Release Notes 4.21

We are excited to bring you another exciting major mid-year release of Harmony. We have included the changes and features we have added in this article with links to the help articles related to each feature for an in depth walkthrough. 

Work Items are now 'Project Plan Tickets'

We have made a few major changes to the projects in this release and one of the most notable is the fact that we will not be referring project related plan items as work items any more. We have carefully chosen to rename these as 'Project Plan Tickets'. The idea is that, there are two types of tickets; Service Tickets and Project Plan Tickets. Project plan tickets are to be used to plan and manage project related work while the Service tickets can be used to capture support queries and other internal non project related tasks.

You can now have both types of tickets in one grid by ticking the 'Include Project Plan Tickets' option in the To-Do > Tickets grid. 

You can also find a list of project plan tickets under To-Do > Projects > Project Plan Tickets.

Project Progress Reporting Changes

We have also made major changes on how progress reporting is done in projects. Now with progress reporting, you can allow customers to view progress of projects via the customer portal with detailed notes on the status of the project and you can also send internal progress reports to staff members  and view them directly on the project contract. The internal and the external project progress reporting can easily be controlled through the Progress Reporting options in the 'Edit and view more' settings page in 'Overview' tab of the project.

Once the above settings are enabled, the project reporting tab will be unlocked. This tab will allow you to add project progress notes to the report. We have provided an off the shelf template to deliver these reports to the relevant users. You can have access to Internal and customer report templates through this page. The customer progress reporting is easily accessible through the customer portal as seen from the screenshot below. Click here for more.

Column picker for the Project Gantt

Harmony allows you to add and remove columns you would like to see in the project Gantt. You are no longer limited by the standard fields in the Gantt and you can now remove and add fields you need as you require. This can be done using the downward pointing arrow head on the project Gantt column tab.

Renewal process for schedules

Harmony PSA V4.21 has added the ability to generate 'renewal quotes' from existing schedules. This is a useful feature to generate quotes from schedules approaching renewal but you want to let the customer know if a price change or changes to the services you provide. 

When a quote is created, it will be listed under the 'Schedule History' tab of the schedule contract. Once the quote is signed by the customer, it can be processed in to a schedule as a renewal quote which will create a new schedule but with an increment version number (e.g.: Version 2.0) to indicate that this is a renewal. Click here for more. 

Invoice now option for schedules

Schedule billing now allows users to invoice for schedule initialisations/Renewals set to be started in the future. This enables you to bill invoices at the point of initialisation rather the than waiting for the schedule start date to commence. This can be performed by clicking on the 'initialise and invoice now' button at the bottom of the initialisation page. Harmony will then initialise and create an invoice line for the future period to be sent to the customer. Click here for more. 

Pro-rated invoicing for mid period consumption invoicing 

Consumption invoicing has gone through yet another improvement with the ability to pro-rate billing for mid-period quantity changes. It will calculate the invoicing adjustment lines for any increases or decreases in quantity changes accurately. However, the billing method will need to have an estimate quantity for this to generate the adjustment lines accordingly. 

Ability to unpost invoices

We are pleased to inform that you can now easily 'void' posted invoices and restore them as draft invoices by selecting the 'unpost invoice' option invoice 'post actions'. This is useful if the final invoice has mistakes or require changes before sending to the customer. With the use of this feature, you do not have to credit and start invoices from scratch to avoid sending out wrong invoices. Now you can easily unpost and edit the invoices then finally 'post' them again for releasing. Click here for more. 

Multiple vacation budgets 

Harmony PSA now enables you to make use of multiple vacation budgets in the system. These budgets are added from the legal entity time settings tab and absence activities can be mapped to drawdown from these budgets from Finance > Setup > Static> Absence Activities. An important point that's worth pointing out about this feature is that, this allows you to add multiple budget with different 'budget units' (hours and days) in the same legal entity. 

As always if you have any questions or issues please get in touch. 

Regards

The Harmony Team