Workguru Blog – WorkGuru

November News

The year keeps rolling on, and we've been busy at WorkGuru improving out platform to enable you to get the most out of it!

October Releases

In October, we’re said we’d focus on 3 major release items, and we’re (mostly) happy to report that Lead Tracking, Email Integration with WorkGuru, and Weekly Timesheets will all be released this evening. There’s a quick recap on what that means below.

Lead Tracking

WorkGuru’s lead tracking allows you to track the value, owner, stages and likelihood to close (LTC) of your opportunities. You can now schedule follow up calls, meetings, and any other activities you define, as well as who is responsible for them. These activities are also incorporated into the individual’s user dashboard giving your sales staff a to-do list for the day!

Email Integration

The second major item that’s going out this afternoon is for an email integration to allow Project and Lead emails to be attached automatically to the correct job when you CC the email to yourbusinessname@workguru.email. This integration will read the email, attach the contents as a note to your projects and leads, and any files will also be attached in WorkGuru. This means that you can always have a proper email trail of your communication with your clients.

Weekly Timesheet

Our Weekly Timesheet is being released for all you engineering and professional service folks out there. This lets you select multiple projects and tasks from a single screen and enter your timesheet entries for the week quickly and easily.

Unfortunately, we missed a bit

Ok.. I’ll confess, I may have been too ambitious in terms of what we were trying to get out this month, and so we missed our target on integrating the timesheets into Xero. This is a little bit trickier than we thought, but we’re committed to getting it done, and we’re working on the release to be ready ASAP.

November Roadmap

For November, our first focus will be on completing the timesheet integration with Xero.

Upload Parts List to Quotes and Templates

So for everyone using CAD programs out there, who’s looking to upload a parts list into your quote, or project template, we’ll be releasing that in mid-November. We know that it’s a pain to type out 50-100 parts that you use on a job, so we’re going to make that process as easy as possible.

Improved Onboarding Process

One of our long-term aims, is to enable our clients to get the most out of an onboarding process as possible, as this will ultimately be the difference between the success, and otherwise of our new clients. This month, we’ll be putting a lot of effort into streamlining the onboarding process, adding videos, and automated guides to get you up to speed faster.

Remember To Book Your Demo

To get a full overview of WorkGuru for you, or your clients, book a time using the link below

https://calendly.com/workguru-team/workguru-demo-and-discovery

September Releases and October Roadmap

Welcome to October! We can’t believe how quickly the year has gone already, and how far through we are.

In this email, we give you a sneak peak into some newly released features, what’s on the roadmap for the next major release, and a Xerocon offer just for you! ← Read all the way to the end!

September was a huge month for us here at WorkGuru! Attending our first Xerocon (photo above with the team from Rype) as partner let us speak to several hundred of our nearest and dearest, and new friends alike. We got so much valuable feedback from our conversations, that some of it has already made it into the product.

September Releases

Our Key releases this month are around reporting, and progress claims.

Progress Claims

One of the key issues we’ve run across for our engineering and construction firms, is the issue of progress claims. As most clients require their invoices to show percentages complete, what this invoice value is, and what remains, we’ve updated our invoice document templates to allow you to get what you need with a single click.

For many of our clients, this singular update will save upwards of 30 staff hours a month when it comes time to raise your invoices.

Revenue Forecast

Forecasting Revenue is a pain. With Milestone invoicing being different to deposit invoices and all of them needing you to go to the spreadsheets to figure it out, we’ve built a solution which will tell you when you SHOULD be able to raise invoices to your customers, assuming you finish the work.
This report works by taking the Due Date of any tasks in the project (that are billable) and calculating the remaining billable value of those, and the due date of the project for everything else, and gives you a summary broken down day by day of the revenue you should achieve as per the screenshot below.

WIP Reporting

WIP reporting has been a pain for everyone as long as project management has been a thing. To alleviate some of that pain, we’ve created two WIP Reports that break down exactly what’s going on in your business, and who owes you what

Given that people either bill actuals (time and materials used) or Quoted value, there are two distinct ways of reporting on WIP. As such, we’ve built two WIP reports that break down for you what work you’re doing, who you’re doing it for, how much they’ve paid, and how much is remaining on that job.

As the screenshots below demonstrate these reports give you a quick and easy view of what’s going on in your world!

October Releases

In October, we’re focusing on 3 major release items

First though, just a little one. We’re updating our project summary widget to give you live, up to the minute profitability reporting, and comparison to forecast with a simple view on each project.

Now, on to the big stuff

Lead Tracking

The first of these is better lead tracking. Not only will you be able to track the value, owner, stages and likelihood to close (LTC) of your opportunities, you’ll be able to schedule follow up calls, meetings, and any other activities you define, as well as who is responsible for them

A quick screenshot of our lead tracker is below.

Email Integration

The second major release we’re planning is for an integration with emails to allow Job and Lead emails to be attached automatically to the correct job when you CC the email to yourbusinessname@workguru.email. This is currently in development with our newest member of the team Marco leading up the dev on this one.

Weekly Timesheet and Xero Timesheet Integration

We’ve nearly finished a beta of our Weekly Timesheet entry for all you engineering and professional service folks out there and we’ll be rolling out the completed version in October. This will let you select multiple projects and tasks from a single screen and enter your timesheet entries for the week quickly and easily.

To take this one step further, we’re aiming to integrate this into Xero for Payroll purposes. The exact scope of this is being finalised, but we aim to have a basic release out of this integration this month.

WorkGuru and Xero Together

After months of work with the dev team at Xero, and some of our fantastic customers providing testing and feedback, WorkGuru has been accepted as an official App Partner of Xero. This means that every WorkGuru client can now get the world-class operations visibility that WorkGuru provides, while getting the most from Australia’s most popular online accounting platform.

WorkGuru was always designed as an operational platform that left the accounting and statutory reporting to a dedicated accounting package. While we will never stint in our ambition to become the best lightweight ERP on the market, we believe that we can do this best by getting Xero to do the specialist work of accounting. After all, they’ve spent billions building a world-leading product to do exactly that.

So what does the integration mean.

WorkGuru sends Sales Invoices, Bills (from Purchase Orders), Cost of Goods Sold journals and Contacts from WorkGuru through to Xero. WorkGuru will never send data to Xero (or retrieve data from Xero) without your explicit permission. For extra detail our support article on this, over at our knowledge base. We’re currently working on adding payment reconciliation to allow you to record payments in WorkGuru, and have that data flow through to Xero, and vice versa.

From a practical point of view, the integration looks like the diagram below. Data flows in both directions to enable a single point-of-truth for your operational, and financial requirements.

The Kiosk – Capture everything in real time

When your staff work on a factory or workshop floor, it’s a pain in the neck getting them to try and log into a computer and enter their timesheets, or what parts they used on a job. Equally, if they scrawl it down on a piece of paper, it adds extra work to your admin team, and frankly, most of us have terrible writing these days and we can struggle to read what’s in front of us anyway.

The problem is though, if you don’t track what you’re staff are doing, when they’re actually doing it, you’ll end up spending time, and using materials on jobs that aren’t accounted for, and which end up just being given away – and no one can afford that!

To solve this, this week we’re releasing a web-based kiosk for WorkGuru. The Kiosk means that your staff can with a few button pushes, add their timesheets, material usage, and any notes for projects they are working on.

The kiosk allows users to set a 4-digit pin, and quickly log in, add the required parts, time and notes to a job, and quickly log back out again, leaving the kiosk open for the next update. In seconds, staff can accurately track exactly what was used on a job, and simply get back to work.

Using stock on a job is as easy as 1,2,3.

The Kiosk aims to give our customers and their staff a simple, and real-time way of adding data and costs to their jobs, without having to leave the shop floor. In this way, WorkGuru can help provide you with up-to-the-minute costing of your jobs, your stock on hand, and give you piece of mind that you’re charging your customers for everything you should

Introducing Project Groups – and Creating Bulk Service Jobs

One of the problems our clients have told us they struggle with, is creating service jobs for all assets of a client, or a client’s site, in the event of a break down and call out. Traditionally, this has meant either manually creating a job for each asset, or labelling a single job with 10 assets.Looking at each of those options, it’s obvious that there are pitfalls for each one.

Let’s take a look at option 1 – 10 Jobs, each with their own asset.

First of all, creating 10 different jobs can be a right-royal pain in the backside. You’re often entering the same data 10 times, and when it comes to invoicing, you’re invoicing the same client 10 times for what is potentially a single call out. That being said, by creating 10 different jobs, you can track the timesheets, and materials used on each different piece of equipment, maintaining an incredibly accurate service record – and we all know how important this can be.

In the alternative – creating a single job with 10 assets, you’re obviously not spending the time to create single job for each asset, but when it comes to reviewing the service history of each asset – you’re not exactly sure what materials were used on each one, and possibly even who serviced them.

Given that we’ve constantly run into these problems for clients – this week, we’ve released Project Groups, with bulk job creation. Simply put, a Project Group is a way of grouping these jobs together, and reporting on them as a single Project, while maintaining the history of each timesheet, and all materials ever used to service the asset.

To create a new Project Group for a client, go to the Assets page, and then filter your assets by searching on the client name, asset name, or description of the assets. From the list, select your assets and then in the top right-hand corner, click “Create Project Group.” From there, you will be able to create the Group, choose your template for the work, select Start and Due Dates, and assign a project manager.

When you click create – a single Project Group will be created with projects for each asset. Staff can mark individual jobs (or tasks as complete) and use materials on each asset, while you can review the work as an overall picture, to ensure that the entire Group of services is profitable and on track.

When you’re done with all of the projects in the group, invoicing is a simple process. With just a few clicks, you can create 1 invoice for the entire job, or one for each asset, depending on your requirements, and just like that you’re done.

Project groups can be used for a huge variety of things. Whether you want to group servicing of assets together for a client, or create a run for dozens of different client jobs, in Workguru, it’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.

Welcome WorkGuru

For the last 4 years, I’ve been consulting with small and medium businesses across Australia in every conceivable type of industry. From fish processors, to mining contractors, lift manufacturers, construction companies and architects, I’ve had the privilege of seeing how companies across Australia manage their day-to-day work requirements.

Throughout that period of time, I’ve worked with a few dozen software platforms, each with specific strengths and weaknesses across those industries, and as often became clear, there were some significant gaps in the market, particularly for clients seeking solutions for multiple problems.

Often I would be asked about solutions to handle project management and inventory, or project management and task scheduling, or even product manufacturing and maintenance.

While there are definitely solutions in the market for these things, my clients kept telling me that they either weren’t hitting the mark, and if they wanted something that did, the costs would be astronomical.

After hearing this continually for a year or two, and not getting as far as I’d like with existing software partners, as awesome as they are, I decided to build my own, and thus WorkGuru was born. I roped my business partner from Rype, Michael Davis, into helping me design some workflows which would work across every industry that we could think of, and then set out to build WorkGuru according to those processes.

WorkGuru is designed to be an extremely lightweight ERP style solution that will help businesses manage their projects, their inventory, their costs and their assets. While WorkGuru is in its Beta stage at the moment, and let’s face it – no software product is ever finished, it already provides features that no other solution on the market does.

Our invoicing platform allows you to invoice percentages, completed tasks only, actual hours and materials usage or a combination of all of these.

Our Project Groups feature lets you join related projects together to get a complete overview of your costs on a multiphase project, as well as individual ones.

Our timesheet tracking and FIFO materials costing functionality lets you know exactly how much each project has cost to deliver.

At WorkGuru, we are far from finished. We have a list of things as long as our arm that we want to build for our clients, and frankly, we’ll never be done. For the moment, our focus is on making our interface prettier and getting our accounting integration with Xero certified. Once we’ve done that, we’ll go and ask the our customers (and potential customers) what they’re looking for, because the whole point of this platform was to put the customer at the centre, and in control.

If anything about WorkGuru appeals to you, or one of your clients, express your interest at www.workguru.io. Alternatively, if there’s something that a client of yours absolutely must have, let us know, and we can look at building it into the platform.

I look forward to the crazy journey that’s ahead, and hope to add value to our customers, every single day.