New

A little while ago, we added the Productivity Worksheet. It gave you the ability to divide up a job's revenue among your staff. Today, we're opening up full access to all that sweet data.

Summary

From the Reports page, clicking "Productivity (Summary)" shows you a high-level overview of all employees for the selected time frame. This will come in handy if you compensate technicians based on commission, if you'd like to encourage competition, or if you just want to see who your top performers are.

You'll see the following information:

• Number of jobs
• Total allocation amount for the employee
• Total revenue
• Average amount per job allocated to the employee
• Average percentage allocated to the employee per job

Per Employee

Selecting "Productivity (Per Employee)" gives you a detailed view of all productivity data on a single employee for the selected time frame.

• All jobs they received allocations for (job number and revenue)
• Amount allocated to the employee for that job
• Percentage allocated to the employee for the job

You can choose how many records to include on a single page by modifying the "Records Per Page" selector and clicking Run Report.

Click the "Download All" button to download all the productivity data for every employee for the selected time frame. The employee selector and "Records Per Page" selector will disable themselves (since you are downloading all employees) and the report type selector will switch to "CSV (Excel)".

New

Do you ever have multiple technicians working on a project? Have a subcontractor that should receive a percentage of the proceeds? Need to track contributions to your bottom line for commission or evaluation purposes?

Now, you can:

You'll see the job's revenue (less any taxes) and a list of employees who worked on the job. Enter a percentage next to each or accept the defaults. Amounts will update dynamically.

You can choose to include or exclude any expenses for the job, and even set aside a portion for your company.

You can change the default percentage allocated to your company in the settings.

It's easier than splitting up the tab at a restaurant. Start tracking productivity now, and stay on the lookout for more productivity features--including the ability to use all this data in your reports!

Improvement

A few months back, we made a change to our accounting integrations to restrict editing of synced contacts in Kickserv. We did this to prevent accidental loss of data. Before we made this change, edits you made to contacts in Kickserv could be overwritten at any time by changes made in QuickBooks™ or Xero).

We'll be honest: this was our least popular change ever. We were amazed at how many of you preferred to edit your contacts in Kickserv, even with the risk of losing that data on a sync.

Today, we have some good news for you: we're bringing back editing of synced contacts, along with a few other improvements and tweaks to accounting sync. Read on!

Unless otherwise specified, the following information applies to QuickBooks™ Online, QuickBooks™ Desktop, and Xero. We have used "QuickBooks" here for clarity.

Contact Editing

When you enable QuickBooks, you will be given the choice of where to edit your contacts.

Customers that have previously configured their sync can change this setting via Settings > Add-ons > QuickBooks.

Edit in QuickBooks (default behavior)

If you choose to edit contacts in your accounting application, any contacts that have already been synced will be locked in Kickserv and must be edited in QuickBooks.

Tip: You can sync address changes from QuickBooks back to Kickserv by also making a change to the customer's name. This change can be temporary, like appending an 'x'. Then, any changes to the customer's address will be copied to Kickserv. You can change the name back in QuickBooks once the address has been synced.

Edit in Kickserv

If you instead choose to edit contacts in Kickserv, all contact and address changes you make to a contact in Kickserv will overwrite the data in QuickBooks. (You can also modify contacts in QuickBooks, but those changes will not sync to Kickserv.)

It's important to note that any contact added or edited in Kickserv will only be synced to QuickBooks if a Kickserv invoice has been generated for that contact.

Billing and Service Addresses

The contact's billing address in Kickserv will always correspond to its billing address in QuickBooks.

• If the contact has a Kickserv service address, it will become the shipping address in QuickBooks.
• If the contact does not have a Kickserv service address, QuickBooks will use Kickserv's billing address as the shipping address.

QuickBooks™ Desktop

All new customers created in QuickBooks™ Desktop will sync to Kickserv with the following conditions.

If the customer has a separate billing and shipping address in QuickBooks™ Desktop:

• The Kickserv service address will be the QuickBooks™ Desktop shipping address.
• The radio button on the customer edit page will be set to "Bill a different address".

If the customer does not have a shipping address in QuickBooks™ Desktop: Kickserv will use the QuickBooks™ Desktop billing address as both the billing and service address.

New setting: "First line of address contains customer name"

If this option is enabled, Kickserv will assume that the first line of the contact's billing address contains a name (as in the image below) and will disregard the first line on sync.

The second line of the address, which contains address information, will be used as Kickserv's Address 1. The remaining address lines, with the exception of city, state, ZIP, and country, will be combined and saved in Kickserv's Address 2 field.

Important: if this setting is chosen, all QuickBooks™ Desktop addresses must be consistent. They should all contain the name in the first line. If the setting is enabled, any customers that do not have the name in the first address line will have incorrect address information in QuickBooks™ Desktop.

If you want to turn this setting on, and your customer addresses are not consistent (some of them have the name in the first line and some don't), we recommend you drop a message to support before enabling it, and we'll see if we can help you get them sorted.

We believe these changes better reflect the way our customers sync their contacts, and hope they eliminate the need for pesky workarounds. As always, we're here to help if you have any questions.

New

We wanted to give you a heads-up that we'll be tweaking some things about the Kickserv look and feel. We're taking the opportunity to address some performance issues, and better coordinate our fonts and colors with the rest of the ReachLocal family. Here are a few of the changes you'll see soon:

• New system-standard font throughout (it loads faster too!)

• Higher-contrast header bar and navigation menu makes better use of space.

• Gone are the custom navigation bar colors. Our attempts to make the navigation color match your company's logo often resulted in combinations that were, shall we say, less than readable. The new navigation is a smart, professional blue-gray and features updated iconography.

• Speaking of your company logo, it was pretty cramped in the header, so we moved it to the other side of the dashboard.

• We also moved product updates (like this one) out of the profile menu and into the site footer, for more visibility.

We hope you enjoy the new coat of paint!

Improvement

The Bottom Line Up Top

Many of you have had frustrating experiences with Kickserv lately, and we're sorry. Eliminating the frustration is our highest priority. We've released some improvements that will help, and we have more on the way.

The Details

Parts of the application have been uncomfortably slow to load at times. We know you depend on Kickserv to run your business, and we take that responsibility seriously. We have spent crazy amounts of time looking into the performance trouble, and here's what we've found:

• Last quarter, we moved many accounts (about 3000 users' worth) off of ServiceSidekick (the original, old version of our application) and onto the current app.
• Those accounts brought years of old dusty data with them.
• This resulted in about 30% increased load on the system nearly overnight, and exposed multiple performance bottlenecks in our code and server infrastructure.

Some of the things we've found and fixed

• Certain custom reports that were brought over from ServiceSidekick did not play nicely with the new application. We worked with customers to adjust these reports, while also beefing up our database infrastructure to handle the increased load.
• Custom reports now only load 100 records at a time, to guard against excessively large database queries.
• All of our custom reports were subject to a bug that was causing them to run much more slowly and hit the database harder than necessary (we fixed this late last week).
• Just this week, we made some changes in the search engine (like quadrupling the memory) so it will run faster and not contribute to slow load times.

Let's just say that our developers have gotten really good at playing whack-a-mole over the last couple of months.

Other things we're addressing

• Making search even more efficient.
• Moving reporting services onto a dedicated read-only database so they don't affect the performance of the rest of the system.
• Moving our interactions with external services (for example, our billing system) into separate processes so they don't impact web application performance.
• A complete overhaul of our client-side architecture for performance, maintenance, and consistency with our mobile apps.
• A test environment that models our production setup more closely, so we can better test the system under real-world conditions.

And more...

We're also addressing some longstanding complaints about our QuickBooks sync. Contact address data has been tricky to sync properly because special QuickBooks rules lead to inconsistent behavior on Kickserv's side. We're working on that. You've also asked for editing of synced contacts to be turned back on. That's on the way as well.

Thanks for being a part of the Kickserv family.

Improvement

If you typically send longer messages, you may have noticed that any line breaks you added to them were ignored by the editor. We are pleased to report that this is no longer the case.

Now you can hit that enter key to your heart's content and your recipient will see the message just as you intended.

New

Kickserv now lets you report on your job expenses.

Just like other reports, you can select a date range. Expenses will be separated by job. Attachments show up in the report as clickable thumbnails.

You can also add expense values to a custom jobs report.

Now you can finally get rid of that pile of receipts on your desk!

Improvement

If you've synced with QuickBooks or Xero, chances are you've run into this at some point: you went back and edited something on a contact, only to find your changes were overwritten the next time you synced.

Not cool. Not cool at all.

Today, we took the first steps towards fixing this rather glaring omission in Kickserv’s sync behavior. When you attempt to edit a contact that has been synced, this is what you'll see:

If you want to make changes to your contact's info, you'll need to do it inside the other application (QuickBooks or Xero). This is an inconvenience, but we hope you'll agree that it's less inconvenient than having the other application overwrite your changes.

Of course, the best way to address this issue would be to allow editing of contact information from either Kickserv or your financial application of choice. Nothing would make us happier. Unfortunately, that's a tall order for a variety of technical reasons, but rest assured we're working on the problem.

New

You may have recently noticed this addition to the Contact Information form:

You guessed it. Starting today, your customers can receive event reminders via text message in addition to (or instead of) via email. They can set their preferences, and change their number if desired, in the Customer Account Center.

Improvement

You can now print multiple invoices to a single PDF for emailing or printing. Just select them all and click the "Print To PDF" button.

Happy Valentine's Day!