Workguru Blog - WorkGuru

April 2020 Release

Hoping You’re all Safe and Well

First things first, from all of the team here at WorkGuru, we hope that you, your team and your family are safe and well during this Covid19 crisis. We are aware of far too many people and businesses who have been impacted, and our thoughts are with you all at this time. We look forward to the day when this crisis is over, and we can all get back to work, and get small business moving again!

…but we’ve been putting our lockdown time to good use

We’ve been locked in front of our computers and pretty much chained to our desks for the last month, so it’s been a great time to get some excellent new features into the hands of our users for testing! Some highlights are

Multi-Currency Purchase Orders
Supplier Order Forms
Timesheet details on invoices
A Major Permissions Update
Potential Stock Shortages Report with AutoBuy
Pure Stock Sales

We’ll drill into each of these features below!

Multi-Currency Purchase Orders

For our clients that import goods from overseas, we now support multiple currency purchasing, which converts to your local currency to calculate landed costs.

To configure multiple currencies, Edit your Accounting Settings, and add as many foreign currencies as you like.
These options will appear when you next go to add a purchase order, as in the below screenshots.

When you change the currency of the Purchase Order, WorkGuru looks up the current European Central Bank exchange rate, and auto-populates the exchange rate field. If you’ve got a particular rate you’re buying at, or you want to change this value, you’re able to override it as you wish.

When you receive the PO, you have an opportunity to update the exchange rate again, which will lock in the landed cost on your PO, and create the stock journal in your default currency, at your specified exchange rate.
When it comes to pushing the PO through to your accounting platform, just make sure you’ve got the right currencies enabled!

Supplier Order Forms

We’ve been asked by several clients to create a supplier order form, that will prompt them for each item they’re buying from a supplier, and this has now been released.

To build a supplier order form, simply create a New Purchase Order, and then select your supplier. You’ll then be given the opportunity to “Build Order Form.”

When you click the “Build Order Form” button, the Purchase Order will populate with every item you can buy from that supplier, so you can go through and tick them off as required.

Timesheet Details on Invoices

As an extension to our document customisation, you can now put your staff timesheets on invoices for your customers.

To add timesheets to your invoices, add a new Table with the description “Timesheets” and use the merge fields that are described in the image. For extra details refer to our Merge Field Reference.

Permissions Updated

We’ve released an extensive update to our user and roles permissions. With the new update, you’re able to specify extra granular permissions such as allowing staff to create invoices, but not approve them.

You can hide the profitability widget from certain staff, and allow others the permissions to add timesheets on behalf of other users.

Remember that you can specify role based permissions as a starting point for your account (e.g. User vs Project Manager) and if you need to, you can give individual users special permissions outside their roles.

Potential Stock Shortages Report with AutoBuy

The Potential Stock Shortages Report looks at the projects you’ve got on, the stock you’ve used, what’s incoming, and what you’ve got to give you a list of things that you might run out of. It also gives you a summary of how much that it’s all expected to cost you!

This report is accessible from the Reports Tab, and works by allowing you to specify a date range that you want to order out to (so you’re not buying things you don’t need for 6 months). Once the report has run, you’ll be able raise DRAFT purchase orders for each supplier in the list.
PRO Tip: You can filter this report by supplier using the Search box, and only order the products you REALLY need!

Pure Stock Sales

WorkGuru was built as a project management platform that supported inventory, but we’ve had increasing calls from our customers to support straight up stock sales. This month, we’re releasing the ability to sell your stock straight to the client, without creating a project for it. This feature will be refined over the coming months, but for now – you can sell out of any of your warehouses, and invoice straight off the sale.

WorkGuru will NOT let you dispatch orders for which you don’t have stock, and will highlight in red the lines that are preventing you from dispatching

Stock Sales have their own numbering system (e.g. SO1001) to clearly differentiate them from Project-based stock usage.

March 2020 Releases

March? How did that Happen?

Wow…We’re in March already, the year is just flying past. In this newsletter, we’re releasing a bunch of new features, heading to Sydney for ABE and offering you and your clients 50% off for the rest of the financial year!

Come see as at ABE 2020

In March we’re heading to the Accounting Business Expo in Sydney. Come and say hello and ask us any questions in person. Remember to register for your FREE ticket before March 25 by clicking the link below.

https://l.feathr.co/accounting-business-expo-2020–custom-lp-exhibitors-workguru
Registration on the day will cost $60, so get in early.

New Releases

Report – Search and Export to CSV

We know how much Excel means to everyone, and so we’ve built the ability into our reporting engine to not only dynamically search inside reporting results, you can now export the report results to CSV and Excel away until your heart is content.

Weekly or Daily Time Sheet Preference

We know that different clients need different kinds of timesheets. For our teams with staff on a Workshop floor, real-time measuring of exactly how much time went into a job is critical – but it doesn’t work for everyone.

For our engineering and architecture clients, we’ve this weekend released the ability to choose whether you enter your timesheets as a daily start/stop method, or via a weekly dashboard.

To change your preference, go to Administration / Settings and update your preference in the drop down box below

Weekly Time Sheet Overview

Our weekly timesheets let you add a project and task to your timesheet, and enter the daily totals you’ve worked for the week, as well as any notes on those timesheets.
Once you’ve completed your timesheets for the week, simply click the Submit Time Sheet button, and your supervisor will be able to sign off on your time entries.

QBO Integration

Our QBO integration is released for beta testing! To set yourself up to use QBO as your WorkGuru accounting platform, just go to Accounting / Settings and select QuickBooks as your Accounting integration! It’s that simple.

January 2020 Update

January Updates

New Releases

Multiple Warehouse Locations

WorkGuru now supports multiple warehouses for stock control. This was a huge update and required an enormous amount of work, but based on our customer feedback, it was right at the top of the list in terms of priorities, and it’s now live in production.

Every existing account have had a “Default” warehouse created, and to create extra locations for your stock, there’s just a few quick steps to follow

1. Turn on Warehouse management in your permissions
2. Go to the Warehouses page, and add a new Warehouse! It’s that simple.

If you’ve got any questions on this one, please contact us at any stage.

Attaching Files Directly to Assets

Several clients have requested the ability to attach documents directly to Assets, and this has been included in this release. Whether you’re wanting to attach Warranty Documents, Commissioning Certificates, or just photos of the asset and its surrounds, the Asset page now lets you upload files for your records in a simple and eas-to-navigate way.

Custom Field Drop Downs

On The Roadmap

Have Your Say

We will always be a customer-driven company that build what our clients are asking for! If there’s features you need, let us know and we’ll try and get them on the roadmap!

Check out what we’ve got coming up in the next few months.

QBO Integration

Our QBO integration is nearly ready! We’re aiming to release this in February, so if you’re on QBO, you can soon be on WorkGuru as well.

Multi-currency Purchase Orders

We’ve finished the design phase of our multi-currency functionality, and it’s entering the dev pipeline this week. When you create a foreign-currency purchase order, you will be able to configure your exchange rate, back to your native currency, which will automatically update any COGS transactions in your primary currency, but push the bill through to your accounting software in the currency in which you receive it.

Receipts Integration – EzzyBills

Particularly for our construction and engineering clients, we’re looking at adding a receipts integration directly into WorkGuru. This would give you the visibility on the job costing, as well as ensuring that you can bill the client for disbursements, and expenses accrued on their project. We don’t have a complete ETA on this one, but aiming by the end of the quarter.

Mobile App

A mobile app has been requested a lot over the last few months, and we’re committed to making it happen. We’re in the planning stages of this one at the moment, and the first release of the app will focus on field-users adding timesheets, stock usage, files, and notes to jobs. We’re ambitiously targeting a March release of the App Beta, depending on development speed.

Join Us at the Xero Roadshows

In February we’re on the road with Xero and heading to the Brisbane and Sydney roadshows, as well as the Parramatta and Collingwood SMB Sessions. Come and see us at any of those shows, meet the founders, and talk to us about what you’re looking for!

More information on Xero’s roadshows can be found at https://www.xero.com/au/events/roadshow/

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

December Updates

New Releases

Xero Timesheets Integration

Well, after last month’s near miss, we’re finally upto releasing our Xero timesheets integration. The integration will take approved timesheets, round them up to a daily total, and send them through to Xero ready to populate your payrun.

For this to work, you must have a draft payrun open in Xero, which WorkGuru will use as the date range to push data. Then, from our Xero integrations page, select Send Time Sheets. This will bring up a summary of your approved timesheets for the period, which looks like the below. When you’re happy, hit the big “Send Timesheets to Xero” button, and guess what will happen! Huzzah!

Communications Improvements – Email to project and lead

Following on from last month, we’ve made improvements to our email integration, which more cleanly allows you to see exactly what has been emailed into each project, and lead. Each email is broken into the text / content of the email, with links to the files attached for a timeline view. Additionally, we place easy reference links to anything you’ve emailed in straight into the files view as outlined below.

UI Updates

We’ve updated several parts of the application to give you better readability of the key data that matters to you. Central to that, is hiding data that isn’t immediately necessary on line items for quotes, projects, and invoices, and letting you expand the row to see hidden data as required.

This allows us to give cleaner information about due dates and staff assignments on projects, and tax rates and GL codes on invoices, while expanding the room you have for individual line item descriptions.

We’ve also added the ability to bulk approve invoices, and timesheets.

Upload Parts List to Quotes, Projects, and Templates

So, for all of our engineering and fabrication clients wanting to take the output of CAD files and upload them into a job, we’ve added the ability to do exactly that. Whether it’s to create a new Quote, Project, or Template, each page now has a Bulk Add Products button, which will allow you to upload a CSV containing your product list.

To enable you to deal with one-off builds without destroying your inventory list, you can add products here that you’re not tracking, and WorkGuru will treat them as one offs, and not add them to your master part list.

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

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.