Hi there,

We're excited to share some of the recent updates we've made to Factory!

Workflow Child Cards

• Create separate Cards for each Line Item on a Job/Order, allowing users to see the status of each Line Item in Workflow
• Move the Workflow Child Card between different statuses by simply dragging and dropping
• Any status changes made in the Workflow are linked to the Line Item status under Sales Order > Tracking, and vice versa
• Important - Workflow Child Cards cannot trigger email or SMS notifications.

Other things to improve your experience!

• We've included ABN when importing a Customer/Supplier to Factory from your accounting package.
• Sales Order Export now includes Notes, Assignees, Invoiced amount (including Partial Invoicing), Quoted Labour hours, Hours worked, Hours scheduled, Cost of Labour, Markup, length values for Lineal Metre Products.
• Assignees/Team members are now displayed in alphabetical order.
• We've added a Filter by status in the Planner, making it easier to display Jobs/Orders.
• Decimal quantities can now be used for Line Items when splitting Sales Orders/Purchase Orders.
• The PO Reference field has been increased to a character limit of 100.

We hope you enjoy these new updates as much as we enjoyed building them for you! And as always, please don't hesitate to reach out to the team if you have any questions or feedback.

Hi there,

We've recently released a considerable number of updates and improvements. Here are some of the highlights that are now available:

Time Tracking

• We've added additional ways to clock on/off from jobs, including via the Active tracking button located in the top nav bar of Factory. This allows you to clock on to new jobs without having to click into a job's Tracking tab.
• Specify the hours worked when adding manual time entries, without a specific start/finish time being required.
• Add custom notes to manual time entries.

Other

• You can now set line item quantities to 0 on both Sales and Purchase orders.
• Implemented substantial performance improvements when creating and interacting with larger sales orders, especially when dealing with considerably large product kits.
• Various bug fixes.

We hope you enjoy these updates and improvements!

Hi there,

We're excited to say that we've just released a new feature that will help you more easily manage back-ordering and similar situations inside Factory!

​Splitting Orders

• You can now 'split' existing Sales and Purchases into multiple separate orders, dividing up the line items and their associated quantities as you see fit.
• To do this, click Split Order via the Options button when viewing a submitted Sales or Purchase order. Then, select the line items and quantities that would like to split out into a new order.
• Doing so will create a new, draft order containing the selected line items and quantities, removing them from the original order. The newly created order will also be automatically linked to the originating order via the Linked Orders tab.

We hope you enjoy these new updates as much as we enjoyed building them for you! And as always, please don't hesitate to reach out to the team if you have any questions or feedback.

Hi there,

We're excited to update you on a few of our more recent updates to Factory!

​Timesheets

• Capture timesheets for specific team members and view all time-tracking related activities from a single location.

Square Metre Products

• Create and sell products that are priced based on custom SQM measurements and SQM rates.

Custom Planner Events

• Add custom events to your Planner calendar. Block out time for non-job related tasks, sick leave, vacation time and more! Including the ability to configure recurring events and event reminders.

Other things to improve your experience!

• We've added support for international addresses on customers and suppliers.
• We introduced some updates to how notifications are received and displayed inside Factory when tagging team members in messages, including new popup alerts and notification sounds.
• Added a new Invoice final amount option to Partial Invoicing to speed up the process of issuing a final invoice.
• Added a new option under each customer's Settings tab that when enabled will prevent any orders created for this customer from being sent to your accounting package.
• Implemented several performance improvements to prevent instances where certain text changes were not being saved on orders, as well as to prevent instances of duplicate orders being created.

We hope you enjoy these new updates as much as we enjoyed building them for you! And as always, please don't hesitate to reach out to the team if you have any questions or feedback.

Hi there,

We've released two new features that give you even greater flexibility when creating quotes and sales orders!

Whole Order Markups

• Add markups to an entire quote or sales order via the new add markup button, applying a percentage based increase to all line items on the order.
• Add multiple markups to a single order in order to cover specific scenarios, such as marking up for various types of distinct overheads.

Tax Free Products

• Mark certain products or line items as being 'tax free', removing them from tax calculations on orders.
• Permanently flag a product as 'tax free' via the new Product is bought/sold tax free option when editing the product.
• Exclude specific line items on an order from tax calculations via the Exclude from tax option found within each line item's options menu.
• Important - using tax free products requires your accounting package integration to have been configured with the correct 'tax free' account or tax codes. Feel free to reach out to our team for any assistance with configuring this inside Factory.

We hope these new features serve you well and help you to accommodate even more unique and specific use cases when using Factory!

Hi there,

We have some new feature announcements and quality-of-life improvements that we'd love to share with you!
​
​Order History for Products
You can now view a list of all Sales and Purchases that contain a certain product via the new Order History tab within each product's page, giving you a simple way to find existing and historical jobs based on the products they contain.
​
​Stock level breakdowns
When viewing a product's Tracking tab, you can now click on the Promised and On the way stock values to display a breakdown of all Sales / Purchases that make up these stock level figures.
​
​Negative dollar line items
You can now add negative values for the Markup, Unit Price and Total Price for line items on Sales and Purchase orders, giving you greater flexibility when creating orders under specific circumstances.
​
​Various bug fixes

• Fixed an issue preventing external notes from displaying on some PDFs
• Fixed an issue preventing some new companies from being able to connect to their Xero account on the first attempt

Please feel free to reply to this message with any thoughts or questions!
​
As always, we'd love to hear them.

Hi there,

This is a big one! We are very excited to announce that we have released the first major piece of our new Time Tracking functionality, allowing your team to clock on / off from jobs.

Gain visibility and insight into the amount of labour that goes into each job, providing greater clarity on your margins and driving more accurate quoting.

You can leverage Time Tracking in the following ways, via each Sales Order's Tracking tab:

• Clock on / off from entire jobs, or specific line items.
• View a live feed of the Hours estimated vs Hours worked for each job
• See a breakdown of all work logged for a specific job

In addition, you can configure Time Tracking in the following ways via the Settings > Time Tracking page:

• Automatically create entries on Planner when users clock on / off from jobs.
• Automatically update the Actual qty of Labour line items on a job as users clock on / off from labour tasks, providing you with an accurate, live, margin.
• Configure Work hours for your team and automatically clock off team members when the end of a day is reached.
• Configure PIN codes for users, requiring them to enter their PIN when clocking on / off.
• And more...

You can view a detailed walkthrough of the functionality here.

Later this month we will be releasing our Timesheets functionality, giving you even greater capabilities around managing your team and the time they work!
​
As this exciting set of functionality continues to evolve, we encourage you to provide any feedback and thoughts about how we can continue to improve our ability to help your team track the time they work on jobs.

Hi there,

You can now add custom text to the emails that you send from Factory.

• Default custom text can be configured per email type (I.e. Quote, Invoice, Purchase Order etc.) via the Settings page(s) within Factory. This content will display by default on every new email sent.
• Text can also be added or overwritten when sending individual emails.
• Any text added will be displayed in the body of the email that your customer or supplier receives.
• The styling of emails has also been updated to make them easier for your customers and suppliers to read and interact with.

We hope this new feature will make sending emails via Factory even more flexible and functional for you!

Please feel free to reply to this message with any thoughts or questions! We'd love to hear them.

Hi there,

We have made a few slight tweaks and improvements to some key areas of Factory:

• When exporting the Sales Orders list to Excel or CSV, the export will now include contact email addresses, as well as all labels present on each order at the time of the export.
• Inventory icons will now display on all Sales and Purchase orders that are in a 'Submitted' status.
• Various bug fixes

As always, please feel free to reach out to our team with any questions or feedback :)

Hi there,

In another step towards our upcoming Time Tracking functionality, we've released our new Labour Line Items feature.

• You can now assign Hourly rates (cost/charged) to Team Members via the Settings > Team page. This applies to both Standard and Assignee users.
• Team members can then be added to orders (or Product Kits) as a labour line item, pulling through their cost and hourly rate onto the order.
• A new labour section has also been added to the bottom of each order's page, detailing the total labour value on the order.
• Under the Settings > PDFs page, you can configure whether or not labour line items display on your internal and customer-facing PDFs.
• As part of the upcoming Time Tracking functionality we'll be releasing shortly, you'll soon be able to track the number of hours estimated (labour) vs hours worked on each order, given you greater insight into your margins and the accuracy of your quoting.