simPRO announced a new update, version 17.2.1 that went live on the 2nd April with several small but important features. The announcement came in a blog by Sian Scott, Communications Manager, simPRO Software Group. This update affects simPRO Service and Enterprise and is the sixth update to the cloud SaaS solution this year alone. The update includes a mixture of new features and bug fixes. The release notes are found here.
The company produces job management software for organisations of different sizes. simPRO service is aimed at services business that carry out maintenance or installation tasks, whether quoted or reactive. simPRO Enterprise is a solution that helps organisations manage more complex project and management jobs. It includes functionality that assists with estimating and projects management through to completion.
Avoiding mix ups
Complex jobs often create the capability for confusion. simPRO has added two features in its latest release to avoid this happening. An alert is now received is items are reassigned in a purchase order that have already been receipted. This means that while items can be reassigned the user is of where they are re-assigned from.
The second relates to tax codes. When pre-builds are imported the tax codes with the same code reference will be matched up properly, reducing the amount of cleaning up users have to do. For companies that need to raise multiple invoices per job, a sequential claim number is also added to the job reference. This allows the reporting and sequence of invoices for each job to be tracked more easily.
Reporting improvements
There are additionally improvements to the profit/loss report. A bug has been resolved where the report failed to show all invoices. simPRO has also added a filter feature. This allows multiple business groups and multi-cost centre jobs to appear correctly. Negative values are also highlighted better so that scanning in a report credit notes are quickly identified.
Enterprise improvements
There were also some minor bugs fixes in the Enterprise software. Fixed assets exports no longer time out if there are 1000’s of items. They also improved the simPRO API so that the correct status on contractor jobs is extracted.
Conclusion
A small update but one where bug fixes are prevalent it seems. What is honest about simPRO is that they are happy to share both improvements and bug fixes that are resolved. Other software companies are hesitant about releasing details of software changes which is a shame. For companies looking to make the choice of their new cloud software, selecting one that provides regular improvements is key. Communication about those changes is just as important and simPRO should be lauded for doing so.
