Introduction

Over the past few months, we’ve been hard at work making Planyard even better—and we’re excited to share the latest updates with you!

Our mission is simple: to help construction companies eliminate the hassle of spreadsheets and double data entry, significantly reducing time spent on cost management while ensuring more accurate financials and forecasts. With our latest features and improvements, project management is now smoother and more reliable than ever.

Let’s dive into what’s new and how it can benefit you.

Knowledge Base Updates: New Resources Available

To ensure you’re fully equipped to get the most out of Planyard, we’ve made significant updates to our knowledge base over the past few months.

We’ve rewritten and added a lot of new content, including guides, videos, and step-by-step tutorials. Our goal is to support you, no matter where you are on your journey with Planyard.

Examples of the resources you’ll find in our knowledgebase:

• Getting Started: Content tailored for new companies just setting up Planyard, helping you integrate the platform seamlessly into your workflow.
• Project Workflow Video Tutorials: Short video tutorials of critical project workflows, perfect for introducing new colleagues to Planyard or getting an introduction to features not yet utilised.
• Feature Deep Dives: In-depth resources to help you learn more about specific features, so you can discover tools that might benefit your company and improve your processes.

Visit the knowledge base to explore these new resources and find support at every stage of your Planyard journey.

Work Orders (Beta): Manage Labour and Overhead Costs

We’re excited to announce the launch of a powerful new feature currently in beta: Work Orders. With Work Orders, you can now manage and track internal labour and overhead costs—whether for your own labour force or self-employed team members—all within Planyard.

This feature lets you assign tasks and allocate costs for both labour and overhead, ensuring all commitments are accurately tracked in your budget.

Key Benefits of Work Orders:

• Proactive task management: Create work orders for internal labour and overhead costs, ensuring that all commitments are accurately reflected in your budget.
• Flexible cost tracking: Choose whether to define quantities (e.g., hours) upfront or leave them blank if the exact labour required is uncertain. When work begins, simply input the actual hours spent and document progress.
• Automatic updates: Planyard automatically updates the commitment based on the hours worked and progress documented, ensuring real-time cost tracking and accurate financial forecasts.
• Supports multiple costing methods: Whether you’re using hourly rates, task-based payments, or a combination of both, Work Orders provide the flexibility to manage costs efficiently.
• Comprehensive overhead tracking: Monitor overhead costs, such as white-collar staff (e.g., project managers or supervisors), alongside labour costs, giving you a complete picture of project expenses.

Interested in Exploring the Work Orders Feature?

This feature is currently in beta and not yet activated for all customers. If you’d like to try it out, contact us to have it activated for your account. You can also schedule a demo directly to see how it works and get a walkthrough of the new features.

Schedule a Demo Here to pick a time that works best for you.

Estimation Improvements: Streamline Your Workflow

At Planyard, we’re committed to streamlining your entire project management process—from the initial estimate to the final invoice. With this goal in mind, we’ve enhanced our Estimation Feature to make it easier for you to manage and collaborate on estimates, ensuring that every project can be handled seamlessly within Planyard from start to finish.

Key Updates to the Estimation Feature

• Customisable Estimation Pipeline: We’ve introduced a more flexible estimation pipeline, which now functions as a lightweight CRM. You can track the current status of all ongoing estimations and, with this new update, create your own pipeline stages. Customise the pipeline with the status stages that best fit your workflow, giving you full control over how you track and manage estimates.
• Improved Collaboration with Permission Settings: Sharing and collaborating on estimates is now much easier. We’ve updated the permission access settings, so your team can seamlessly collaborate on estimations, ensuring that everyone involved has the right access at the right time.
• Notebox for Estimation Overview: To make communication more transparent, we’ve added a notebox to the estimation overview. You can now add important notes directly to the estimate, and these notes will also appear in the PDF export.
• Issue and Expiry Dates for Estimates: You can now add issue dates and expiry dates for your estimations, helping you stay on top of deadlines and making it easier to manage multiple estimates.
• Version Control for Estimates: We’ve added the ability to create multiple versions of your estimates. You can have several versions running simultaneously, compare them, or revert to previous versions when needed, offering greater flexibility in managing changing project requirements.
• Currency Support for Estimates: You can now specify the currency for each estimate, making it easier to manage projects across different regions or clients. This addition ensures clarity for both you and your clients, especially when working internationally.

These updates are designed to improve how you work with estimates, making your process more adaptable and efficient. We’re committed to continuously improving the Estimation Feature to ensure that Planyard serves as a one-stop solution for your entire project lifecycle.

Miscellaneous Updates: Enhancements to Improve Your Workflow

In addition to the major updates we’ve introduced, we’ve made a number of smaller improvements to further streamline your experience and enhance project management capabilities. Here are just some of the latest updates:

• Labour and Overhead Cost Tracking: You can now categorise costs as labour or overhead, making it easier to track these expenses within your project KPIs. This allows you to quickly see the total cost of labour or overhead, providing better visibility into your project’s financials.
• Simplified Valuation Tracking for Payment Applications: When creating valuations for clients or subcontractors, you can now enter the total progress as a percentage. Planyard will then use this information to automatically calculate the current valuation amount by comparing it to the previous valuation, making it easier to track project progress and ensure accurate payment calculations.
• Copy Consolidated Invoices from Previous Periods: To simplify managing recurring overhead costs, you can now copy consolidated invoices from a previous period. If overhead costs remain consistent month over month and are allocated across multiple projects, this feature allows you to quickly replicate the last invoice and automatically fill out the items, saving time and reducing manual entry.

These are just some of the updates we’ve rolled out recently. We’ve also made various improvements to the user experience and addressed bug fixes to keep your Planyard experience as smooth as possible.