Features and improvements

Core modules

Work Orders. To avoid confusion, we’ve updated the information displayed in the Customer section of the cancelation email dispatched to the original provider when a work order gets reassigned. Instead of the client’s head office city and state, we show the location city, state, and ID.

Add-on modules

Connector. The system won’t allow you to enter a negative NTE amount when you are mapping trades manually. When uploading a trades mapping template, any negative NTE amount will turn to zero — please pay attention to that when you’re filling out the template.

Projects. Admins who configure project approval rules will notice a change on the Default Rule Set page. Such fields as Forward To and Set Status To have been removed in order to simplify the approval rules configuration and avoid issues with the approval cycle. It won’t affect your approval process in any way: for the approval process to work smoothly, all you need is the approval limit specified for each level. A project will move up the approval ladder, and, based on the project cost and approval limits of approvers, designated people will be able to either review or approve the project.

ServiceNow. French, Dutch, German, and Romanian speakers can now use the ServiceChannel application for ServiceNow in their native tongue! When you set one of these languages in your ServiceNow settings, the ServiceChannel data will get translated into this language too.

ServiceNow. Attachments linked to ServiceChannel work orders cannot be removed via ServiceNow. Should you need to get rid of some WO files, navigate to Service Automation to take this action.

ServiceNow. As you open a ServiceChannel work order in ServiceNow, we sync the data between the two platforms to make sure you see the most up-to-date information on the work order.

ServiceNow. Note that once work orders are voided on the ServiceChannel side, they get removed from ServiceNow.

Bug fixes

Core modules

Admin. As soon as you created and saved a new user in Service Automation with the Password Self Management checkbox activated, the checkbox got deactivated, making you doubt whether you enabled it in the first place. It was just a confusing interface glitch because, after reloading the page, the checkbox got back to the activated state. No more tricks like that. The checkbox stays enabled unless you decide otherwise.

Compliance Manager. Things didn’t go well with the Insurance Requirements page where the Effective Now, Future, and Past tabs failed to display the information they were supposed to provide. The tabs have been fixed as well as some issues with saving and activating insurance requirements.

MLI. Invoices that should have skipped the specified MLI levels of approvers didn’t do that in some cases. If both the first and the second levels had the Skip Level option turned on in your MLI rules configuration, the “skip level” rule worked correctly for the first level but broke down for the second one. We’ve mended this setting.

MLI. You might have had an issue moving an employee from one level of the multi-level invoice (MLI) hierarchy to another because the employee wasn’t on the list of available users. Such employees couldn’t view and take action on the invoices assigned to them. It happened only to the employees from the MLI hierarchy who were also part of the multi-level proposal (MLP) hierarchy. Now the system distinguishes between MLI and MLP and allows users belonging to both hierarchies to act according to the rules and level permissions.

Proposals. When you ran one of your saved proposal reports, on the filters page that appeared, the Proposal Date and Report Type were not specified, as if you hadn’t saved these filters. Now the Proposal Date and Report Type options that you define when saving a report are visible when you run a report.

Work Orders. By replying to a copy of the email alert about a new service request, location users managed to accept this work order. From now on, providers and only providers can accept the requested service via email.

Work Orders. Service requests with duplicate WO numbers were detected. How did that happen? Adding a space before the WO number allowed you to save the number even though it had already been used on another WO. Invisible to the naked eye, a space before the WO number permitted creating a duplicate, and we didn’t object. We’ve put our best spectacles on 👓 to be able to quickly spot spaces and prevent duplicates when you add WO numbers.

Work Orders. Some of you might have faced a problem with editing the check-in/out information in the Labor Performed section of the WO details page. Having added a new check-in/out record or edited the existing one, you couldn’t save it with the work date you had entered — the current date was displayed instead. In some cases, you couldn’t save the updated work date on the existing record because the Save button was disabled.

Add-on modules

Projects. When you created, edited, or issued a work order task, the WO call date was passed off as the scheduled date. We’ve updated the field name from Scheduled Date to Call Date to correct this oversight. Another issue that hit projects was that the scheduled date of a work order task didn’t get updated when you changed the WO scheduled date in the Work Orders module.

ServiceNow. Attachments added to work orders on the ServiceChannel side didn’t make their way to ServiceNow. The bridge has been restored: attached files are transferred to ServiceNow without issues.

ServiceNow. Despite the preferred language that you set in ServiceNow, the pages that were part of the work order creation flow contained information that wasn’t translated into the specified language and was displayed in English.

ServiceNow. There was an issue with adding attachments to work orders in ServiceNow. Files got added to work orders in ServiceNow but never showed up on the corresponding service requests in ServiceChannel.

ServiceNow. When you created a work order and marked it as a recall from another service request in ServiceNow, the not-to-exceed (NTE) amount on the new WO wasn’t set to zero — although the preference to set NTE amounts to zero for recalls was turned on in your dashboard settings.

ServiceNow. Work orders that were marked as recalls in the ServiceChannel platform were transferred to ServiceNow without any note informing you that these requests were recalls from other WOs. The issue has been resolved: the WO problem description will let you know if a work order is a possible recall.

ServiceNow. We’ve made a few tweaks to the way notes and attachments are added to work orders via ServiceNow. How we display the history of work order notes has been adjusted as well. For example, one of the fixes affected the Scheduled Date field that failed to show the scheduled date of a work order at the time each note or attachment was added. We keep improving WO notes and attachments, so stay tuned!