Happy New Year! We’re extending the joy of the holiday season and kicking off the year with a great new release. This one delivers features and improvements for all our users, including powerful new functionality for Helm CONNECT Personnel and some exciting currency tools for Helm CONNECT Jobs. If you missed what happened in our last release, you can read about it here.
Look what’s happening in Helm CONNECT Personnel
Since launching Helm CONNECT Personnel last summer, we’ve been working closely with our users to expand and improve the features and make the product even more awesome. Here are just some of the improvements you’ll find in this release.
- Confirm crew schedules by SMS and email
Imagine your crew getting an email or text message and being able to confirm their schedule with a single click. Now they can. Our crew change emails now include ‘Acknowledge’ and ‘Decline’ buttons so your crews can confirm their schedules with one click, whether they are logged in to Helm CONNECT or not. We also integrated with Twilio—a leading SMS platform—so you can send text (SMS) messages to your crews and they can reply to confirm their schedules right from their phone or mobile device. All responses are recorded in the crew schedule for full transparency, so you can spend less time chasing your crew, and more time optimizing your schedules and travel arrangements. To learn more about this feature, check out this article.
See responses to crew change notifications in Personnel > Schedule > Crew Changes. 
- See certifications for future positions
You need to know whether your crew have the right certifications for their job, but what happens when someone is being promoted or taking on a new role? Previously, you could only see and enter certification details in Helm CONNECT after the start date of the new position. Now you can track certification information for future positions, no matter how far in the future, both on shore and on your assets.
- See crew schedules in hours
We’ve always displayed crew schedules in amount of work—based on the rules you set for your work periods—but not in actual work hours. In this release, we added a toggle so you can view your crew schedules by amount of work or by hours, allowing you to plan who will crew on next and comply with rest time regulations.
To see what Helm CONNECT Personnel can do for you, please contact your account manager to set up a demo!
Manage exchange rates and report revenue in multiple currencies
Until now, customers who invoice in more than one currency couldn’t use Helm CONNECT Jobs to manage their exchange rates or report revenue in multiple currencies. In this release, all that has changed! We added some great new features that allow you to manage exchange rates for as many currencies as you need, and have those automatically flow through to your invoices. And when it’s time to report on your revenue, you can run separate reports for each currency or a single report with all revenue converted back into your home currency. It’s up to you.
Details tab is now Advanced Search
In our last release, we made our new Advanced Search functionality available to all our shore-side maintenance and compliance users. In this release, we completed the roll out of this powerful search tool and retired the old Details tab for good. To learn more about Advanced Search, check out this article or reach out to your account manager.
We changed the Crew tab in Onboard
We moved the Crew tab to a new home in Onboard > Personnel, added emergency contacts, and replaced the crew on/off functionality. Check out this article to learn more.
Onboard > Logs gets a list view
Your crews asked for it, so we did it! You can now switch between the card view and the new list view in any space in Onboard > Logs. Sometimes the little things make the best gifts, and this just might be one of our favorite new features.
The new list view in Onboard > Logs
That’s the first release of 2019! Check out our release notes to see all the details.
And we’ve got one more big announcement: Mark your calendars for October…we’re bringing Helm Conference 2019 to Nashville! More details coming soon.
We hope you love these new features! Please keep giving us feedback so we can build the stuff you need. To learn more about what’s happening in Helm CONNECT 1.14, check out this post.
Happy 2019 and happy Helm-ing!
