: we now do what is called “lazy load” based on new options provided in the latest release of our underlying browser framework (Ext JS version 4.22). So if you are opening for example my tasks or my leads and have alot of entries while they are all queried from the server (allowing you to sort, group and filter based on the whole population not just on a subset) the system only renders or prepare a small subset of rows to present to you on the screen. Instead of click “next page” you can simply scroll to get more tasks, leads etc. rendered. This is called “infinite scroll” in programming circles!
With regard to long text editing such as comments we kept the cursor inside the long text after typing colon (:). “Task:” entered within a long text is a code for “link to some task” and automatically fires a search for tasks in iBE.net to link to. This has been speeded up and now fires in the background keeping the cursor within the long text. Links within long text were added to iBE documents (such as a link to another task or ticket) as well as to other web-sites or urls (such as Google Drive or drop-box documents). To invoke a link in a long text either enter the name of the iBE object followed by a colon (e.g. Task:) or click on the link or chain icon in our long-text toolbar.
Fix to the input field for $/unit such as unit price, cost rate or labor/service fees to default the currency from the company and validate that the unit must match either the product or service base unit (in case of a fixed fee for example) or be a valid time unit (in case of a T&M cost or fee).
Document sharing feature was introduced on several objects with a new “share” button in the main toolbar. This brings a popup allowing you to email links to this document to your colleagues or external business partners as well as defining permissions as to who can access or update this document.
Modified “my tasks” to show not only tasks where I am assigned as a resource and tasks where I am the primary workflow owner, but to also include tasks where I am a secondary workflow owner (for cases where a workflow step is sent to several people at once).
Fixes for app asking to save changes even when nothing was changed. This is being fixed on an app by app basis so if you find this still happening somewhere please let us know!
Links for “try our new beta-release” and “go to classic” in login and main app screens to support the gradual roll-out of our new Osprey 422 release
Improvements in readibility of timeline or document history by not just showing fields which have changed by also when changes are made to sub-objects showing the key or what object was changed. For example if a task resource planned or actual effort is modified we now show the task resource name as well as the fields that were changed.
We added coaching or guidance for users new to iBE.net. The first time you invoke an application little pop-up post-it notes are displayed with useful information about the application. You can choose to show the next “note”, dismiss the notes and start using the app or dismiss the notes but show them next time
A new look project management application was delivered in our Osprey release! This application now includes the added project header information such as resources, rates, financials and progress as TABS rather than having to find the link to show project header data. This is more consistent with our other applications. Project tasks are now displayed in the first TAB.
At the same time we enhanced the project RATES tab to show rates by service, by service and billing rate code combined or just by billing rate code. Billing or pricing by resource alone (not by service) is a new pricing option added to make it easier to maintain billing rates on a project level, but does not allow clients to vary rates according to task or task service (according to what is being delivered). Use billing by service and resource rate code if you need to adjust prices by task or service as well as by resource.
Part of this enhancement included consideration of client projects which are priced by service and rate code when in future they will be only priced by billing rate code (resource). If you open one of these projects you are warned that pricing by service/rate code combination will be deleted and do you want to copy to pricing by rate code alone. If you accept this (you can cancel and modify the project type setting instead to price by service as well as resource) then service pricing for the first service is copied.
We added a feature to download a task (for example a demo or meeting) to your local calendar. The task download to calendar link is available in project tasks, my tasks, my tickets and sales activities.
Finally a FINANCIALS tab was added showing bar-charts of cost and revenue performance, as well as project level costs, revenues, funds. payments and budgets – planned, actual and remaining. Project costs and revenues are automatically rolled up from task costs and revenues while invoices and payments are syn’d up from our billing module. Funds and budgets are maintained at project levels for funds or customer PO’s and at task or project level for cost budgets
For our Osprey release we added the option to enter time entries in a list: as well as our timesheet period overview with one row per customer/project/task combination we have built a time entry list view. This view provides one row per time entry allowing you to enter additional information such as task quantity, start/stop times, remarks or location in the same list vs. a cell details tab below the overview. There are in fact two time entry details views: for a single day or for the entire period. Choose the view which suits you best according to your setup and the number of time entries in a period.
We also now allow quantity input into timesheets: there are two separate use-cases here each coming from a different client
Improvements in time off request usability including displaying current balances for the top few paid time off types at the top
Option to print remarks inside the invoice items list or table: formerly remarks were printed at the end of the table, so we added the option to print timesheet etc. remarks as a column within the item list on the printed layout.
Fixes to billing for exceptional or “rainy day” scenarios such as workflow templates that are invalid, billing status codes that are improperly maintained and services that are missing their rates. Also improvements to how billing messages are presented back to the end user. We also implemented a billing option called “With logging in server” which is mainly for internal use to trouble-shoot customer billing issues in more detail as compared to the messages given back to the end user
We added an option to sort data in bar-charts by dimension including alphabetical sort for bar charts based on some text or code, and date sort for bar charts organizing bars by time period. Prior to this enhancement all bar charts were sorted by value ascending or descending (length of bar) which does not make much sense when trying to show data points over a time series. At the same time we increased the maximum allowed number of bars from around 7 to around 50
Cosmetic enhancements to the billing summary list including additional (hidden) columns, fixes to the task selection based on overlapping from/to dates and a selection by company. Advanced selections by customer, project leader or billing method will be added in the near future
We modified how unclassified expense claims are saved and presented to users. Expense claims can be saved as unclassified from mobile phone apps and rather than rejecting the update we store them in a “draft” or unclassified state. This means that they cannot be submitted or billed until they are classified. Rather than clicking on “open > drafts” as our original design required, you can now see draft expense claims in the expense claim search list app, in a lighter grey font. You can open draft claims just like any other claim and provided it is classified you can “publish” the claim at any time to make it active. Once active the status e.g. submit action will appear, so another way to see if claims are draft is a space in the status column
Fix to save whereby if the save failed for any reason the data that was previously changed was not being marked as necessary to save before leaving the transaction
Analytics dashboard run-time user personalization options including expanding a single widget to full-screen size, hiding a widget and changing the dimension or measures used to show how data is organized (report on and report by) on the fly
Fixes to workflow or process template set-up including correct trapping of unsaved changes and fixes to advanced tabs for each step such as workflow recipients
Created automated test scripts for LinkedIn (contact form) and billing as well as login screen
Added an option to forward a workflow action to another user. For example you are assigned to approve a ticket but you know you are not the right person. As opposed to rejecting it back and then changing the task owner you can now forward it to the right person
Improvements in look and feel of analytics dashboards including a less colorful theme (more neutral tones and greys insteads of yellows, browns and oranges) as well as a more consistent look and feel as compared to the rest of our application
Automatic emails whenever someone is assigned to a task, whenever a task is completed and when someone is marked in the notification tab of workflow set-up. We also added the option to customize these emails based on each client’s requirements (contact us if you want to change the format or content of these emails)
Team Calendar report showing all members of your team and their current and planned absenses, as well as company holidays
Improvements in usability of date and time fields with a “time picker” when the field allows input of time as well as date. Also we added the option to enter “time only” if the date is fixed. Time can be input from the picker or via the keyboard, like date in a variety of formats. Note that when a date field does not support time the time is saved internally as mid-day GMT.
Timeline or document history showing a history of all changes made to a particular document. You can scroll down to see earlier history or filter by type of change such as only showing comments, status changes or field updates
Improvements in bank card registration including automatic regular update of the list of bank cards accepted by our third-party bank integrator service provider (Yodlee), improvements in the user interface to enter bank card information and consideration of bank or financial institution specific security protocols or login screens
Rationalized and extended the list of analytics dashboard fields including revising all field names to make them more intuitive and avoid overlaps
Overtime or time item types were added to timesheets to support premium rates payments and billing rates. Overtime types are associated with the timesheet type and in turn with a work-schedule, and allow clients to define for example 1.5x pay and billing rates for certain projects, work conditions or work-hours. You can choose whether employees select the overtime type manually in their timesheet or calculate this automatically using our future time evaluation module. You can also limit the number of overtime types selectable in timesheets to ones defined in the employee compensation details (as opposed to create separate work-schedules and timesheet types for each unique employee group)
Added a preview option in the browser for PDF and TXT files. You may still need to download larger PDF files but now you can preview these files in your browser directly
Book time from task details: you can now enter time from the task details RESOURCES tab (for anyone assigned to the task) or from the task list overview in project > task, my tasks or my tickets (for yourself only).
We built versions of time & expense list and time & attendance (time booked vs. work-schedule hours) for individual consultants, showing the same information but only for the current user. Also added attachments or files to timesheets
Fix to browser back button in Internet Explorer
An interface for expenses and customer invoices to SAP was configured for a major client. This interface directly calls SAP’s BAPIs to post into Finance/Controlling for expenses and customer receivables, with SAP GL account numbers mapped based on rules by expense type, customer group or product/service being offered
Fixes to attendance clocking interface and setup screen for biometric and clocking devices
Tax added on expense items, giving you the option to activate VAT or other tax codes by expense type (e.g. for flights and hotels but not for phone bills) and have the system calculate and propose a tax amount in your expense based on the applicable VAT etc. rate for the country in which the expense was incurred. You can typically edit both the tax rate and the amount for example to deal with cases where only a part of your hotel expense was taxable. Your system administrator can also choose in your company set-up whether to bill this tax onto customers or whether to back it out automatically and potentially replace it with a sales tax
Option to book time from the task, as a fast-path means for project managers or resources who normally have task or ticket details open to book time. This time is fed directly into a timesheet and still needs to be submitted and approved on a weekly (or alternative period) basis
Harmonization of the activities view between leads, opportunities and customers (with minimal differences such as not showing customer column in customer task list). Allowing each one of these as well as sales activity app to drill down to the same task details screen
Display of photos next to people’s names when available
Usability fixes to expenses including pop-ups for quick entry of rate based and mileage based expenses types from the expense claim item list directly. This prevents you from having to open the expense item details screen each time you enter a rate based or mileage based expense. You can still enter $-based expenses right in the table of expense items.
We also added visibility of paid amount to expense claims and extra (hidden by default) columns to the expense item list for Quantity, Unit price, Tax amount, Paid in cash, Reimbursable and Distance
To make billing easier, you can now create more flexible formulae in the pricing or calculation sheet. Formulae in the pricing sheet are flexible enough to cope with contract terms such as retainers, advanced payments and over-and-above payments so please contact our customer support team if you need to create custom pricing sheets.
Employee work-schedules are now being taken into account when converting from daily billing rates during billing or displaying revenue for timesheet hours. This work-schedule can be defined in the project header or taken from he Employee record depending on how you setup the task type
Document management comes to iBE.net with our new Files application to manage your files directly in iBE.net, saving you the need to use Google Drive, Dropbox or box.net to manage business files. You can upload, search and organize files centrally. From Files you can:
If you click on tags in the tag widget you can see the files associated with that tag.
Based on Customer feedback, you can download opportunity lists to excel
Keep track of which claims you have paid. You can now enter a paid amount for expense reimbursement and payment date in the iBE.net expense claim. You can update this information via direct input from Absence Admin, batch file upload with data exported from Quickbooks or via workflow, by using a pay step to trig an auto-update
To get your business data out of iBE.net and into your financial software more efficiently,
we have made the following enhancements:
Please contact our customer support team for help with mapping your Quickbooks, Salesforce or SAP data elements to iBE.net or for updating iBE.net objects from excel documents.
Knowing how much a project costs is vital to your business and we want to make it as easy as possible. Therefore, regardless of whether you make changes via the timesheet or the task details screen, task cost and revenue roll-up from timesheets considers the overtime billing and costing ratio and whether time is billable or not (for revenue)
Third party device’s time-zones now automatically adjust for daylight savings time
Additional advanced search options such as my team, adjustments only or redemptions only has been added to the absence administration application. At the same time, the options for “my team’s absences” and “everyone’s absences” has been removed from the my absence app.
Communicate about leave requests more efficiently, Comments made during approval or rejection can now be seen from the absence request screen. Click on the comments tab to see them. Based on customer feedback, you can book more than one half-day absence on the same day. You can also see a history of all changes to an absence in the history/timeline display
To make it easier to claim the things you buy, you can now create rate based expenses based on any unit of measure, not just miles, km or days (per diems)
At iBE.net, we are committed to helping you customize the system to work best for you. To that end we have made two enhancements to make the iBE.net system even more customizable:
Need to keep track of who requested some work to be done? No problem. You can now edit the requested by field for a task. Requested by can be any customer contact at the customer for the ticket’s project if the project is billable/external.
Need to keep track of classifications for the work you do, such as inventory used to complete a request or resolutions to common problems? You can now code tasks with catalogs. Catalogs allow you to define your own list of values for a quick and easy customization
You can now create business rules to check timesheets, such as preventing people from submitting timesheets once client billing has taken place. Business rules can be added on Timesheet Types under Setup HR in the system menu. Contact our customer support team if you need help setting up business rules
The sales activity screen now drills down to the same task details as my tasks or my tickets
Save more time and update your Customer contacts while logging Helpdesk Tickets. You can now create contacts on the fly in the request by field. These contacts will get automatically linked to the ticket’s customer.
Save even more time by adding time to helpdesk tickets from the grid. Now you can include a column ticket overview to jump in one mouse-click to time input. Log multiple tickets in the grid in a flash. You can now enter the problem description from the ticket overview screen. Find your tickets more quickly using grouping the same way you already do so in My Tasks.
To make it clear how many tickets exist in each status, the number of tickets is displayed to the right of the status and a “More” button has been added after the first two statuses to make it clearer where to click to see the rest of the list. Keep all your tickets right on track. Traffic lights (indicators for tracking how likely work is to be completed on time) and other additional search options/filters have been added to the more organized layout of the search screen.
To rapidly book tickets and assign the work to yourself, you can change the settings on the task to default the assigned resource of a task to the current user. In by popular request, you can limit who can be assigned as a resource on a task or ticket
to just employees, based on a task type setting
Want to take advantage of the latest biometric clocking devices for attendance? The attendance module has been extended with an application to manage clock in/out devices from third party hardware suppliers such as ZK Technologies. In the device mgt. screen you can:
Some set-up and consulting is required to integrate third party devices to iBE.net’s attendance module so please contact us if you are interested in using this feature
In order to enhance usability of the system, we are always focusing on simplifying entry of information into the system. For absences, we have made two key enhancements:
We are always trying to find new ways to help you keep your business running smoothly. To this end, we have a new solution to support different billing and costing rates for overtime. Setup of overtime requires changes to several system level settings. If you are interested in using Overtime, please contact Customer Management for a walkthrough of the solution. Once setup, employees can select the overtime type in the timesheet. Billing rates are automatically multiplied by the overtime billing ratio, as well as task and project actual costs and revenues factoring in the appropriate billing and cost ratios for time booked to the task. Overtime types are not associated with planned costs and revenues
You can now import vCards (.vcf files) for both Mac and Windows into contacts. Open the contact form popup from customer or leads screen and click on the “import vcf” button in the bottom left corner
Are your employees meeting their billable hour targets? This is no longer a cumbersome question to answer. We added three new fields to the compensation tab to keep track of target billing revenue over a period. This is very useful to see if your consultants are meeting their assigned targets. These three fields are hidden by default so contact iBE.net customer support if you want to change the screen layout configuration to show these fields
You can now update the actual finish date in a task. By default the actual finish date is set as the time when the task was completed or percent complete set to 100%. But in case you closed out a task late, you can now edit the actual finish date to prevent people from booking time or expenses to the task any time after the proper close date.
Change history data has been extended to task details, product and employee
In order to make it easier for you to build your own dashboards, we have simplified the analytics field names and descriptions in many reporting tables such as time, tasks and employees
To increase consistency between Absence displays, we have made column headings more consistent between employee absence balances and projected absence balances in absence request. Please note that projected balances take into account forecast accruals as well as submitted requests and adjustments up to the selected date
Expenses now include a “Match” feature. The matching logic looks for all pending expenses imported from your credit card / bank card which have not yet been matched to any expense item, where the amount and currency are the same and the transaction date is either the same as or within a 5 days of the expense item date. Users can access match feature from pending expenses screen or from receipts screen.
If the user subsequently imports the matched item into a claim both the receipt and imported credit card information are accessible from within the claim. We are always updating the list of banks/credit card companies from which you can import charges for expense claims. For this purpose, we use the 3rd party system Yodlee, which is the same engine that powers Mint. We will continue updating this list every 2-3 months based on Yodlee’s growing database of financial institutions.
To enhance the usability of expense claims, we have changed the “assign” button to “import” for bringing pending expenses into an expense claim, as we think it a more understandable term
We have enhanced how the workflow messages update to make things faster. When an item such as a timesheet has line item approvals, the header displays the lowest stage of the workflow for any line item, such as submitted or rejected. The enhancement ensures that changes to the line item status automatically updates the status of the document header instantaneously
We have made a final series of enhancements to the Time & Attendance report. These enhancements include:
In order to improve functional consistency between reports, we have enhanced the “Everyone” filter in the Time & Expense report. Now, when you click “Everyone” in the screen header, you have the option of selecting all employees if you are a system admin user. If you are an Advanced level user, you will see all the employees for whom you are the HR representative
Managing Absences for your employees just got easier. Much like the popular Time Admin and Expense Admin functions, Absence Admin can now be found under the list of available Mange functions. Authorized users can view, create, and edit leave requests for others. As the administrator, you can now also control whether employees can create their own absence requests or not, by absence type. It is recommended to only allow employees to create / submit their own absence requests if these adjustments are subject to approval workflows
The inbox filters for “this week” and “this month” were filtering by the current calendar week or month. This was causing confusion during the rollover between months. It has been changed to mean “the last seven days” and “the last 30 days”
Businesses with multiple office sites don’t have to be hard to keep track of. We have enhanced the Sites tab in the customer application to make it easier for you. Check “customer has multiple sites” if your customer record is for an organization with several offices or locations. Then set up a unique customer record and address for each site and connect all the sites under one Enterprise record by connecting them in the sites tab
Even small businesses can house different entities within a single company. To aid managing this, we are rolling out multiple business units or departments this week. If you operate in more than one country, you may have employees assigned to multiple companies or sell from multiple sales offices. iBE.net customer support can create multiple companies or sales departments for you. This will allow you to assign each employee, lead, opportunity, customer and project to the appropriate business or department. The associated transactions, such as timesheets, expense claims and customer invoices, will then follow suit. This functionality is still in beta-stage while we are in the process of developing a front-end so you can edit your enterprise structure without calling iBE.net customer support. However, if you would like to be added to the list of companies involved in beta testing, please reach out to Customer Support
Sometimes you don’t want people changing the tasks they have been assigned to or creating their own. We are closing a final loophole towards this goal. Users who are not authorized to open and edit projects or tasks can no longer create tasks through the “quick add” left panel widget. Likewise the “+” button to quickly add a task from the task timer or my tasks left panel widget is automatically hidden for these users. Be sure to set up job-role based navigation menus and mark the project, tasks and task details applications as “display only” in the navigation menu for users who should not be able to create tasks. Feel free to reach out to Customer Management if you need any help setting up your navigation menus
We have enhanced our Analytics application with the ability to create your own calculated measures. Now you can take the data you are already collecting and synthesize new information by applying formulas to create custom metrics. There are 4 types of calculated measures available:
You can create a new calculated measure while you are creating a new dashboard and reuse it in all the dashboard widgets. Currently, there are 2 types of aggregation formulas, which can be used with the calculated measures, SUM and AVERAGE. You can specify one of these formulas while creating a chart or by changing the chart properties from the property panel
We are bringing the all benefits of integration to your helpdesk. We are ready for Customer Beta testing on our My Tickets application. Here is a list of our current ticketing features:
Please contact us if you have an interest in learning more about our helpdesk ticket module.
To make it easier to get your bills out the door, we have added sales tax and VAT to the iBE.net billing application. Tax rates are being regularly updated and kept in sync with regulatory changes on a monthly basis, for both the 60,000 or so US-based jurisdictions (down to town/city/parish/zip code level in certain states) as well as for Canada, UK and EU. We will add tax information for other countries in the coming weeks.
Now you can set-up tax information in three areas as follows:
The newly defined tax rules will automatically calculated the necessary sales tax or VAT and place it on the invoice, depending on how your pricing sheets are set up. Contact iBE customer support if you need this feature in case we need to adjust your pricing sheet to include sales taxes or VAT. If you have not assigned a location to a Customer record, a tax jurisdiction can be selected during the invoicing process. Sales tax amounts are calculated item by item and summarized by tax code. Instead of a single field for total invoice tax amount, you will get a table or list showing the different tax codes and their respective totals, which are part of the invoice line item pricing. The total summary amount will still print on invoice forms that you send to your clients.
Sending invoices to your retainer based clients, doesn’t have to be a hassle. We are pleased to announce that iBE.net can now automate the invoicing of your retainer based contracts, without the need to manually adjust task/service quantities from one month to the next. Our retainer solution will allow you to bill the retainer fee and time and materials overages. We can also handle any rollovers for the selected billing interval. Tasks used for retainer-based contracts should still be set up as T&M tasks, which will aggregate contract and overage hours together. Since setup of these contracts may seem a little complicated at first, please contact iBE.net Customer Management for help in setting your retainer contracts up in the system
You can now click the “back” button in the browser while working in iBE.net and it will go back the previous iBE.net screen or activity instead of the previous web page you visited prior to opening iBE.net.
We are currently working on a central file management application so you can use iBE.net to manage all your files instead of or alongside Google Docs or Dropbox. We will publish more information on this in the coming weeks when it is released but we encourage any clients who might be interested in this feature to contact us for beta testing
Non-submitted timesheets can also now be deleted in the time administrator tool to make it easier to submit time for others.
In order to improve performance, the solution now defaults the initial from/to dates in reports to today/yesterday. This decreases the initial load time. You can still adjust the date and click the “reload” button to get the range you want.
Finally, We have enhanced our attendance solution to help you mitigate those common clocking errors. If an employee submits two clock “in” records in succession then we will assume the second one is in reality a clock “out”. If the second clock was received on the next day or in the new work-shift we will assume the second clock is also a clock “in” and they forgot to clock out the day before. Supervisors can still review, amend and correct attendance records using the time and attendance report
If you haven’t submitted the absence yet, you can now delete it. Rejected absence requests can also be deleted, if you decide not to correct and resubmit them
We now make it even easier to send invoices to your customers by enhancing how timesheet remarks and expense receipts are printed with customer invoices. You can choose whether or not to include expense receipts and/or timesheet remarks in customer invoice PDFs by invoice item category. You can also edit remarks in the invoice before they are printed.
Billing in iBE.net summarizes the time, materials, and expenses booked on billable client projects so that the resulting customer invoice is shorter and therefore more manageable. The option to summarize time and expense items is a key feature of iBE.net’s billing process, and gives our clients the flexibility to meet their own customer demands with varied invoice layouts. Previously, customer invoices could be summarized by service provided, task, employee or expense type. Now we have added the option to summarize by the date when time or expense was incurred, as well as the option not to summarize at all. You also have the option to change summarization options by type. So you can summarize your time while line item expenses, etc, making iBE.net invoicing more flexible than ever
Now that you have all your employees submitting expense claims, you also need to be able to mark which ones you have reimbursed. You can manage this information either of two easy ways:
Payment status has also been added to the time & expense item report as well as to the expense claim search list and historical claim screen with the “Amount Paid”. This allows employees and administrators to view the amount paid against each claim
To improve system performance, the system will only load attachments only when requested. This may cause a very slight reduction in the speed at which attachment thumbnails appear. It will however improve load speeds significantly on tasks when you do not open the attachment tab or pop-up
We are always striving to improve system performance speed in order to keep your work buzzing along. Previously, downloading large lists (more than 1000 rows or so) to Excel was taking too long and resulting in time-outs. To prevent this, we have enhanced the system to allow reports to download in the background and be delivered by email to the email address entered in the download window. Please make sure that you have marked an email address as “preferred” in user preferences or my profile contact information to receive automatic emails.
As you probably run the same report again and again, you can now save selections of multiple employees in the time & attendance and time & expense item reports via the “save layout” option (the small personal setting gear icon in the top-right of the list)
In order to make iBE.net more intuitive, have enhanced the way timesheets allow you to book time against a task. Previously you could only book time and expenses to open tasks assigned to the employee of the timesheet or expense. Now, the system will check to see if the task was open on the day you want to book time to it. Since expense claims do not have a “start date”, the process is slightly different. Available tasks go four weeks back, unless you enter an incurred on date more than four weeks in the past, at which time additional tasks will become available
Communicating vital information to your clients has never been easier as we now allow you to print remarks from the timesheet on the invoice. Not to worry, all remarks are editable during the billing process. Some enhancements have been made to ensure that time and expenses booked through customized workflow templates or retainer based contracts are seamlessly sent to billing. In order to help you manage your invoices more easily, we have enhanced the list invoices screed to group invoices by Due date
Part of iBE.net’s elegance is its ability to send line items from mixed claims and timesheets to the appropriate person for approval. However, we understand that approving each individual line item can be extremely tedious. Therefore, you can all the time or expense items you are responsible for approving with a single click at the top of the list. This will not approve or reject any items in the claim for which you are not responsible.
We have improved the speed at which multiple inbox messages are processed as part of our ongoing efforts to increase overall inbox performance. We have also truncated activity titles in the inbox to prevent eclipsing of adjacent columns such as status or next step buttons
You can have even more control over your employee’s time and expense than before. We have enhanced our workflow template to support the following vital management functions:
Please reach out to iBE.net customer management if you are interested in taking
advantage of these new functionalities.
The user interface for expense claims and receipts has been enhanced. Updates to task progress has been improved to accurately account for time booked against tasks that are moved to different projects or time included on timesheet items that get deleted.
We are proud to announce our newest application-Attendance. You can now track your employee’s clocking in and out with ease, either through our left panel widget or via an independent device. We can currently even support biometric devices such as finger print scanners. The time and attendance report has also been enhanced to allow managers to make manual adjustments as necessary to either daily total hours or to detailed clock in/out time-pairs
Error and warning messages that appear while processing items for invoicing are now easy to access after they have disappeared from the screen. The messages can be displayed again when one is looking at the invoice. These messages are shown in the pricing instance popup (calculator) at the bottom with their count. For example, it might show ‘Error messages (2), Warning messages (3), etc’. Upon clicking this link, the messages will be displayed. The calculator icon in the invoice detail grid will also show a warning yellow triangle if there are errors. We have also enhanced the pricing sheet with layout improvements as well as the option to re-price an open invoice after changing parameters or variables in the sheet that you are permitted to update
To make it even easier to reply to comments you receive about tasks in the system, we have changed the sender of the alert email to comments@ibe.net. Now when you hit reply, it will automatically update the comments with your reply as long as you keep the task id/description in the subject line. Other recipients can be added to the email manually
At iBE.net, we have always made it easy to download lists or tables to Excel with a single click. Now we are making it even easier by allowing all downloaded numbers to be automatically accessible in Excel for use in formulas by separating the value and units into separate columns.
To download durations as a number:
Finding the project you need has never been simpler. System administrators can now see all projects regardless of whether they are listed as a project resource. You can now use workflow to complete your tasks! This will be especially useful for closing support tickets after customer approval. Completion of a task (via workflow or otherwise) sets percent complete as 100%, remaining effort and utilization as zero and actual finish date as the date/time the task was completed, just like clicking the status bubble on the left hand side of the grid does now.
Last week we introduced you to the extended Project header. We extended the project header to include a financial accounting tab showing summarized costs, revenues, billed amounts as well as customer PO funds at the project level. This week, we have added this financial data to the project search screen as hidden columns. Provided you are authorized, you can add these columns to the project search screen as you do other columns now. This can be a very useful financial overview of several projects at once and be included in the excel download of the project list.
Made handling of tasks and subtasks more intuitive. Add a subtask adds your new subtask below the other subtasks. Add a row will create a sister task at the same level as the task that is highlighted.
Want to know how much you would have made it you had billed by Time and Materials instead of your fixed pricing method? No problem. Equivalent Time & Material revenues are calculated and displayed in the task dates/cost/quantity tab. To use this feature make sure that you have maintained a billing rate code for the consultant in question which is in the same (or a compatible) unit of measure as the task’s service rate
We understand how important it is to have data at your fingertips, but we also understand how important it is to not let your sensitive data get into the wrong hands. You can now hide report/list columns from unauthorized users for greater data security. To do this you need to create a restricted screen layout for the document category (timesheet, expense claim etc.) concerned and mark desired columns as hidden. Then you can link the screen control layout to a custom job-role based navigation menu. Contact support for more information on this great feature!
The time and expense items report is now even more informative. The report has been enhanced with some additional columns (claim header status etc.) and the option to list or filter expense claims based on the claim date as opposed to the date the charge was incurred on
We have added a history tab to timesheets. The full list shows all changes including status updates, value changes and comments to the timesheet. You can even filter the report to only show the types of changes you are interested in by selecting status/workflow changes from the list at the top of the window
Gain more control of your projects with the new extended project header. To access, click on more on the upper right hand side of the project header to see tabs for General Information (Goals, Location & Phases), Project Resources, Schedule & Progress, Service Rates, Financials, Comments, Attachments and History. Extended project header includes:
We have enabled quicker opening speeds for tasks by creating an extra menu item in the standard delivered menu under “Tasks” called ‘Create Task’. You should still manage, track and edit your tasks using either Projects or My Task