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.

We've just rolled out an update to the data import flow available in the web interface, to make it easier to use and more flexible.

Previously, we only supported importing customer and property details from a CSV file with a fixed format of required column names, which in most cases caused a lot of work for anyone trying to map their existing data into the expected format to get the import to work. The new import process addresses this limitation, by allowing you to upload CSV or Excel files with any column configuration, and then letting you pick what fields in JobStaq your spreadsheet columns map onto.

We've also introduced some aggregated fields, to reduce manual processing work required prior to uploading the spreadsheet to the web interface. Initially, we're supporting a combined customer name field (which we'll split into name components), and a combined property address field (which will get split up into lines). We'll continue to monitor feedback and usage of this importer to identify any future potential for more aggregate fields going forwards.

We've also expanded the types of data the importer supports to customers, properties, jobs, notes, assets and events, which we think should cover most use cases of the feature. If you've got any data not supported by this flow, please reach out to our support email, and we'll be happy to help getting your data imported.

Finally, we've made some behind-the-scenes improvements to the data deduplication handling during imports. Our previous import system only supported comparing the data being imported to data in your account before the import started, but we noticed a number of cases where imports contained duplicate records, so have changed this so that we'll attempt to spot duplicate data within a import file and merge this, to keep your database as useful as possible.

You can access the import flow from the settings page of the web interface, by searching "import" in global search, or from this link. Any feedback is appreciated!

Following from the release of audit logs earlier this week, we've now began to expose our accounting integration sync logs through the web interface.

On the integration page, you'll now see a table summarising the data in your JobStaq account that gets synced to your accounting integration, to give you a high-level summary of how much data is missing:

We've added an error logs tab to this page so you can get an overview of what's failing to sync, and where possible, make corrections to data to allow the sync to succeed:

On any customer or invoice pages where the sync has failed, you'll now see an alert message with details of why the sync failed, so you're able to quickly work out if this is something you can fix by changing data on the page:

And finally, you can go to the audit logs page in company settings to view all sync data (including successful sync information), and filter this if you need to locate anything specific, or filter the existing customer and invoice list views by their accounting sync status.

You're now able to access audit logs through our web interface, to see change history made to data in your account. This allows you to see who made changes (such as creating, updating and deleting records), when they were made, and what field values were changed. This should be useful if someone accidentally removes or changes an important piece of information, and you need to restore it back to an older version.

Audit logs can currently be accessed from your company settings page, or in some cases, from record view pages (eg. customers, jobs, and properties).

We'll be improving this feature over time, and expanding it to give you logs relating to integration syncing and account security, so please let us know of any feedback you have!