6/4/2013
Overview of the Most Notable Changes
We've made the most significant changes in these areas:
Bonus/Commission Manager: (BETA feature): Our new Bonus Manager lets you design a powerful performance incentive plan that takes into account not only profitability but also completion, payment status, customer satisfaction, and job file management.
Document Improvements: We've added drag & drop capabilities, made it easier to see what's been sent, and made other document changes. (Additional changes to documents are coming in the next release as well.)
Email: On the email tab, if an incoming email has attached documents, those documents are now shown below the email. Double-click any attachment to open it.
Xactimate Estimate Import into Chronicle's Budget: You can now import figures from any Xactimate estimate with a Recap by Category into Chronicle's budget.
Pinning Items to the Home Page: For jobs, documents, people, and organizations that you are actively working with, you can now pin these items to your Home page to make them easier to get back to.
Job Feedback Tracking: Chronicle now gives you a way to track feedback on employees and jobs.
Scored/Rated Surveys: Chronicle can now automatically calculate a score on surveys that have Rating questions. The resulting score appears in the bonus evaluator, and it will also appear in future employee performance reports. This can be useful for surveys that track things like customer satisfaction or job performance.
Saved Display Changes: Chronicle now remembers the new window position if you move Chronicle's main window, and it remembers column customizations on a number of key reports.
Ability to Exclude People from Mass Communications: We've added the ability to exclude people from emails or other mass communications.
Setup Changes: There are a number of new categories and customizations in Chronicle's setup.
Miscellaneous Fixes: We made various minor enhancements and fixed a various minor bugs.
Each of these areas are elaborated on below.
Bonus/Commission Report
This feature is still in a testing stage (beta) for the summer, but we believe it works and you are free to try it now if you wish.
This release contains a beta version of our new Bonus/Commission manager. This lets you design a powerful performance incentive plan that takes into account not only profitability but also completion, payment status, customer satisfaction, and job file management.
This new bonus manager automatically calculates bonuses based on rules that you define. You can make these rules simple or complex, taking into account many factors including:
- different rules for each job role and for hourly employees
- different rules for different departments
- bonuses amounts based on invoiced amount, paid (collected) amount, sold price, flat rate, or the difference between target and actual performance
- bonuses can be paid when departments are added, completed, invoiced, or paid (collected)
- Up to 4 tiers of positive bonuses and 3 tiers of negative bonuses.
- ability to override calculated bonuses
- different bonuses for different job sources
-
custom bonus plans for specific employees
In addition to calculating bonuses based on conditions you define, the bonus evaluator also gives you additional information to determine what bonus you should give:
- profit and labor percentages
- job feedback
- satisfaction surveys
- document on-time percentages
- activity on-time percentages
- department on-time status
- scheduling percentage
See the instructions on the bonus manager for more detail.
Document Improvements
Drag & Drop
You can now drag documents from your Windows desktop or any folder to Chronicle. You can drag documents to the documents window in Chronicle, to an email/journal, or over the Jobs, People and Organizations tabs. (The documents will be added to the highlighted job, person, etc.) When you drag the documents, Chronicle brings up a screen to confirm the job/person/org (you can change this at the top) and to indicate which requirement(s) the documents meet.
Sent Documents View
The Documents window has a new Sent Documents tab that lets you quickly review which documents in the file have been emailed or faxed.
Other Document Changes
The job documents screen now has an Add Missing button that lists all missing requirements for the job and that lets you more quickly add what's missing.
You can now multi-select documents to change security level for multiple docs at once.
Email Improvements
On the email tab, if an incoming email has attached documents, those documents are now shown below the email. Double-click any attachment to open it.
Xactimate Estimate Import into Chronicle's Budget
You can now import figures from any Xactimate estimate with a Recap by Category into Chronicle's budget. To do this, you must do some one time setup to tell Chronicle what activities each Xactimate category corresponds to and what percentage typically goes to labor, sub, and materials. To do this setup, go to the Labor/Budget tab in the main setup, and go to the Activity Budgeting subtab. For each department, use the Add button over the Xactimate activity mapping list to map each activity to the corresponding Xactimate category. (You can map activities that aren't selected, but the list at the right will only show the Xactimate categories for the Chronicle activity that's selected on the left.)
Once you've done this setup, to import an estimate for a job, go to the budget and click Import from Xactimate. You'll see a list of all documents that have been added for the job. Pick the estimate if it's there, or click Browse for Estimate to find an external file if it's not there.
Pinning Items to the Home Page
For jobs, documents, people, and organizations that you are actively working with, you can now pin these items to your Home page in Chronicle to make them easier to get back to. For example, you might pin a job that needs particular follow-up or a document that was in progress. You can pin items from various places. For example, to pin a job, you can right click the job in the job list on the Jobs tab, in the Job Manager, in the Collections Manager, or you can click Pin Job to Homepage in the toolbar in the job file.
To return to any pinned item, just click it on the Home page.
Job Feedback Tracking
Chronicle now gives you a way to track feedback on employees and jobs. For example, if a customer calls with feedback about an employee or job, or if a supervisor has comments about an employee's work, you can now enter this feedback into Chronicle.
The results of this feedback appear in the bonus evaluator, and it will also appear in future employee performance reports. You can also review all feedback for an employee (for example, when it's time for an employee review) in the person file for the employee.
New Scored/Rated Surveys
Chronicle can now automatically calculate a score on surveys that have Rating questions. The resulting score appears in the bonus evaluator, and it will also appear in future employee performance reports. This can be useful for surveys that track things like customer satisfaction or job performance.
For a survey to be scored, the survey must have Rating questions. These rating questions are added on the Survey tab in the main setup. Once you've defined the rated questions, the survey is automatically scored whenever someone fills it out. If unrated questions are mixed with rated questions, the unrated questions have no effect on the score.
Saved Display Changes
If you reposition the main Chronicle window, even to a different monitor, Chronicle now remembers the new window position and automatically opens in the new position when you re-open the program.
If you reposition or resize columns in these reports, Chronicle now remembers these changes and positions the columns where you moved them whenever you reopen the reports:
- Collection manager
-
Labor manager (1st three tabs)
- Job Manager: Current Jobs and Financial reports
- Bonus Manager
Ability to Exclude People from Mass Communications
If people ask to be excluded from emails or other mass communications, we've add the ability to exclude them. To do this, double-click the person to open the person file. On the General tab, to the right of the phone list, there are now options added ability to exclude the person from all or selected mass communications. (The mass communication types are defined on the Categories tab in the main setup if you need to change the options there.)
Setup Changes
Categories
Chronicle now has these new categories that you can define values for:
| New Category | Default Values |
| Job Feedback Types | Breakage, Cleanliness, Courteousness, Quality of Work, Timeliness, Work ethic, Other |
| Job Feedback Sources | Customer, supervisor, agent, adjuster, subcontractor, other |
| Mass Communication Types | General Mailing, Newsletter, Special Promotion |
| Job Document Subfolders | Contracts, Change Orders, Estimates, Purchase Orders, Work Orders |
Fixed Error SystemClassID not found after adding a person role. (Data was saved correctly saved; there was just the incorrect error message.)
Job Feedback
On the Job setup tab, we added a new setting to let you require a reason in job feedback: When entering job feedback, require a reason.
Labor Budget Setup
Departmental Overhead (Burden) added to Labor/Budget setup tab.
Security
We've added these new security contexts:
- COMMISSIONREPORTVIEWFORSELF (default 2)
- COMMISSIONREPORTVIEWFOROTHERS (default 6)
- COMMISSIONREPORTRUNPOST (default 6)
- COMMISSIONREPORTSETUP (default 7)
Surveys
In the survey setup, we added support for the new rated survey questions.
If you added a new list answer choice question to an already existing list question and immediately edited that answer choice, the edit did not save. We fixed this.
Miscellaneous Fixes
Reminders: Reminders could previously only be sent to employees with Chronicle messaging. They can now also be sent to anyone with an email address at any of the company’s domains.
Job Manager:
- For job-related reports, the right-click menus contain new options to Add Feedback, Add Journal/Email/Fax, Pin Job to Homepage, and View Journal.
- Activity Report: Activities due in less than one day were incorrectly not showing in warning color. Terminated color was also not showing. We fixed both of these issues.
- Activity Report: Minor color improvements: Made pending different color from 8+ days; put unused cells in light grey; turned off alternate color scheme since so many cells were colored; changed terminated color.
- Financial report: Floating point error (initially at 80%/99) occurred with some data. We've fixed this.
Job Costing: The job costing screen now breaks out regular, overtime, and double time on Labor Summary tab and on the printout.
Collections Manager: Several minor fixes:
- Backspace key in day range lost focus on edit. Fixed.
- Typing to search didn’t work if one had never clicked in the Search field. Fixed.
- Add Journal/Email/Fax and Pin job to homepage added to right-click menu.
- Collection manager now remembers if you reposition or resize columns.
Survey: Very long survey names got clipped off in the display in the job, person and org files rather than wrapping. We fixed this.
Budget: The budget now evaluates activity amounts even if labor was not correct tied to a specific activity on the job.
Refresh of Reports list: Saving a report in the Labor Manager and Task Manager failed to immediately refresh the reports list. (All information was correctly saved so the list refreshed the next time Chronicle was restarted.) We fixed this so the reports list now refreshes immediately.
Task Manager: Saving a report failed to refresh the reports list. Fixed.
Excel 2013: An "access violation" bug when using Excel 2013 was fixed.
Comments
0 comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.