–
–
Hello, 2020! It’s our first release of the new year and the new decade and we’ve got some great new features and enhancements coming Helm CONNECT 1.18. Let’s dive in! But first, if you missed what happened in our last release you can read about it here.
–
Scheduled dates for task and checklists in Helm CONNECT Maintenance
Starting us off is a new Scheduled Date feature for Helm CONNECT Maintenance. To help plan your work and balance your maintenance team’s workload, you can now set a separate scheduled date for your checklists and tasks that is different from the due date. For example, if you have a number of checklists and tasks coming due around the same time, you can stagger the scheduled dates on these items so your teams can manage their workload more efficiently and get everything done in time.
We know that logistics can be complicated and you have to change plans sometimes, so we also allow you to schedule work after the original due date. Don’t worry though, if you must schedule work after it’s due, Helm CONNECT will require you to add a note explaining the reason for going past the due date so you have a record to show auditors.
We display the scheduled date in Onboard > Logs, Onboard Overview, and Advanced Search so both your onboard crew and staff on shore can quickly see what’s coming up. We also added a new Unscheduled filter in Advanced Search to help your staff on shore find any unscheduled maintenance work easily. Check out this article to learn all the details.
–
Enhanced billing in Helm CONNECT Jobs
As promised, this release delivers some powerful new billing features for our Helm CONNECT Jobs customers. We’re introducing interval billing, attachments and custom fields for your transactions, and more flexibility with the way time zones are displayed on your invoices.
Bill by interval instead of by order
First up is interval billing, which allows you to include multiple orders on a single invoice and bill for work without orders. Billing by an interval of time instead of by order means that you can bill all the work that took place within a specified span of time on a single invoice, instead of billing each item individually. To keep things simple, we provide a range of pre-set intervals including weekly, bi-weekly, semi-monthly (1st and 16th), monthly, and quarterly. You can also use interval billing to send invoices without an order, so you can now handle charter billing in Helm CONNECT.
Note: Interval billing is available to Helm CONNECT Jobs subscribers at no extra cost. However, in Version 1.18, it’s turned off at your tenant level by default. Please contact your account manager if you have any questions about this feature or if you’d like to have it turned on.
Email transactions with attachments
To speed up your billing workflow, we added a handy Email button right on the transactions detail view so you can email a transaction to a customer as soon as you submit the invoice. And because we know how important it is to send attachments with some of those transactions, you can do that too, right from the transaction!
Customize your transaction fields
Until now, you’ve only been able to use the standard set of default fields on your transactions. We know that our users track a lot of information in custom fields—on orders, trips, jobs, activities, or events—that carries through to billing. Then we heard that some data is best tracked on transactions and, now, in Version 1.18, you can set up custom fields for transactions and configure them to be required or optional.
Choose the best time zone for billing
Some of our customers operate across multiple time zones, with the work happening in one time zone and the invoices being created in an office in a different time zone. In Version 1.18, you now have the option to display the dates and times on your invoice in the time zone where the work took place, instead of in the time zone where the billing occurred.
Simplified workflows in Helm CONNECT Personnel
For Helm CONNECT Personnel, this release is all about giving you quick and easy access to the information you need to do your job efficiently. Your job moves FAST and we want to make sure Helm CONNECT keeps up with you.
Export list of certifications to Excel
When you need to export a list of certifications quickly—so you can see more easily which certifications are going to expire or what certifications are held by the crew on one of your assets—you can now use the new Export to Excel button that we added to the Tracking tabs for both Management > Assets and Management > People. This report includes certifications that haven’t been obtained yet as well as phone numbers and email addresses.
Links from Schedule tab to Crew Changes or History
To do their jobs efficiently and keep information up-to-date, crew dispatchers must move crew around quickly in Helm CONNECT. When they need to edit a planned or pending schedule, it needs to be fast and easy. Previously, they had to navigate to the Personnel > Schedule > Crew Change tab, filter to the relevant asset, then find the crew change card they needed to update. In this release, we’ve saved time by adding links that go directly from the Schedule tab to either the Crew Changes or the History tab, which is already filtered to the relevant asset and displaying the correct crew change card. When the schedule change is done, a click on the browser’s Back button jumps right back to the Schedule tab. To learn more about this feature, check out this article.
That’s it for now. Be sure to check out our release notes for all the details about Version 1.18. And by the way, did you see the news? We now have an office in Singapore!
To see what’s happening in Helm CONNECT 1.19, check out this post.
Happy Helm-ing!
