Krow Software has announced the latest version of its PSA (Professional Services Automation) software in a blog by CEO David Vanheukelom. The blog includes a link to download the latest version, 26.1 of the software.
Not all details have yet appeared on the Salesforce AppExchange but no doubt will do shortly.
This does not appear to be a major release. When compared to version 25 which introduced integration with Sage Live financials, there are no major integrations or functionality. There is, however, a series of iterative improvements. Considering that the work was completed over the short month is a credit to the company for maintaining the cadence of releases.
Better Chatter integration
One if the main enhancements is around Krow’s integration with Salesforce Chatter. Krow users are now able to automate the integration of chatter actions to email. If a contact has been entered against a specific task within a project a user is now able to automatically generate an email from within the Chatter Action section of the system.
For projects where team members do not all have access to Salesforce Chatter this automation will save significant time and also creates an audit trail for the project manager.
Improved cost controls
One of the more interesting updates relates to project costing. Users are now able to enter both billing and cost rates for projects based on specific dates. What isn’t clear from the blog is how granular these changes are. Do the changes relate to project wide costs or can they be related to specific tasks or roles within a project? If the latter, it will allow a granularity that is important with longer duration and larger projects.
Even if it merely relates to project costs it is useful for longer projects. For example there may be cost increases baked into contracts. Staff costs, for example, may increase as a result of annual reviews which could alter the profitability of projects.
Other minor improvements
Krow has also introduced several new checkboxes and filters designed to increase the efficiency of the solution for users. There is a new filter within the resource planner for unassigned resources. This allows controllers to rapidly identify unassigned tasks and ensure that they are delivered.
Other improvements see changes to timesheets, expenses, resource planning, project and task management. There is also now the ability to select a vendor type on an organisation record. This addition synchronises with vendor types in Sage Intacct. While this sees a tighter integration with that ERP software, one wonders why Krow is not making the ERP integration more generic.
What does this mean
There are several small updates in this release that customers will welcome. It seems as though Krow has fixed several outstanding items for its customer base that did not have significant impact. It will be interesting to see what plans they have for their road map in 2018 and whether they continue the cadence of monthly releases.
