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.
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​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.
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​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.

Hi there,

We're very excited to inform you that you can now set credit limits for customers, as well as place customers on credit hold.

Credit limits

• You can now assign a credit limit to customers via the Settings tab of a customer's profile.
• Credit limits are calculated based on the total value of unarchived Sales Orders which are not in a draft status.
• When a credit limit is exceeded, or when submitting a Sales Order that would cause a customer to exceed their credit limit, a warning will be displayed.
• For MYOB customers, an additional option is available under the Settings > Integrations page to leverage MYOB's built-in credit limit values and credit hold status instead of Factory's.

Credit hold

• Customers can now be placed on Credit Hold, preventing new Sales Orders from being created for them.
• Credit Holds can be toggled on/off via the Settings tab on a customer's profile.
• When enabled, a warning will display when attempting to create a new order for the customer.

Other

• In addition, we have also made several improvements to the user interface of Factory when accessed via a tablet device. This will ensure a smoother experience when accessing the platform remotely or via the workshop floor.

Hi there,

We're excited to announce the rollout of our latest update, Sub-Kits.

You can now add 'kits within kits' to create more complex and detailed Product Kits that contain multiple layers or 'sub-assemblies'.

When creating or editing a Product Kit, simply click the new Add Sub-Kit button, enter a name for the Sub-Kit and then add your products to it.

From within the Product Kit's page, you can also customise where the Sub-Kit's details will display throughout Factory, similar to showing/hiding where a Product Kit's individual line items appear.

As always, we'd love to hear your feedback on this new functionality, so please don't hesitate to reach out with any thoughts or questions!

Hi there,

We've made various improvements and fixes to Factory this week that we'd love to share with you.

• You can now configure the Bill date when converting a Purchase Order to a Bill. The date chosen will be reflected on the Bill in your accounting package.
• The email address of contacts added to a Sales or Purchase Order will now display on the order's page, along with their name and phone number.
• We've sped up the time it takes for certain product pages and pricing tables to load when adding these products to an order.
• Fixed a bug that was causing issues when copying/pasting data into pricing table cells or product line items on orders.
• Fixed a bug that was preventing material colours from displaying on certain PDFs.
• Various other bug fixes.

As always, we hope you find these changes and fixes useful!