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.

We've made a large upgrade to our existing individual portals, which could be shared to give access to a single document such as a quote, invoice, or engineer tracking. Now, you have the option to allow customers to login to a central portal, where they can access details on all of their jobs, upcoming events, quotes, invoices and forms.

What's Available Now?

For subscribers on our gold plan, you now have access to the customer portal feature. On the portal settings page in the web interface, you are able to configure branding for the portal, optionally link custom domains, and set the default access level for new customers in your account (this defaults to no access).

From the options menu on the customer page, you're able to select the access role assigned to the customer, and also preview the portal as the customer, so you have an idea what your customer will see.

Coming Soon

We still have a number of improvements planned for the portal, including integration with the automatic booking system, customisation of features your customers can access, and the ability to raise new jobs directly from the portal. If you've got any other ideas on how we can improve the portal for your needs, please reach out and let us know!

Hopefully a welcome change from frequent subscription price increases elsewhere, following on from the custom forms changes, we're also making storage cheaper!

The included allocations for each plan is increasing, with bronze going from 1GB to 5GB, silver from 2.5GB to 10GB, and gold from 5GB to 15GB. Additional storage pricing has decreased across all plans to £0.25/GB/month.

There's not much more to say here than the title of this update! In response to our interactions with customers and those looking for solutions, we've become aware that a lot of users have the need to create one or two custom forms for their workflow, such as job sheets, and forcing these users into our highest tier package doesn't make sense. Custom forms, previously only available on our Gold plan, are now available on all plans, with Bronze allowing 1 custom form, Silver allowing 5, and Gold continuing to offer unlimited forms.

You now have the option to notify your engineers when they've been assigned to an event, or a task.

For events, notifications get sent once the employee locked option is checked, and only for events occurring the next 7 days.

In both cases, no notifications will be delivered if you're assigning yourself to a task or event.

We've released support for creating recurring events through the web interface, so you can automatically schedule events according to a determined pattern (eg. every x days, every other Monday, 1st of every month), and choose how these are associated to jobs (whether this be unassociated with a job, all assigned to the same job, or a new job being created every x months).

You're able to access this feature through the new "Recurrence" tab on the event create/edit popup from the web interface's calendar page. For events with an associated series, the update button will present the option to apply any changes made to either the selected event, or this plus all future events, while the delete button will allow deletion of either the single event, or all future events.

Support for managing recurring events through the app is planned in our development backlog, but we have no timeline for this at this stage. Please reach out to support to register your interest in this so we can correctly prioritise this!

We've extended our automatic reminders feature to now include support for events in addition to the previous quotes, invoices and forms. This will allow you to automatically send your customers email or SMS messages at a specified offset prior to or after the event's start date, for example, to remind them of a booking and give them a chance to contact you if they need to re-arrange, or to send a post visit feedback request to see how things went.

Like all existing reminder types, custom conditions can be used, for example, to configure reminder types on a per job type basis. Please reach out to support for assistance with setting up conditional reminders, as the self-service interface for this currently isn't very beginner friendly.

We've just released a few improvements to customer portals to help give you more control over your branding. All these settings can be managed through the web interface customer portal settings page, at https://web.jobstaq.co.uk/#/settings/customer_portal.

Custom domains Users of our Gold tier can now configure their customer portal (and link shortener) to be accessed via one of their own domains, rather than the default portal.jobstaq.co.uk. More details on how to use this feature can be found here.

Favicons, light & dark logos Previously, the logos shown on the customer portal pages were the same as the one we use on generated PDFs, which while fine in most cases, some users wanted more flexibility. You're now able to override the default logo with a light theme and dark theme logo for the customer portals if required (for example, if you have a secondary logo design for displaying on dark backgrounds). You're also able to upload a favicon image that will be shown in browsers next to the tab name, and in preview links in some third party applications.

Custom HTML You're now able to provide HTML snippets to be inserted into the head or end of the document body on all portal pages. This may be useful if you want to gather analytics data for your customer's usage of the portal, or would like to insert a live chat widget to the page to provide your customers a way to raise any questions about the quote or invoice they're viewing.