What’s New in Factory: July and August Releases

Hi there, 👋

Seven weeks of updates, and a big couple of months. The Planner has been rebuilt, kiosk timesheets are live on the shop floor, and there's a stack of work on how Factory talks to your accounting package.

🚀 New features and enhancements

• A planner you can read at a glance: Colour the board by the person doing the work or by workflow status, and you can see who is carrying what and where every job sits without opening a single card. Work that cannot start can be flagged as blocked with a reason, so the whole team plans around it. Day, Week and Month views have all been reworked, there is a filter panel and search across people, orders and customers, and Saved Views let you keep a board setup and share it with the team. Colour is off until you turn it on, so the board looks the same as it always did on first load. There is also a short video walking through the changes.
• Kiosk timesheets: Set up an iPad, tablet or desktop in the workshop and your team can tap their name, enter a PIN, and clock on and off against a job or general attendance — no personal login, no paper timesheet. Labour lines carry a LABOUR badge so they are easy to pick out of a job list, and kiosk access can now be granted to Admins and Power Users as well as Standard Users from Kiosk Settings.
• Product kits inside other kits: Kits can now contain other kits on sales orders and quotes, so layered or reusable bundles can be built the way you actually sell them instead of being flattened out by hand.
• You can now see when an accounting connection needs attention: Factory shows the real state of your Xero, QuickBooks or MYOB connection rather than a stale "Connected" label, prompts you to reconnect when it has dropped, shows an in progress state while a connection is being re-established, and flags products on a sales order that have not synced. Submitting an order that will not sync warns you rather than stopping you. Connections also refresh in the background before they expire.
• Purchase orders for staff without pricing access: Standard User (No Pricing) can now open Purchasing and create or manage purchase orders, with sales order pricing still hidden. Your floor and field staff can raise a PO at the supplier counter and link it to the job, instead of sending the receipt back to the office.
• Choose how records arrive in Xero: Set whether Factory sends sales orders and invoices across as Draft or Awaiting Payment. If your shop signs off invoices before they are treated as ready to collect, or you send them from Xero rather than Factory, they can now land in Draft and wait for you. Both settings keep their current behaviour until you change them.
• Xero payroll for New Zealand and the UK: Payroll sync now covers Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, handling each country's employees, timesheets, pay rates and payroll calendars.
• Tax free accounts for the US, UK and NZ: Xero setup now surfaces the correct zero tax account options for those regions, which heads off invoice sync failures caused by a missing tax free mapping.
• Update product costs when purchase orders come in: Turn this on and receiving a purchase order writes the price you actually paid back to the product's cost in your catalogue, and recalculates marked up pricing with it. Off unless you switch it on.
• Labour from timesheets is easier to follow: Labour lines that came from a timesheet now show where they came from, link back to the time entry, and are better protected against being edited or deleted by accident.

🛠️ Fixes and refinements

• We've released a number of enhancements aimed at resolving slight rounding issues between Factory and accounting packages.
• Fixed square metre dimensions disappearing after saving an order, leaving the line showing 0 sqm and $0.00.
• Fixed square metre dimensions being lost after Update Order.
• Fixed stock counts drifting upwards, where an order pickup notification could add stock back after it had already been deducted. Counts that were already inflated may still need correcting.
• Fixed an invoice date mismatch, where the PDF showed the date you picked but the email and Xero showed the next day.
• Fixed partial invoice generation failing with a calculation error.
• Fixed external notes being treated as products, which left order level markup applying to nothing.
• Fixed a Xero connection error that stopped some accounts loading their accounts and tax codes, and blocked invoicing.
• Fixed invoice lines without a Xero item mapping syncing with the wrong tax rate.
• Fixed orders and purchase orders failing to submit to MYOB, QuickBooks Online and Xero when an item was missing a tax code — your company defaults are now used instead.
• Fixed a QuickBooks Online first import returning only recently updated records, which left large customer and supplier lists incomplete.
• Fixed the "connection was lost" warning appearing on all three accounting cards when only one had disconnected.
• Fixed the sales order banner overstating how long it had been since the last sync.
• Fixed purchase order emails failing when a company logo image type could not be read.
• Fixed purchase order PDFs showing millimetre measurements to four decimal places.
• Fixed Bill To and Deliver To sitting empty on a sales order when the customer's billing details were already filled in.
• Fixed breaks not being deducted from tracked time when the setting was switched on.
• Fixed an error that blocked manual time entry on certain user and order combinations.
• Fixed a time entry's duration collapsing to 1 minute when moved to a different labour item.
• Fixed a duplicated planner event staying in the original user's lane after being dragged to someone else.
• Fixed Auto Sign-Out After Clock On not working on the kiosk.
• Fixed manually added time entries not syncing through to kiosk time records.
• Web Timesheets can now clock off an entry that was started at the kiosk.
• Kiosk devices now return to the link screen with an explanation when kiosk mode is switched off, rather than sitting blank.
• Workflow status badges now use the colours set in Workflow settings.
• Performance improvements to the Sales Order list.

📱Mobile improvements

• Create sales orders from your phone: Win a job in the field and you can start it there and then. Pick the customer, add manual items or labour, and the order lands in Factory as a Draft for the office to finish. Catalogue products and kits stay view only on mobile for now, and submitting, invoicing and accounting sync remain on the web app, with more to come.
• PDFs opened from Collaborate now render more clearly.
• The Drawings tab is now hidden when Flashings is switched off, rather than opening onto nothing.
• Fixed a crash on the Tracking screen when a square metre value was entered with a double "m".