New Tools You Can Use From Rockton (Video)

From a quicker way to search to a faster way to import exchange rates and automate projects and pricing in Dynamics GP, Rockton Software covers it all in this recorded webinar.

What if you could:

• Spend less time clicking on this 🔍, and find information up to 83% faster.
• Have a 1-step process for importing exchange rates directly into Dynamics GP.
• Automate the creation of invoices, employee expense transactions, payroll transactions, project budgets, and project purchase orders.
• Manage and track price adjustments from promotions to rebates, commissions to date-driven pricing. There isn’t much this pricing engine can’t do.

Rockton shows you some ways to make your work simpler and easier in Dynamics GP.

Transcript below:

Melissa: Hi, there, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. We’ve got Rockton in here talking about some new tools that you can use. So, we have Alicia Weigel here and Ginger Myers, and they’ll be talking with us today. So, thanks so much for joining us, both of you.

Alicia: Absolutely. Thanks for having us.

Ginger: Sure. Yeah.

Melissa: Wonderful. So, feel free to just take it away.

Alicia: All right. Well, hello, everyone. Thank you guys for taking a little time out of your Thursday to swing by our webinar. Ginger and I are with the Rockton Software team. So, we’re going to be presenting some tools that Rockton offers that have some recent enhancements as well. So, we’re gonna go over a few of those with you today. So, this is our agenda for today’s presentation. I’m gonna show you six new features in Rockton SmartFill. And then Ginger is gonna take things away and show you guys how you can automate exchange rates in Dynamics GP, and then also give you a little sneak peek of our Project Cost module. For those of you that might not be familiar with Rockton and what we offer here, we have been a Dynamics GP ISV solution provider for going on 21 years now. So, forever in software years. We’re headquartered out in Erie, Colorado, but we have offices across the country and employees across the country. I am in the Fargo, North Dakota office and Ginger is in sunny warm Phoenix, Arizona. So I like to visit her whenever I can.

But currently, we’ve got over 100,000 GP users using one or more of our products. So, we have a full offering of everything from what we’ll show you today, our pricing and project costing, and exchange rates. But we’ve also got our searching, our auditing, and then a suite of tools for system administrators and things like that. So, we really have our hands in kind of a little bit of everything because the whole motto at Rockton is Make GP Work Simpler and Easier. So, that is what our solutions are made to do. So, we’re gonna kick it off with Rockton SmartFill. Now, this is Rockton’s kind of flagship product, it was one of the first solutions that we started offering for GP. So, this has been around for a long, long time. And we’ve got over 30,000 SmartFill users across the globe. So, it’s a very popular product in the fact that it does not matter what your job is in GP. If you touch GP at all, you can use SmartFill. So, I’m gonna be showing you guys how to use SmartFill for one thing, and then I’m gonna talk about some of the new features that we’ve recently added to the product.

Like I said, it’s been around for eons, so it’s super stable the way it is, but we were starting to get some requests and some cool ideas of things that SmartFill could maybe do to add to functionality. So we decided, “Hey, let’s bring on some of that new information and show that off.” So, I’m gonna close out of this and jump into GP. All right. So, to wrap your heads around what SmartFill does if you are not a current user, or you haven’t seen this product in the past, SmartFill is like a super Google search for finding your records all across GP. And when you’re thinking about records, think of those as the places where the little magnifying glasses live. So, if we come out to…let’s start with an account. Where would you or what would you be searching in this field here with a magnifying glass? Obviously an account number. What we strive to do with SmartFill is take away the need for you to click on the lookup, wait for that list to load, sort through that list, you know, filter it out, whatever the case may be. We just wanna find the account you’re looking for without you having to think about it so hard.

And you maybe know your first, you know, 25 off the top of your head, or you maybe know something about that account. So, what we allow you to do is type that into the record value, so whatever that account number is, you tell us what you know. So let’s say we know that it’s a labor account we’re looking for. So, I just typed the word labor across here. You have to hit Tab to get through the rest of your segments. And magic poof, SmartFill goes to work, sorts through the entire list or full chart of accounts, and brings back just accounts where somewhere in either the alias, the description, or the number, we can find labor. Does not have to be the first piece of the description. As you can see, it’s second here, but that goes through that whole chart of accounts. And we have one customer that purchased this that has 1.5 million active accounts. So, they could not even consider clicking on that magnifying glass, because that list could take multiple minutes to populate all of those accounts plus then having to sort through them would have been a nightmare. So, that is what SmartFill is meant to do, is to go at it and find it.

Now, I searched with an account description. What if I know a little bit more about the record I’m looking for? So, I could know part of a segment. Doesn’t have to be the first segment. Maybe I know I’m looking for an 1130 account, I can tab through again. And this is gonna auto-populate the window. So that first box you saw, the Make a Selection, that said, “Hey, grab whatever you want out of here. We’re bringing you back all your labor accounts.” Well, I typed in 1130, which was that middle segment. And because I only had one 1130 account anywhere in my system, it just auto-populates this window for me and then I can go about whatever I need to do with this account. So, that’s one of the ways that SmartFill is gonna speed up processes for you. You don’t have to sit there and think about it all day. So, now I’m gonna go out and I’m gonna grab a customer and I’m gonna show you some of the new functionality that we’ve added.

So, SmartFill is gonna work all over GP which is awesome, or all of your card windows, it’s gonna work in your transaction windows. So, if you’re doing a journal entry, for example, that you’ve got, you know, 500 different distributions to plug in, you can just start knocking out those account numbers just by typing in, “Oh, I need a cash account. Now I need a WIP account. Now I need a [inaudible 00:07:39] account.” You can just start typing whatever you want and we’ll get you through that journal entry that much faster. Now, with a customer, this is another prebuilt lookup. Out of the box, we’re giving you over 4,000 predefined lookups. So, you don’t have to set anything up, but we can help you get a little more creative with the product too. So, let’s look for a customer, I’m gonna look for…what do I wanna look for? Let’s look for an electric customer or ELE. So, I have got a few options here. And you’re gonna notice that in this Make a Selection box, the criteria that I’m searching for has changed. Now I have customer number. I didn’t have to type the customer number, I typed part of a customer’s name. I got Elec out of electrical. But they also saw that or SmartFill saw that as ELE in telemarketing. So, those are how it’s searching. It’s looking for whatever I’ve given it to kind of go out and filter out the list.

Now, if I wanna add additional criteria that I’m searching, I can do that. And in the past, you had to log out or not log out but log into a separate area to modify what we call our objects. With our new features, you can actually edit what your searching criteria is right from this Make a Selection window. So, I’m gonna hit Edit Object, and this is pulling open the customer object for me. Now, I can link different tables in here. I can create Calculated Fields. I can do all sorts of fun stuff. But let’s say I just wanna be real simple about this. I’m gonna add my customer master because it’s already in here. And I’m just gonna say it’d be easier for me to find customers if I could also search for those customers by the city that they’re in. So, I’m gonna say that I wanna search that and I wanna display it and you’ll see it just added it to my Make a Selection window below, so this is my preview window. So, I’ve got their city in there. Let’s also add in their state just for fun. State, off the toes. I’m gonna search and display that. So, I’ve got city and state here, I’m gonna save it. And now you can see it just pulled in the city and state for all the customers it gave me on the list too.

And now I can use that as a searchable criteria. So, I can do a column search, which you’ve always…they used to have a subset search, now it’s a column search. So, I can say, “Hey, I also, in addition, I wanna be able to search for customers in Washington.” I’m gonna hit Tab with that WA, so it’s looking for WA in Washington State, but it’s also catching it in Iowa City. So, I can get kind of picky on what I wanna see. Now, let’s do another search here and let’s look for my VIP customers because I have the ability to even search text fields, or these notes in GP. So, the little OE notes that you stick, you can add that as searchable criteria for customers, items, whatever you wanna see. So, I’m gonna type VIP, and this is going through, and it’s reading all of the notes for my customers that have VIP in their notes. So, if I select one, I can open up their little sticky note. Oh, they’re VIP through December of ’22. Awesome. Now, another cool thing, which is a new feature, is if we go back to this VIP list, SmartFill is almost like a smart list, when you’re able to search on such broad criteria. So we decided it would be handy for you guys to be able to export the information in this list.

So, I’ve got my list of all my customers. These are all my VIP customers. Maybe they’re on my holiday gift-giving list, and I need to send them a cookie basket around the holidays. So, rather than having to go print out a smart list or go find all these people, I can pull it here and I can send this out to Excel right from the Make a Selection window. So, that just kicked off Excel for me and pulled in all the information that I had in here. And if I wanted to, I could also have included their address. Maybe short-term, I just wanna quick get a list so that I can drop this into a mail merge and have all my VIP customers’ addresses and names and information right here. So, that is another one of the features that we offer. And that is brand new. So, if you are a current SmartFill customer, and you would like to get these new features, all you have to do is go out to our website, to our product download page, and download the latest version of SmartFill that has a wizard, so it’ll install it really quick, and it’ll give you that new chunk file. And then you’ll have all of this functionality in your current version as well. You’re not gonna need to replace reg keys or do any of that, you’re just getting the latest and greatest code. So, super, super simple for that.

Last thing I’ll do is I’ll just kind of put it all together for you in a transaction. So, we’re gonna go out to our sales transaction entry window just to give you an idea of how you can use this really quickly because it’s already pre-setup. As soon as you install it, it’s working in all these places. So, let’s go out to our customer. We’ll look for someone in the West. We’ve got West Des Moines, we’ve got West Side Cable Services, and West Central Distributors. Let’s go ahead and grab them. Let’s search for items, but all we know is that these things we’re selling them are green. So, we’re searching items really quickly just by the description. I can also search by the vendor item description and you’ll notice here I’ve got a calculated field. I can even search for the quantity available versus the quantity on hand so I know that I have enough of this item to sell. So, I’ve got 10 of these available. It looks like we’ve got 22 on hand, but 12 are allocated. So, let’s go ahead and sell some phones, and we’ll also sell a cabinet. We’re gonna look through that list again. Oh, we’ve got a few different cabinets and cables, so we can just keep on going down the line until we’ve got this document. And of course, I picked one without a unit of measure setup.

We can keep on doing this until we’re ready and then we can just go ahead and print this out or do whatever we need to do with this order. So, that is SmartFill in a 15-minute nutshell for you. And from that, I am gonna go ahead and I’m gonna pass this off to Ginger, and she’s gonna talk to you guys about our Exchange Rate Import tool, and then also a little bit of information on Project Cost. So, Ginger, I will pass presenter rights to you here, just one moment. And there you go, you should be able to take it away.

Ginger: Great. Thanks, Alicia. Okay. So we have an Exchange Rate Import tool. So, if you’re using the multi-currency functionality of GP, you’re probably well aware that you have to, on a daily basis or weekly basis, make sure that your exchange rates are updated so that the math happens correctly with the current rate for your transactions. And what we’ve done is we’ve built an exchange import, and we can schedule that so that every morning perhaps, GP will go out and grab that rate and bring it into the GP multi-currency setup window. And so, it’s an automated one-step process that directly updates the GP multi-currency tables. So, that is how we make your work simpler and easier in GP. No more wasted time researching those exchange rates, and it really does simplify accounting. And certainly, whoever’s doing the updating now will really appreciate the automation. Okay. It’s an important extension to the Multi-currency Management Module for GP. It uses .NET technology to pull those rates in. And once that setup is complete, the exchange rate tool is unattended and automated for you. So you can schedule it, you know, in off-hours, and usually they are off-hours. It’s usually very early in the morning, 5 a.m., or something that you’d be bringing your rates in for the day.

Okay. We offer four services today, four exchange rate services: European Central Bank, Bank of Canada, the Commonwealth Foreign Exchange, the new name for that is Money Corp, and the last one which is our most popular one, Open Exchange Rate. All right. Those are all free services, by the way. The only one that may cost anything is Open Exchange Rate, and that’s if you do a lot of different translations in one day. We’ve not had anyone ever exceed the free minimum or maximum, the free maximum number of transactions. So, we’ve never had anyone have to sign up and actually pay for one of these services because they have such a very flexible free offering. All right. So let’s look at how we select our currencies. In GP, we do have an Exchange Table Import Setup window. And in that window, that’s where we turned on or set up our exchange rates basically. And the one we’re looking at here on the screen, it says Euro AVG, right? So that’s the European Euro average. And we have that setup in GP to look like that. So, we would go through and set all of our currencies up just the way we need them.

And now, what we do inside of GP also is we would go to another window, and I’ll show you that one here live in my environment. Okay. So, in this window on the administration homepage, and it’s this exchange table right here, you know, this is where we have all of our different currencies set up. And today, someone in the organization, if you’re using multi-currency, has to come here to the rates, and they are entering the rates for the day. Now, you can see in my environment, because I have my automation set up, and I’m using the ERI tool, I am getting this automatic download at 5:15 every morning of the rates for all of my currencies that are set up in GP. This just happens to be the Canadian to U.S. dollar conversion here. And so you can see that this is automatically happening. It’s unattended, it happens automatically, and we use Task Scheduler, so Windows Task Scheduler to automate that.

Okay. Now, in this particular case, we’re using European Central Bank. That’s why they’ve noted that there and we’re only restoring a rate for a week at a time. Right? You could do daily, monthly, whatever you need to do. Okay. So, let’s take a look at ERI. It sits outside of GP. So it’s its own application. I’m just gonna navigate to the Exchange Rate Import. It’s this tiny little product here. And when I go to Configuration, I just choose from my companies that I have it set up for. So, I’m gonna choose Fabrikam here and you see that we have four tabs across the top. This is our connection to SQL and our login. We do create a special login for ERI called ERI login. That is a SQL user login. And we do store connection details here to get to that specific database. All right. Our registration, you’re going to indicate to us when you order the product, which of those four services you want to use. And then we allow you to mash on this button that says Get Registration Online, and you pull your reg key down, and this checkmark, this little box, and save and now you’re all good to go. So, the installation of this product probably takes, you know, all of 10 minutes, maybe.

The next step is to look at the services here. We need to make sure that we’re choosing the right URL designated for each of the four services. So, the one I’m using, again, is European Central Bank. So, I’ve just put in this URL that we’re looking at here, and it’s set to daily. And if I default that, that’s just whatever my registration key is set for because we’ve embedded whichever one of the four services you’ve chosen, we’ve embedded that into the registration key. So, when you click Default, we go read the registration key, and we know which service to bring down. Okay. And we can also test this. So, I’m testing that the rates come back. And so, here are all the rates for all of the currencies that I have loaded in GP. So I didn’t get any errors, that’s working just fine. The last tab here has to do with the currencies as they’re set up in GP. So, right here, what we’re looking at is that our service base currency ID is euro. You know, normally in the U.S., it would be USD, but in this case, we’re having a base currency of euros. Over here to the right, I’m seeing every combination of currency that I have loaded in GP. So, again, that exchange table window that I was in right here off of the administration tab, this is what it’s reading. It’s reading this entire list of currencies.

So, what we’re doing here is just making sure that this last column functional is completed because it will be blank when we first install. So, all we have to do here is indicate what our functional currency needs to be for each of these currency conversions all the way down. Typically, it’s this second listed currency ID. So, Canadian to USD, Canadian would be your originating, and USD would be your functional. That’s always the rule of thumb for our new currencies that we set up. Okay? If at any point you need to disable any of them so that the rates don’t come down anymore for those particular combinations, you just checkmark this Disable column next to the applicable table. So, that’s really as simple as this is, let me just save that. And when we come back to the main screen of Exchange Rate Import, I can click Get Rates and just make sure that the rates came in, or they already exist. And I get a date and timestamp for, you know, when they were last updated. So, that gives you a warm and fuzzy that, you know, we’re up to date as of today.

All right. So that is the Exchange Rate Import tool itself. Now, let’s talk a little bit about how it is set up with Task Scheduler. So, usually, we have someone technical involved in this step. But if you just went to your Start button and started searching for Task Scheduler, you’re going to find that you have it on your computer and on your server. This is where we install it, is on the server. And basically here, we’re gonna go to the Task Scheduler library, and we’re gonna set up this ERI import schedule, basically. And so, let me just double-click on that and show you that these are all the tabs across the top that, you know, we need to address as we’re setting this up. But what’s really most important here is that we have set it for the schedule we desire. So, right here on triggers, if I just double-click that, you’re seeing that I told the system that we’re gonna set this up to download weekly, and it’s going to be at this start date and time. And all of these days of the week, the rate’s gonna come down. Okay? And as soon as I set that up and checkmark enabled, that is my schedule that’s in place. And that really dictates, you know, how often it’s gonna come down and the automation that we can expect to work.

The rest of these, we don’t necessarily have to make any changes to, but what we wanna know is that it is running, and it is turned on and ready to roll. So, it doesn’t take very long to get this set up either, probably another 10 minutes perhaps. And in our instruction guide, we give you step-by-step instructions for setting it up if you’d like to try that yourself and get that in place. Okay. So now that we have ERI bolted on, and we have it automated, what we can expect on a daily basis then is that each of these exchange tables we have in GP are going to get automated with the rates. And each of the rates are going to be date and timestamped automatically. So, when you come in in the morning, if this is run at 5:15 and you come into the office at 8:00, you can check that this happened and that, you know, a new rate has come down. Now, in this environment, this rate can come down every week. But transactions could inherit this for up to a week. That’s what we’ve said. So, again, you’ll determine how long you want this rate to be, you know, usable and the frequency at which you bring in the rates.

All right. So, let me go back to the slideshow. So, we’ve talked about scheduling the import. We used Windows Task Scheduler. And we also have a log that tracks that it was successful or unsuccessful. So, using Task Scheduler, that will actually fire off an error message that will alert IT if it fails so that you would know. But we also have this log so that you could go back proactively and just look and make sure that it’s been successfully bringing in the rates every day. And I’m laughing because the word successful is misspelled. Okay. The next thing about Exchange Rate Import is continue to track the history not only in the GP window, but also in our own table. So we can see those historical rates.

All right. So basically, that’s everything about the Exchange Rate Import tool, and how it works with GP. What I’d like to turn and talk about now for maybe the next 15 minutes is Project Cost, just a little bit about Project Cost. It’s a very full-featured product. This is another product that’s offered by Rockton Software. And Project Cost is a full-featured project tracking solution. It does integrate with payables, receivables, inventory, SOP, POP, payroll, GL, and smart list in GP.

So, if you’re project-tracking today using Analytical Accounting or MDA, you could replace that with a full sub-ledger, and that’s what Project Cost offers. So, the benefits of using Project Cost is, you know, we basically simplify the necessary keystrokes and entry that’s required to actually track a transaction to a project and task combination. And we actually segregate those by cost categories as well. So you can have different labor tasks, different purchasing tasks, which AP would use, and different subcontractor tasks, and lastly, different material tasks that we can use with inventory transfers, and also on purchase orders. Okay. So let’s take a look…Oh, the last thing I wanna say about how we make it simpler and easier is just that you can log in anywhere at any time to record your time and expense information. We actually do have a web portal that is at no additional cost that comes with our product. And you can have unlimited users accessing it to enter their time or expenses, and I’m going to show you that as well. We allow one level of approval for those transactions. So your approvers can actually log into the approval portal and approve their transactions of their subordinates in our portal.

Okay. So let’s take a look at the product itself. I’m just gonna close my exchange rate product. Okay. So you can see here that Project Cost is its own sub-ledger. It’s built in Dexterity. We have a few .NET windows, but for the most part, we’re a Dexterity written/authored application, and we have the look and feel of GP. So, we have seven area pages just like all the other GP sub-ledgers. And under those similarly titled sections, we have palettes here. Let’s start by looking under cards at Project Explorer. And let me explain to you that in Project Explorer, what we’re looking at here is a tree view of our projects and tasks. So, for instance, I’m seeing something called 2020 projects up here with a folder icon. That means a master project, or a contract. That’s at the highest level of project. And then under that, we have our second level of project, or folder icon. And now those are all the sub-projects that roll up under the contract or the master project.

So, again, two levels of project that we allow, and each of these projects will have a plus sign next to them. And if you expand the plus sign, what we’re looking at here are tasks. So, it’s at the task level where all costs and revenues are booked. Okay. So we must have a combination of a project and a task to actually be able to book a transaction. You’re seeing here next to engineering and architecture that we have a plus sign. Next to those, if I expand the plus sign, what I want to explain is that engineering here is a master task. It’s really just a shelf that we use for reporting. So, you know, at the end of the day, when I get my report, I wanna slice and dice engineers separate from architecture. So that’s why I have two different shelves. And I just nest whatever applies to each level appropriately here. You know, we could have two levels of project, we can have 999 levels of tasking. Of course, we’ve never had anyone go near that number in their configuration, but we do have full flexibility here to build out 999 levels of indentation here for each project.

This master task called Engineering has two subtasks under it called Engineer 1 and Engineer 2. Each of these tasks would map one to one with a GL account. And we do that because when the AP person puts in a voucher and tags to Engineer 1, we really don’t want them to have to go to the distribution tab and enter a GL account for that expense. We want that expense GL account to just default into the window properly and correctly for them. Okay? So we go ahead and store that on the task. Let me just drill in over here. The blue words, that say Task ID, I’m gonna drill into that, hyperlink, and I’m gonna show you, this is our task setup window for the Engineer 1 task. And I’m allowed to turn on how this particular task is able to be used. Can they use it for labor entries, subcontract entry, purchase entry, or inventory material entry? So, in this particular case, Engineer 1 can only be used for labor or subcontract labor. Can’t be used with AP, cannot be used with inventory.

Okay. Now, if I click on accounts, I’m noticing that each of the allowable cost categories also have been defaulted to a GL account. So, because only labor and subcontract labor are turned on, I only need GL account defaults for those two. We always wanna make sure we have a revenue account because sometimes we take this labor, we mark it up, and then we bill it through. We send it over to GP and we send it to the invoice and sales. So we need to have a revenue account for that transaction. Okay. So, this is just our Task Setup window. All right. So, hopefully that makes sense that, you know, we have two levels of project, master or contract and sub, and we have 999 levels of tasking. Whatever way you need to construct this so that you can get the reporting the way you desire, that’s what determines this hierarchy.

All right. So once we have the hierarchy in place, we next wanna turn and focus on budgeting. So, we have a Budget Explorer window. This Budget Explorer looks just like the tree explorer window in every way. It adds one new level that the Project Explorer did not have. So, if I go and look at my 2020 project over here in Budget Explorer, I’m still seeing some…you know, I’m seeing some sub-projects here, four sub-projects, that roll up into this 2020 master. And if I expand the plus sign next to the sub-project, I’m seeing this new level with a green bar piece of paper icon. That represents the name of the budget, and you can have unlimited budgets for each sub-project. And a lot of people have a lot of budgets that they’re tracking. If I expand the plus sign next to the budget, everything below the green bar piece of paper icon, so everything below the budget name, is all budgetable. Okay? So all of these tasks are what we now use to budget. So, for instance, you can see here when I click on Engineer 1, I’m able to put in a $50,000 budget for subcontract labor. I put it in $242 worth of labor for my employee labor. Okay. And so, I would just kind of layer in my summary budgets for all the tasks on the project. Like maybe I have, you know, $100,000 worth of materials and I’m gonna put that number in. So, this would be summary budgeting.

We also afford you the opportunity to do detailed budgeting. So, for instance, if I wanted to say exactly who or what class of employee is going to do the labor for Engineer 1, I can drill into this blue hyperlink for labor. And I can actually put in a row here that says, “This is my user ID. His ID is A12D. He’s in the electrician class. He’s gonna be using this Pay Code. He’s gonna work eight hours. This is his default pay rate, and then this is his bill rate when we mark him up.” And I can say that I expect him to start that effort on October 29th of 2020. Now, the caveat in doing detailed budgeting, of course, is that if anything changes in your, you know, project, and the dates slip, you’ll have to come in here and update all the dates by a certain amount of days or out to a certain date to start. Okay? So, anyway, as long as someone is able to maintain that, detailed budgeting is allowable. But I would say probably 85% of people just put in summary budgets.

The next thing that we can do in this window is scheduled billing. So each task could allow you to put in your milestone billing schedule, and allow accounting to just have those memorized out there for, you know, every end of the month, I wanna build my customer 10 grand for this project. We can keep that schedule on the project. All right. Okay. So, we also have all of your employees set up here in Project Cost. And they’re set up and assigned to their class in their department, they’re given pay codes, and their cost rate and bill rate are here. So, just know that all of that is stored in Project Cost, and those are the building blocks that allow the portal to work. So, let me take a minute and take you to the website of our portal. So, again, your IT folks will indicate to you what the URL needs to be for your particular portal. This would be your logo here, and each of your employees would have their own login and password.

Okay. So I’m saying, “I’m Adam Barr, and I’m logging in with my password.” When I come into the portal, I’m coming to the month view. And you can see here that I’ve already put in some time, I’ve put in some expenses, and the system knows, based on the system date you’re on, so mine’s June 10th, it knows to light up what day is today, June 10th, in yellow. And so that’s why that’s in yellow. Okay. So now if I want to enter time or expenses, I go up here to the top and I just click on whichever of these tabs is applicable to what I’m up to. So, I’m just gonna click on the time tab and I just have to fill this little palette out and save it for one entry of time. So, I’m gonna browse out and I’m going to choose, you know, Barron 3, is my project, and my task might be this, sub-costs. Okay? And it’s defaulted to today. I could have my whole list of pay codes here like holiday, bereavement, sick time, overtime, if I wanted, but we just have one pay code in here because we’re only worried about billable time.

I’m gonna say I worked eight hours today on that particular project and task combination. I can put in a 500-character billing description that can flow over to GP, SOP, invoice. And I can also scan and attach any documentation that could flow over to accounting as well. So, you know, maybe I want this to be attached. It lights up in yellow, and it visually tells accounting that there’s something attached there. These notes right here, this is an additional 500 characters, that’s an internal note only. Maybe you wanna tell your approver something about that time, so they’ll approve it, you can actually put those notes in there. Okay. So that’s all that’s involved in getting your time in for one project and task combination on one particular day. And I can just say Save. Okay? Now, we have two optional processes beyond this. One is submissions. So, let’s say that your rule for your employees is, “We want you to time in every day. And at the end of the week on Friday by 5:00, you need to have all your five days of time submitted so that your approver will now see your time entries and be able to do their task of approving.”

So, again, this is an optional configuration, but it is set up in my test environment, so I’m gonna just highlight that entry. And if I’m ready to submit that and then have it go to my approver, I just checkmark it and hit Submit. So, that would probably be an end-of-the-week process. Next, your approver will know, because of your business process internally, that Monday by noon, all time should be submitted and now they have to do their approvals. So, they would come in and go to the approval portal. And they’re gonna see all their subordinates time here stacked up in this window. Right now, we’re seeing Adam Barr’s one day of time and…It should be two days, I think. Oh, yeah. Okay. Two days. I just had to hit Refresh to get the second day that I just keyed in. So, here’s my entry that I just put in, June 10th. And I’m able to look at all the bits of detail down here below that my subordinate keyed in. And I can also see that they’ve given me some attachment. I can override almost everything in this window, and I can also reject it, and give them a reason for the rejections. And then they’re gonna get an email that says, “Hey, that day of time was rejected. Go fix it.” All right? So, all of that is handled here by the approver.

But if everything looks good, which it does now, I’ll just checkmark those two transactions which automatically approves them for cost and billing. And I’ll save. Now, one thing that you can do with billing is the approver could actually exclude it from going over to GP and appearing on an invoice. And there are compelling reasons to have that happen. So, we’ve given you the ability for the approver to exclude a certain line of hours that does not need to appear on the invoice. But I’m gonna hit Save. So, everything in the portal now is completed. And that is how easy it is to get your time in, get it submitted, get it approved, etc. Now, our Expense tab works exactly the same way. So, it’s exactly the same functionality. And the only additional wrinkle here is that if you’ve got a corporate credit card, we allow you to tell accounting that that’s how you paid for the expense, is with your corporate credit card. Okay. Otherwise, it’s the same. So, now let’s look at what accounting does. So, all of those transactions come in, and maybe the business processes that by Tuesday morning, accounting can expect everything to be approved.

So, they’re gonna come here to transactions in Project Cost, and they’re gonna create either SOP, sales order processing transactions, or maybe they’re gonna create purchasing management AP vouchers to reimburse people for travel expenses. So this is where accounting picks up the ball and runs with it. Okay? So, in the case where we were talking about time entries here, we’re seeing that we have all of these entries in here, I’ll just expand them all. So, all of these transactions are waiting to be approved by accounting and swept over to GP. And we just do that by checkmarking it here and clicking Process, and sending it right over to a SOP batch that we assign. So, that’s how the end-to-end time entry in the portal, the approvals happen, the sweep happens over to GP, is all through Project Cost windows. All right?

So, that’s basically what I wanted to make sure we got through, that I showed you that that’s how our tool works. We also have the ability, if you don’t start transactions in the portal, you could just come to an AP voucher for instance, and simply create a voucher. And when you come here to the purchase amount right here for a hundred dollars, our window will automatically pop up. It’s just an additional window that happens in AP. It pops up. It begins with the acronym PC, so that’s how you know it’s ours, and you can tag it to a project and task combination, and then insert it. So, that’s what gets it onto the project from a native AP window. And purchase orders work that way, SOP works that way, a journal entry works that way, etc. Okay. So, thanks for indulging me in that. I’ll go back to the slides and just indicate to you that that was my presentation of Project Cost and the Exchange Rate Import tool. If you have any questions or would like to follow up and see a demo, or maybe get a trial key for the Exchange Rate Import tool, just reach out to us at sales@rocktonsoftware.com.

Alicia, is there anything you’d like to add?

Alicia: Yeah. Same thing for SmartFill. If that’s something that you guys are interested in, certainly reach out to anyone at Encore as well. They’re very familiar with our stuff. We’ve been working with Encore for years and years and years. So, we can certainly get you a free trial of SmartFill or also get you a quote through your account manager. And then were there any questions at all that we can help answer with Exchange Rate or SmartFill or Project Cost?

Melissa: Yeah. Something did come up. So I’m not sure if you managed to answer this, but they asked, can the Exchange Rate Import get its rate from SQL?

Alicia: Great question. The answer is no.

Melissa: Very quick answer. Okay. Yeah, we just had that one question.

Alicia: Awesome.

Melissa: Okay, great. Thanks very much both of you, Alicia and Ginger, for joining us today. That was awesome. And we did record today’s session, so that will be sent out to everybody in an email. So, give everyone a little bit more time back in your day.

Ginger: Great. Thank you so much for having us.

Alicia: Yes. Thank you.

Melissa: Thank you. Bye, everyone.

Ginger: Bye.

Alicia: Bye.