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Workbench Release Notes

Beta Release 4.6.16.1

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.

Managing these trust accounts can be time-consuming and complicated, leading to potential non-compliance and financial risks for head contractors.

To comply with these regulations, head contractors are required to:

  1. Establish and maintain a trust account for all subcontractor's retentions. This can either be a Bank Account (New Zealand & Australia) or a Financial instrument (New Zealand only).

  2. Report to subcontractors regularly (monthly in Australia and at least once every 3 months in NZ) with the details of the historic Payment Certificates and Retetion balance on all their subcontracts with details of what is being held and where.

  3. Provide subcontractors with the details of each Trust Account on the Subcontract Claim Payment Certificate and Payment Schedules.

 Benefit for our Workbench Clients:

  • Reduce manual work, and time.

  • Compliance with legislation.

  • Improved relationship and trust with Subcontractors.

  • The impact of non-compliance can be extremely costly for the company, and also penalties for Directors.

How to manage Retention Trust Accounts in Workbench:

  1. Retention Trust Accounts
    A new maintenance screen 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 is disabled once referenced.

  2. Subcontracts

    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

    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 the claim reference.

  • Subcontractor Payment Certificate with all the Trust Account details. Print report from each Subontract Claim. Trust account details will only display if the Subcontract has a Retention Trust Account.

  • Subcontractor All in One Report with all the Trust Account details. Print report from each Subontract Claim. Trust account details will only display if the Subcontract has a Retention Trust Account.

  1. Retention Balance reporting to multiple Subcontractors:
    The legislation requires that Subcontractors be reported of their Retentions periodically. Workbench will enable Head Contractors to send these Retention Balance reports with all the details of the Retention Trust Accounts in bulk.

    1. A new tab will be added to the Subcontracts Retention Management screen, where a list of Subcontractors with a Retention Balance can be selected to send the Balance report. This report is the same format as the Retention Balance Statement, and it only contains information about the particular subcontractor to which the report is being sent.

    2. The Commercial contact on each subcontractor company will be used as the contact to send the Retention statement.

    3. For bulk emailing, if using Office 365, it 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.

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 reports that need updating to support Trust Accounts or can you use the new standard reports from Workbench? Further enhancements to these reports will be released on 4.6.17 as per early feedback from some of our clients.

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

  • Get started setting up Commercial contacts on your Subcontractors with the right email addresses to where the Retention Balance Statement will be sent. Note that an existing contact (like a Billing contact) can be also identified as a Commercial contact.

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

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

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

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.“.

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