Workbench Release Notes
IN PROGRESS
Announcements:
💰👷♀️ New regulations for Construction companies on trust accounts in Australia and New Zealand
Workbench is pleased to announce that we are working with Construction industry experts to bring new functionality to enable our construction industry clients to comply with new regulations on trust accounts in Australia and New Zealand. This will allow head contractors to easily manage both project trust accounts (PTA) and retention trust accounts (RTA), as well as regularly provide retention balance reports to subcontractors.
Recent changes in Construction Acts in Australia and New Zealand require head contractors to hold retention funds on trust accounts to protect subcontractors' payment claim funds. Additionally, specific construction projects in Australia must hold project funds on trust accounts dedicated to that project. Managing these trust accounts can be time-consuming and complicated, leading to potential non-compliance and financial risks for head contractors.
To address this challenge, Workbench is designing new functionality that allows head contractors to specify the details of separate trust accounts for each construction project, as well as for each subcontract if required. Head contractors will be able to report regularly to subcontractors following a simple process. Reporting will include details of retention transaction history and retention balances, and provide them with the necessary trust account details for their peace of mind. Specific General Ledger accounts can be configured on each Trust Account to facilitate transaction reporting once the information is exported to the financial system. Appropriate reports will be available to facilitate auditors' work and be able to trace all the transactions in a Project.
We will update you via our blog and Release Notes as we progress. We estimate the work will be available for Beta testing in July. We take the opportunity to thank our clients that have kindly provided their feedback in this process.
Beta Release 4.6.8.1
Scheduled Release - 22 May 2023
New Features
Plant
Feature Revisions
Dockets & Daysheets
Daysheets:
Purchasing
AP Invoices:
Subcontracts
Plant
Quotes
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Reporting:
Administration
General
Integrations
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Hotfix Release 4.6.8.4
Scheduled Release - 02 June 2023
Improved application startup performance for instances hosted in AWS.
General Release 4.6.8.2
Scheduled Release - 29 May 2023
Beta Release 4.6.8.1
Scheduled Release - 22 May 2023
Announcement:
All users with a System Administrator licence will see a popup message reminding them to populate the Commercial and Admin Contacts. This popup will appear until the contacts have been populated 
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New Features
Expense Claims
New Claim Type - Credit Card expense:
Users can now capture expenses incurred using their Company’s Credit Card. These expenses will be non-reimbursable, and require a new Supplier company to be set up with the right AP Accounts linked to the Credit Card in the Financial System.
For now, this only works on Standard Approvals of Expense Claims. Further work is being done for Workflow approvals.How to configure it:
1- Users will now have two Expense Claim companies linked to their profile (Employee Details tab). One for Reimbursable Expense Claims and another one for Credit Card type of Claims.
2- The option on the Expense Claim Type will depend on the companies set on the user. The drop-down may display none, one or both, depending on the corresponding expense company set on the user.
3- In Upvise, we now support both types of expenses as well: employee expense and Credit card expense types. To enable this both payment modes must be set up:Employee Reimbursement
Credit Cards
An Expense Claim from Upvise may include two different Payment methods, and when exported to Workbench these will be split into one expense Claim per Payment Method.
Feature Revisions
Jobs
Job Enquiry - Additional filters in the Orders tab:
Users can now search for a specific Purchase Order on the Orders tab using PO picker or the new filter Item Description to search for a specific PO line.Job template - Site address:
Deriving the Site address on a subjob template was not working as expected when using the new Address structure as determined by the control parameter “BETA FEATURE - Structured Addresses”. This has been rectified.
Purchasing
AP Vouchers:
Allow Reassign action to other steps on a Workflow approval:
The Reassign function previously only supported reassignment on either a Workflow Function or Named context. It has been enhanced to support Reassign for Workflow schemas defined using both WF Functions and Named.
Stock
Negative Stock in Daysheets and Service Log:
The "Allow Negative Qty Stock" CP determines whether stock on hand can go negative when entering stock issues. This validation has now been added when entering STock issues from a Service Log or a Datasheet.
Subcontracts
Work Order List - status:
The status of the Work Order on the Work Order list did not reflect the correct status when the approval process was Standard. This has been rectified.A new default filter for the Work Order list has been added:
Completed = No, to display only WOs that are still opened and being worked on.
Plant
Plant Meter Reading automatically clocking:
An issue where the plant meter was automatically clocking after entering a reading with the same value as the previous one was rectified.Plant extension Column Views:
To make it easier for users to create a new Plant Extension Columns Views, we have now added a picker for some of the criteria options, so the user does not need to know IDs for these criteria and simply chooses the right option from the picker. The example below shows a View using Plant Group, where the Plant group Dozers can be selected using the picker.
Pickers added:Plant Group Picker
Plant Class Picker
Owner Type
Carrying Units
Plant Pricing Group
Quotes
Sorting was not working properly on At Cost Element cost sheet formats. This has been rectified.
Datasheets
Scheduling Plant Item’s datasheets:
When using the Datasheet Scheduler to generate datasheets for Plant Items, the created datasheets were not linked to the Plant Item. This has been rectified.
Service Desk
Plant Log - populate Client when a Plant Job is selected as the Log Job:
When a new Service Log is created and the Job selected is a Plant Item, the Client is now populated with the Client on the plant item.Service agreement being removed from logs:
The service Agreement field was hidden from the screen when changing the Log status, but this is not correct and it has been amended.When Saving a finalised log the status was reverted to Completed. This has been rectified.
Log No now included as Reference in Get Sales:
The Log No is now included in the Reference field on Job Invoice Get Sales screen following this logic:if we are billing the job we show the log no and the first 20 characters of the log description.
if we are billing the specific log the Log Reference is not displayed, as it is assumed the transactions are from this log only.
Administration
Control parameters:
The description on Control Parameter Auto Receipt With ApInvoice has been updated to make it clear that this CP is only valid for legacy Stock mode.General Config - Email Templates:
The email template for Workflow - PR Reminder has been enhanced with new tokens:
General
Work Centre picker suggestion not filtered:
A recent change to trigger the Work Centre suggestions immediately had a side effect on the picker filtering and when the user uses the tab key to navigate through the different columns, that has been rectified.
Integrations
MYOB Advanced
Description change on Bills:
The description on all AP Invoices (Bills) and AP Credits (Debit Adj.) exported to MYOB Advanced has changed from: [Company Name] - Batch: [BatchNo] - [Invoice Details/Comments]
to: Web WB - Batch: [BatchNo] - [Invoice Details/Comments]
SAP B1
Enhanced AP invoice batch process:
The export process has been improved to handle the re-exporting of a batch that errored due to an invalid supplier in one of the AP Invoices, so it doesn’t error again after removing the invalid invoice from the batch.
Upvise
Workbench Site Contact Integration Update:
To ensure better data alignment, a recent update has been made to the Workbench Site Contact integration. This update enables the automatic synchronization and replacement of the Client contact field on the Upvise Project to accurately reflect the one-to-one relationship with the Workbench Site contact. To improve data consistency, instead of concatenating multiple contacts, the update focuses on finding and replacing the contact if any changes are made in WB. This approach ensures that the data remains more aligned and up-to-date.Assets - Columns Displayed:
A new control called "Columns Displayed" has been added to the Upvise Assets Module. It allows you to choose which columns to show in the Asset list. To access this feature, go to Assets, select Options, then go to Display and choose Custom Columns.
Notification issues fixed:
Upvise has successfully implemented a bug fix to address an issue that was previously hindering the delivery of notifications for submitted forms. Effective from 20/05/2023, notifications are now being sent in accordance with client's Upvise system settings.