IN PROGRESS

Workbench Release Notes

Beta Release 4.6.15.1

Scheduled Release -11 September 2023

New Features

Subcontracts Retention Trust Accounts 💵

To better protect Subcontractors' funds the legislation in New Zealand and Australia (Western Australia and Queensland so far) has changed and requires these funds to be kept in Retention Fund Trust Accounts.

...

How to manage Retention Trust Accounts in Workbench:

1. Retention Trust Accounts:
   A new maintenance screen has been created is now available to create and maintain a list of Trust Accounts or Financial Instruments that can be assigned to each Subcontract.
   

   

   1. Maintenance list for subcontract Trust Accounts.

   2. Pre-installed types and new ones may be configured in Lookups.

   3. Trust can be marked as inactive.

   4. Editing of Trust Account details are is disabled once referenced.
      

2. Subcontracts
   

   Image Added

   1. New optional field for Retention Trust Account.

   2. Edit is controlled with 'Edit Retention Trust Account details on Subcontract' permission.

   3. Permission is included by default in Administrator and Finance roles.

   4. Edits audited to EventLog.

   5. Retention Trust Accounts on a Subcontract can also be set from the Retention Management screen, to reduce time and for better visibility on what Subcontracts require to be updated.
      

3. Subcontract Claims
   

   Image Added

   1. New optional field for Retention Trust Account inherited from Subcontract.

   2. This RTA field will reflect the current Subcontract RTA until it is locked at approval.

   3. Unapproving a subcontract claim will refresh and get the latest RTA from the subcontract.
      

4. Reports

• Subcontract Retention Statement under Subcontract Reports. It can be executed by Subcontract or Subcontractor including all payment details for each subcontract.

  • Only includes Subcontracts with Retention balance different to $0.

  • If the Subcontract Claim has not been certified yet, this will be noted next to thee claim reference.

• Subcontractor Payment Certificate with all the Trust Account details. Print report from each Subontract Claim.

• Subcontractor All in One Report with all the Trust Account details. Print report from each Subontract Claim.

Things to consider:

• This functionality is still in beta, and requires a control parameter to enable it: ‘BETA FEATURE - Subcontract RTA' = yes

• Do you have custom Payment certificates or Payment Schedules that need updating or can you use the new standard reports from Workbench?

• General Release 4.6.17 (release date 2nd October) will include the ability to send the Retention Balance reports to your subcontrcatorssubcontractors.

• For New Zealand, the Amendment Act will come into force on 5 October 2023 and become part of the Constructions Contracts Act. 
  
  

• Bulk emaling, if using O365, is safer to turn Control Parameter 'Office 365 Bulk Email' on, to force the emails to be sent using Sendgrid, our SMTP server, rather than Office 365, as this does not support sending emails in bulk very well.
  
  
  
  
  
  

Dockets & Daysheets

• Dockets - improved navigation to source dockets:
  In several screens, we have added a hyperlink to the source docket for easy navigation and to make it easier to check or edit data.
  You will find it on AP Vouchers, AP Invoices, and Docket reconciliation screen.

Feature Revisions

Lists

Purchasing

• Purchase Orders:

  • Default PO list:
    when a user opens the Purchase Order list, the default list now matches the default filters which are:
    -Purchaser = logged in user
    -PO Number default operator was changed to Equals (it was > = )
    - Approved = No
    -Completed = No

Subcontracts

• Enhanced batching validations:
  When batching a subcontract claim, the system now ensures that a Claim is put into the first open AP period.

Plant

• Plant items’ Project:
  Plant items now have a new attribute called Project, which indicates the Job (project) that Plant item has been assigned to. From this same attribute, the plant item can be assigned to a Job.
  

  

Billing

• Job Sales Invoices:

  • A new option to find those Outstanding invoices with a value Not Equal To has been added to the existing Outstanding filter:
    

    

Quotes

• At Revenue & Cost Element - updating a cost line:
  When deleting a cost line the system now updates the selling value of the Revenue line to reflect this change.

• Reshresh Quote Main tab values when copying Costsheets:
  When an existing Cost sheet is copied and added to the Quote, the Quote values on the Main tab of the Quote are now refreshed and updated to reflect the newly added Cost sheet.

• Editing pencil functionality:
  For ease of use an editing pencil has been added to several different fields on a Cost sheet line where a long text can be entered and edited.
  

  

Service Desk

• Changing Job code on Service logs:

  • Change to Log Screen:
    On the Log screen, the Job Code is now locked if there are any associated JobTransactions or JobOutputs.

  • New Utility to change the Log Job:
    A new Utility has been created to change the job code on an existing log where there are transactions or Job outputs: wbUtilityChangeJobOnLog

    It validates that:

    • the new job is not finalised.

    • none of the transactions have been billed or exported.

    • all the transactions are valid in the new job's activity group and job work centres.

    If any of these apply, it returns an appropriate error message, and the Job is not changed. Otherwise, the Job Code is changed on all associated JobTransactions and JobOutputs.

Administration

• Simplified User creation:
  Enhancements:
  1- When opening the Create From Existing User pop-up screen after the first time, any consecutive times in the same session, the From User is kept to be reused and can be changed if needed (same behaviour as when creating new activities from an existing activity).

  2- Start Date/End Date are not copied.

  3- The Company field from the Main tab is now copied when creating a new user based on an existing one (employees are usually all in the same company even when there are several fincos).
  4- When creating a user from an existing one, an error is now displayed if any licence of the existing user is maxed out (meaning the number of allocated users for the licence is equal to the purchased licence).

Integration

Upvise

Xero

• Tracking Category Options Case Insensitive:
  In Xero, tracking category options are not case-sensitive and must be unique.
  In the Workbench integration, when searching for the tracking category option in Xero that corresponds to the one in Workbench, we have changed the search accordingly. A new error message has been created to handle the specific scenario when the exact tracking category is not found and the system tries to create a new tracking category with a different case from the one that exists in Xero: “Cannot create '{option}' Tracking Category Option: For each specified tracking option the name must be unique.“.

...