We've added a read-only integration for CardDAV clients, allowing you to view your JobStaq customer and employee database from within third party software, such as the iOS contacts app. More details on how to configure this can be found here.
Our customer booking portal allows customers to self-sechedule work to save administrative time for your business, when scheduling new or repeat work. We've made improvements to the confirmation screen of this portal, so that customers now get presented with an add to calendar dropdown, to save details of their booking to their preferred calendar software, so they don't forget when this work was scheduled for.
When used, an event will be created on their calendar with your company's contact details (incase work needs re-scheduling), time range, approximate duration, job type, and the property which the work takes place at.
We've been busy at work making a large number of changes to existing features over the past few weeks. A number of these relate to our internal tools to assist in supporting users when issues arise, however, there's a number of changes impacting our app and beta web interface which will be covered below.
Preview cover letter communication template PDF
For printed letter communications, there's always been the option to preview the cover letter which will be sent when creating a communication. However, up until now, this has not been possible for templates. We've added support to preview what a letter will look like with sample data from your account so you can quickly verify it's what you're after and make changes if there's any issues.
Creation date improvements for app
The creation date we stored on the server was previously set to the date at which the app synced to the server. In cases where you have no network connection when creating an item, this will mean the date isn't when it was actually created, so may cause confusion. We've made changes so that we can preserve the date & time at which an item was created in the app when synced to the server, no matter whether a network connection is available at the time of creation in the app.
Communication employee sender
Previously, all email and SMS communications sent through JobStaq have been sent from the company email or SMS sender. However, some users have requested the ability to change this so that emails can be sent from the user who created the communication, so replies go to their inbox. We've added configuration options to company settings to allow you to change whether emails and/or SMS messages are sent from the company contact details, or that of the employee creating the communication. We'll fall back to the company details in cases where the employee details are either missing, or when a communication was created automatically (eg. service reminders).
Search improvements
We've added links to the search page sidebar on our new web interface to allow you to quickly navigate to a section on the page, saving time scrolling through results when your query returned a large amount of data. We've also made some improvements to partial phone/mobile number searches on customers.
Resend communications from app
Previously this option was only available on the web interface, but now you're able to resend communications through the app if needed due to failed delivery or ammendments.
Quote & invoice status history
You are now able to view the history of quotes and invoices over time.
Event deletion close job suggestions
When deleting an event associated with a job, if this is the last event remaining on the job, we'll prompt you to check whether the job should remain open (if work is to be re-scheduled at a later stage), or whether the job should be closed (if the work is no longer going ahead). This should help your jobs requiring attention lists more accurate and informative.
Expire used booking portal links
When using our auto-booking system for form reminders, the link will now expire once the form associated has been marked as renewal complete to avoid accidental double-bookings for the same piece of work.
Automatic accounting integration sync
We'll automatically run a complete sync every Monday morning if you've configured an integration with Xero or QuickBooks to ensure data is in a consistent in JobStaq, and to minimise the chance of the connection deactivating due to lack of activity. Please contact support if you'd prefer this to be disabled for your account.
Forcefully update form PDFs
There are some cases where our system may not detect a form PDF needs updating, such as when customers associated with the job are changed. We've added buttons to the app and web interface to allow you to force the PDF to be regenerated in these cases.
We're rolling out some large changes to how locations associated with events work, to increase the flexibility offered by the calendar and automatic scheduling.
Prior to this update, events could either be associated with a job or not. Events associated with a job always took place at the job's site address, and non-job events had no location. Some users had to work around this limitation by opening jobs whenever they needed to schedule work at an address, which added admin time, and made job status summaries less useful.
From this update, events themselves have a location, which for all historic events, defaults to the job address, or no address for events without jobs.
This means you can create non-job events with a location, such as for meetings and training, to allow the app to present navigation options.
For job events, you can remove the address from the event, allowing you to schedule in time for calls with customers, or to survey properties online proior to work with software such as Zoom to save on travel time. You're also able to assign a different property to one event, for example, to set an address where keys need to be picked up and returned to in order to access the site's main property.
We've improved handling of international (non-GB) phone/mobile numbers and addresses across the software.
Phone Numbers You can continue to enter phone/landline and mobile numbers in the same way you have up until now. However, we've improved validation support for international numbers, and support for formatting these for readability.
You'll need to specify a country dialing code (eg. +44) for any international numbers, and if this is omitted, the number will be interpreted as being from the same country your JobStaq account is set to (GB).
Addresses When creating and editing properties through the website and app, there's now a field to select the country the property is located within. This is used to determine the validation that's applied to the postcode when saving your changes.
At present, address lookups, mapping, and auto-scheduling will continue to only work for properties within the UK, however, if you have a use case for any of these features with international addresses, please reach out to let us know!
To help make finding data within your JobStaq account easier, we've made some changes to how the account search functions.
Your query is now also checked against job descriptions, event descriptions, notes, and job customer reference fields for matches. Some changes have been made to improve detection of phone number in queries, to improve the changes of finding a match.
When filling out forms on our app, your changes will now be saved as you progress, so that in the event you need to view something else in the app, or run into any technical issues, you won't need to worry about losing your progress, or finishing the form first.
Whenever you change an input on the form, it'll be saved in the background in a draft state. Drafts remain locally on the device you created them from, and will only sync once they've been fully completed.
If you want to delete a draft form, when exiting the form editor using the "back" button at the top right of the page, there is an option to exit and delete draft.
We're currently rolling out support for draft forms to our mobile apps, so you'll start to see this become available over the next few days.
Following from feedback from some users, we are now offering autocompletion for UK addresses at no additional cost from your regular subscription.
Previously, we were sourcing data from Royal Mail's Postal Address File (PAF), which while good quality was expensive due to licensing terms, resulting in costs for this feature being passed along to users, at around 5p per lookup.
We're now sourcing address data from a different provider which uses other data sources with lower associated costs. From our investigations, the data appears to be good enough for most use cases, and has become the default system for all accounts since this was released earlier today.
If you still wish to use the higher-quality PAF address data, please contact our support team and we can switch your account back to the older pay-per-use lookup system, which benefits from improved location accuracy, higher address coverage, and better support for preventing duplicated data within your account. We plan to offer both systems going forwards, with the eventual goal being to allow you to switch your account between these providers based on your preferences.
Updates to our billing pages to reflect this change will shortly follow over the next few weeks.
What do I do if I have remaining account credit for postcode lookups?
If you purchased account credit to use for our old postcode system and no longer have a use for this, please contact our support team, so we can either refund this credit, or apply it to a future invoice for your subscription.
With the number of items in the forms list growing over time, it may become difficult to find forms which you commonly use, especially if these are located near the bottom of the list.
This update introduces the option to favourite forms within the app, so that they are pinned to the top of the list, allowing you to quickly access commonly created forms.
To use this feature, when on the "Select form" page of the app, simply swipe right on the form you want to favourite, and click the "favourite" button. It will then appear in a new "Favourites" section at the top of the page. If you want to remove a favourited form, just follow the same steps.
We've added support for importing logs from Anton Sprint analysers in addition to Kane analysers. Logs can be imported to be saved against jobs for reference, and used to auto-complete selected forms, such as domestic gas safety certificates.
To pair an analyser, ensure it is turned on with Bluetooth enabled on your device, go to "Settings", "Analyser", and select the analyser from the list.
While paired, you can export logs via Bluetooth from the analyser, and they will import into the app. Note the analyser will currently report the app did not receive the data correctly - just dismiss this error with the "esc" key.
The app currently supports the following log types, with more to be added in future as required:
