simPRO as a SaaS product is constantly evolving to meet the demands of it’s massively growing client base. Due to needs of the growing number of companies choosing to implement simPRO to help them run their business more efficiently we are always coming across new and better ways to get the job done.
Here are some of the most recently development highlights:
CIS Management – UK Only
As part of HMRC’s attempts to control the taxation of the self-employed trades, CIS (Construction Industry Scheme) was introduced about 2 years ago as a means to collect tax from the primary contractor who withholds (usually) 20% of the labour component when they pay their subcontractors invoices.
As part of this months release of simPRO 10.5.0 there will be a full CIS integration giving complete control over invoice creation, amounts to withhold, reporting and calculating CIS payments due. Not to mention the most important thing – built in reminders that tell you when you need to complete your CIS paperwork and when to make your CIS payments to HMRC so you don’t get fined.
simPRO Enterprise will have full CIS integration making it suitable for both the prime contractor and subcontractor roles. simPRO Lite will have CIS integration only available for the subcontractor roles. This feature combined with the RCTI (recipient created tax invoice) feature means that you can now get into full control of your paperwork and the paperwork of your smaller (less organised) subcontractors.
It is designed to work for any business that gets caught up in the CIS system.
More details and screen shots will be released soon, but if you would like a copy of the scope of the CIS integration please let us know and we will be happy to forward you a copy and discuss how it will apply for your business.
Custom Client Fields
Ever wanted to capture some information about a client that you just didn’t have a standard field for? What about their date of birth, their golf handicap or whether or not they are a good account payer. Perhaps you integrate your system with something else and would love somewhere to keep track of different identifiers between the two systems.
Enter simPRO custom fields. Just like the asset builder, you can now define your own custom fields on a client. To do this head over to Admin > Clients > Custom. You can create text fields, list fields and date fields to apply to individual client records. Once you have done this you can then search through those fields and within the clients you will have a new tab called “custom” which will display all this additional information.
Again this will be released in this month’s version 10.5.0, for more information contact us anytime!
Plant Upgrades
One of the most underutilised modules of simPRO is the plant manager. With plant you can track your own plant and equipment, who has it, when it was allocated to them, when it was brought back, when it’s due for a service etc.
Plant can also be scheduled to jobs, as such plant can now also be allocated to zones. Remember, the same with employee’s you don’t need that piece of equipment to be in the zone of the job to schedule it, it only helps for filtering & reporting purposes
Call centre upgrades
The call centre module is coming along very nicely. We now have a few clients on board using it and putting it through it’s paces. The idea of the call centre is a simple one page screen to log jobs and schedule them in (with a few extra nice bits and pieces put in there).
This month we have added some new functionality including outbound campaigns, more comprehensive searching abilities, quote lookups and more flexible zoning options for auto scheduling.
So if you manage high volume inbound (and now outbound) calls and need a simple tool to manage the job logging and scheduling, ask us about the call centre module addon.
Employee Preferences
It’s inevitable that with the overall scope that simPRO caters for within businesses that some users have preferences to the way they would like things displayed or to work.
We have put in the first of these preferential options now with individual employee’s being able to determine in their estimating how they prefer to work with time, in hours or minutes. For now this option is located under the employee’s profile tab. As we expand on these options we will move all employee’s preferences under a separate tab within the employee card.
With this particular option employee’s can set whether they prefer to use minutes or hours when creating quotes and jobs, editing pre builds and catalogue items – without it affecting the company defaults. Now, who wants seconds?
RECS / VEECS – Australia Only
A while ago the Australian government announced an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) and part of that involved trading Renewable Energy Credits from items used to offset carbon emissions generated by some of the big boys. However for the contractor managing the POS for these RECS (and in Victoria also the VEECS – Victorian Energy Efficiency Credits) was next to impossible.
To help alleviate the problem for our clients we have developed simPRO to be able to track the RECS (and VEECs) used on jobs and what the potential POS discount to the customer would be, this can then be applied against the actual invoice at the end (if you actually claim the RECs from the client to trade yourself) or can just be used to give the customer an estimate on what their costs are likely to be after they trade the RECs in themselves.
The REC values and number of credits are put on the pre builds into each REC and VEEC zone then the location’s postcode does a lookup to determine automatically which zone it is in for calculating purposes.
Now with all that free time you’ll have from not needing to manage a complex REC system, why not go home early or head off for a round of golf?
This will be released in this months version 10.5.0, for more information as always feel free to contact us anytime.
Tags: call centre, CIS, RCTI, Updates
Absolutely agree. Empower the field worker to focus on their core responsibilities AND support the streamlining of back-end operations toward analysi
I like how straight forward the process is.
Sounds like a good idea but how is that better than just getting a pda solution for guys?
Great article. There's a lot of good information here, though I did want to let you know something - I am running Redhat with the circulating beta of
Looks good - the digital notes can also be transferred straight on the computer, right ?
Hi JDW - yes it would be a great tool for any kind of business that needs to invoice from the road. If any of your clients are contractors or service
Is this real? I need that for my new plumbing company for the lads. But we will use sage for this is there a sage pen?
Interesting - as an accountant I think that would be a great tool to use for busineses of any size that I deal with. Any ideas on when it might be