I’m proud to say that we’re finishing this year on a high note, with another strong release full of features and improvements inspired by and suggested by you, our customers. Let’s take a closer look at our third and final release of 2021: Helm CONNECT 1.23.
Quickly manage part requests while protecting the accuracy of your master list
Attention Maintenance customers: we’ve taken our popular Request Manager—which Jobs customers already use to manage their users’ change requests for ship, location, and account information—and enhanced it to include part management! This powerful tool will allow your users to request any parts they need to complete their work without interruption but, to protect the accuracy of your data, it won’t add them to your master parts list until they’ve been reviewed and approved.
Users can quickly request the parts they need while performing the following workflows:
- Adding or editing requisitions. Users can use requested parts while adding or editing the line items in requisitions, but won’t be able to set the status of a requisition or line item to Received on Shore, Received on Asset, Closed, or Canceled until any requested parts are approved.
- Recording parts used on tasks. Users can use requested parts while adding or editing a task but won’t be able to finish the task until any requested parts are approved.
- Adding part tracking for inventory. Users can add part tracking for requested parts but can’t update inventory for declined parts.
Add manual transactions to submitted invoices
Good news for Jobs customers who need to add transactions to submitted invoices: that feature is finally here! For example, suppose your company offers discounts to customers who pay their invoices early. In that case, you can now submit and send out your invoices then manually add the discounts for any customers that qualify. You can add either flat rate or percentage-based transactions to submitted invoices, and this feature has a separate permission so you can easily manage which users can use it.
Disable payroll forecasting to improve performance
Not every feature can be a perfect fit for everyone, which is the case with payroll forecasting. Many Personnel customers make regular use of this feature and say the ability to project and plan their future payroll is well worth the additional time it takes to generate. Still, not all customers need this powerful tool, so we’ve introduced the option to disable it on your payroll schemes.
Payroll forecasting requires the payroll engine to calculate twice, significantly increasing its time to process payroll. Some customers may reduce their payroll processing time by up to 50 percent by disabling payroll forecasting.
Additional custom buttons for work-rest types
With the help of ongoing validation sessions with our customers, we continued to improve our popular Work Rest module in this release. One request we heard frequently was for more custom buttons to represent work-rest types on the grid, and I’m happy to announce that you can now have up to ten custom buttons instead of just four!
That’s it for now. Be sure to check out our release notes for more details about Version 1.23 and subscribe to our newsletter to stay up-to-date on the latest Helm news. Your account manager would also be happy to answer your questions about anything in this release or to set up a demo for you.
Stay safe, everyone, and happy Helm-ing!
