Synergy release - 25 January 2020

To help ease you into a new decade, the first release of 2020 is all about performance, performance, performance. Our product development and customer success teams reviewed your feedback to find key areas where you want improved performance - you will now experience improvements and see changes to the user interface (UI) in the work breakdown, in how you produce reports; when you use the connected accounting add-ons, and also in the invoice screen.

Work breakdown

The work breakdown is an integral part of all projects. This update improves the work breakdown's responsiveness and introduces some UI design enhancements:

• Hover and reveal -  many of the functions for work breakdown controls are revealed when you hover over the phase or stage. This unclutters the view, making it easier to get the information you want. 
• The 'Add +' button to add a new phase/stage/task is hidden but will reveal when you hover over the row. We also changed the icon to a minimalist . Read more.
• If you click into one of the hidden menu items, this will remain open while you scroll through your work breakdown.
• We simplified how you sort your stages. The new standard is arrowheads on the left end of the row that allow you to reorder your phases, stages, and tasks a row at a time. Read more
• You can still drag and drop if you need to move your stage across multiple rows. We moved this option to the ellipsis  – ‘Sorting’ and drag as required. Read more
• If a stage or task is unassigned, they are now displayed as empty heads as opposed to being left blank. The idea behind this is to remind you to add a resource. Of course, you can ‘assign’ a resource when you click on the head. (picture)
• Similarly, the ‘change’ function for any resourced stages/tasks now appear when you hover over a row.
• The timer start button is also hidden on all tasks, and reveals when you hover over the row (in both planning and delivery modes). The timer will also continue to run after you start it in the work breakdown. Read more
• We’ve labeled all the functionality in the work breakdown with tooltips, so you’ll know what each function does. Go wild, hover and learn.

Schedule

• Tasks now have a sidebar. This means you can also use a date picker to edit the start and end date of your tasks. Read more.

Run reports in the background

If you export or print reports, you will love what we’ve done in the reporting page. When you export a report to PDF or Excel it will run in the background, leaving you free to do other things in Synergy.

See the progress in the new dialog and move it around as you please. You can also download the file you generated directly from the hyperlink. You will see multiple dialogs if you are generating multiple reports and you can download up to two reports in parallel, and any subsequent reports will be queued.

Note: For this feature to automatically download on completion, you will need to ensure that pop-ups “are always allowed from totalsynergy.com” in your browser settings. Read more 

Records displayed

To improve your experience,  we’ve changed the limit of records displayed - we now show less on-screen to make it faster, and much more in pdf and Excel exports for your biggest reports and exports:

• On your Synergy screen, we will only show the first 10,000 records. 
• When you generate a PDF, this is extended to the first 50,000 records, which is probably around 500 pages.
• When you export to Excel, you can have up to 500,000 records. If you had 100 staff generating 100 timesheet transactions every week, you would be able to export a whole year’s worth of transactions to excel.

The PDF and Excel files are saved into the Staff > Documents > Temporary files.  

Staff folders

We updated the security settings in the Staff > Documents folder. Read more

• Staff with system administrator and director access will have visibility to all the folders and files in the staff folder.
• Project managers, assistant project managers, and users will only have access to their own temporary files folder and files.

Notifications

• You will receive a notification when your report is ready for download. Click the notification to open your report.
• You will also get an email notification if you have it enabled. This link is valid for 30 days. Read more

Accounting add-ons

Our developers have worked some backend magic and you will see performance improvements when you use Connect to sync up with your accounting add-ons (MYOB, QBO, Xero).

Invoice screen

Creating and submitting invoices is faster.