It is common to have parts of communication templates that are repeated across several templates, such as greetings and footers. To assist you with managing templates, you can now create macros, which are snippets that can be inserted into templates, to make managing these sections easier. Macros have access to the same variables and formatting options as the templates they are inserted into. Manage macros here.
Users on all plans now have the option to enable the enquiry customer portal through the web interface (here). This provides a form you can use to collect job requests from customers online - either through a hosted portal on our website, or embedded directly onto your website. You'll receive a notification when an enquiry is created through this form.
The initial release lets you gather customer contact details, the site address, request description & photos. Over time, we're hoping to make this more customisable to allow gathering extra information, and to integrate the enquiry portal into the central customer portal so that customers can select from a dropdown of their properties without having to re-enter all details for each request.
A demo of this form can be found at https://portal.jobstaq.co.uk/jobstaq-demo/enquire if you'd like to try it out to see whether you'd like to enable it for your account.
We've provided support for taking online payments on invoice portals through Stripe for a while now, however, every business has different payment processor preferences, so it's been difficult to prioritise which other payment integrations are worth developing and maintaining.
To provide a wide range of integrations, JobStaq is now able to make use of any payment methods you have configured through your accounting software (Xero, QuickBooks or Freeagent). You can control the default online payment methods available for each invoice from the customer portal settings page in the web interface, and can override these settings on individual invoices if required.
Additionally, you can set a preference for whether to show the JobStaq customer invoice portal pages to customers, or use your accounting software's portal fron the customer portal options settings. At present, you can choose to always use the JobStaq portal, always use the accounting portal, or use the accounting portal when payment is due.
The customer experience when paying through any payment gateways provided through your accounting software will be less smooth than any native integrations in JobStaq, so we will continue to monitor which payment systems are in use by our customers to influence future native JobStaq integrations for payments.
In addition to creating templates for entire quotes & invoices, you're now able to create templates for individual items that can be added after a quote or invoice has been created. One possible use case for this is a database of pricing for commonly fitted parts.
The most common use case of JobStaq's custom forms feature is to replicate existing forms and workflows, and the form builder can take a while to copy over all details of a form into JobStaq. We've added support for an AI import tool, which lets you upload a PDF file of an existing form, which attempts to identify questions and the most appropriate type in the JobStaq form builder for each field. As with all AI products, it will never be 100% reliable, however, this should hopefully quickly give a good starting point on new forms to manually verify and edit.
The custom form import tool can be found at the "Import" button on the custom forms setting page of the web interface.
You're able to categorise invoices as either deposit, interim, or final. All existing invoices have defaulted to final, but you're able to edit this on the invoice page. This option improves the reliability of the job status system in cases where an invoice has been raised before all work is completed.
The job status system has been rebuilt from scratch, to address some of the limitations of the original version. The new system will allow us to customise the status system for each JobStaq user, rather than forcing everyone to use the default system, once the new app update is ready. This includes both adding job status options that can be manually selected, and changing the automated status updates.
We have a published flowchart on our documentation site to help you understand how the default status system updates the status of your jobs. You can view this here.
We'll now show any bank holidays on the web interface and app calendar based on the holiday feed associated with the shift of each engineer in your account. These will appear as an all-day event and will prevent auto-scheduling from allocating events on this date as before, but you now have the ability to manually delete the event, if you've agreed with the engineer that they'll be working that day.
On customer and invoice pages, when the record you're viewing has been synced to a connected FreeAgent integration, you'll now see a button to quickly jump to the record in FreeAgent.
We've added a "Employee display settings" button to the calendar sidebar. This will take you to a popup where you can decide which employees are visible on the calendar, and drag them using the handle at the right of the list to change the order they show up in. You'll have the option to either change the settings for your account, or all users in your company.
The default ordering will remain the same as it is at present (order of employee creation), but this will give you the option to group engineers together by role, or sort alphabetically. Employee created after you configure the settings will default to being enabled and show up at the bottom of the list until you make any changes.