Business Central Extension Version 2.0.0.52

GSGroup is releasing a new version of the Handyman Field Service Management Extension for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. This is a major release that focuses on improving the extension’s usability and your productivity.

Exporting orders is now more efficient and user-friendly

• In the service order type, you can define a default value for „free order,“ meaning new orders using this service order type will be generated as „free orders“ by default. Free orders do not require manual scheduling. Field service technicians can select orders from a pool based on their skills, service area, and other criteria. This setting is useful when field service technicians schedule maintenance orders themselves, without involving dispatch.
• Also for service order types we added a setting to prevent exporting the order to Handyman. This is useful when certain orders are never processed by the field service team, e.g., because they are handled by the hotline or the in-house workshop.
• There is a new option to use „Work Description“ for service orders. Microsoft recently introduced the field „Work Description“ for projects, sales orders, and service orders. This field can be used to describe the work that the service technician will perform in Handyman Mobile. With a new setting, this field can be used instead of „Description“ for service orders, as the counterpart to the Handyman field „Order Name.“ The advantage of the „Work Description“ field is that it can contain an unlimited amount of text, whereas the „Description“ field was limited to 100 characters.
• Exercise better control over which order lines will be exported. Sometimes, not all order details need to be exported from BC to Handyman. For example, service technicians should not worry about resource lines for a fixed fee. The new version makes it easier to manage these lines. The extension will not export lines if the resource or work type is not used in Handyman. Similarly, the salesperson will not be exported as the Handyman official in charge if the salesperson record has not been exported to Handyman. Previous versions exported data, resulting in import errors in Handyman.

Use Handyman’s powerful pricing rules in BC

• Handyman offers a wide range of rules for defining item pricing per customer or per contract. 
• The new version of the extension allows you to use these rules to define item prices in BC for sales and service orders.
• The Handyman rule set is easy to set up yet powerful. Since Handyman is designed for field service organizations, the setup allows you to easily configure pricing scenarios that are typical for service organizations, such as:
  • For contract-based maintenance, charge for materials only.
  • For contract-based repairs, grant a discount on materials and labor.
  • For all orders of a contract, charge a fixed travel fee. You can record actual travel time and mileage as resource consumption so they can be used to calculate order costs.
• Support item planning based on planned order dates in Handyman.
  BC allows you to plan the items required for open orders. To do so, it is important to know when the item is needed. The new version of the extension provides this information. If the corresponding setting is activated, the date planned as the order start date in the Handyman Resource Planner is sent to BC and entered into the Needed By Date field in the service order line.

Order management for field service operations has been streamlined for easier use

• After field service technicians complete their work in Handyman Mobile, their feedback must be processed in BC to update the order.
• The new version of the extension offers improvements that make this process faster, easier, and more reliable.
• The inbound order list now has two new columns that count the number of item and resource lines sent by Handyman. This allows users to quickly filter orders with new lines as opposed to orders updated only with header information.
• Order cards indicate whether the order has entries in the inbound order tables. This enables you to quickly identify unprocessed data before posting or exporting the order again.
• Handyman resource lines contain more information than BC order lines. In particular, Handyman has fields for the start/stop timestamp of the time registration and a free-text field for providing information on the work done. All three fields can now be reviewed and edited in the order lines. This also allows you to correct entries made by the service technician.
• It has become common practice to open Handyman order reports in BC. This way, no customization is required for BC reports; instead, the standard Handyman reports can be used, which contain all the details on the work done in Handyman, including filled checklists, pictures, and signatures. When used with BC SaaS, the new version displays these reports immediately instead of requiring a download.

Improved functionality for exporting basic data

• Many customers use the extension to assign personal vehicle stores to service technicians.
• Sometimes, for example after an inventory count, it is necessary to reset the inventory in Handyman so that it matches the values in BC. This can now easily be achieved from the location card via the new export action.
• If the „Do not export service items“ setting is active, exporting service items is fully disabled. This setting is useful when managing the installed base in Handyman.
• Work Types
  • To support the new functionality to use pricing rules defined per contract, work type codes carry now a new field „Cost Type“
  • The extension provides additional fields for each work type via an extra card. The usability of this card has improved with the ability to scroll directly from one work type to the next. The page has been renamed „Handyman Configuration.“

General improvements, terminology and usability

• We use now consistently the term „Document“ when referring to sales orders, sales invoices, service orders, service invoices or projects.
• The inbound order page and list have been re-structured to make important information more easily accessible. 
• Consistency of terminology used has been improved across all translations.
• Export of basic data from the record card follows now a consistent pattern across all types of basic data so that users will find it more intuitive to use. 
• Labels and tooltips have been improved to enhance usability.
• Fixed a bug where the wrong document type was used when creating sales orders.
• In Handyman, technicians can create lists of items needed for their vehicle stock or for a particular order, which can then be processed as purchase orders. These records can be processed in Business Central as transfer or purchase orders. This version adds the functionality to create purchase orders from the inbound purchase order list. This allows users to create purchase orders more quickly.