Welcome to Discovery’s release notes! This month we’ve got exciting improvements to more accurately audit vendor invoices, and new security updates to help your internal Compliance Department happy!
New Features
Manage your Vendor Accounts
Discovery users can now set detailed information about a Vendor Account, including the accounts' Vendor Contact, Billing Frequency, Invoice Retrieval Method, and Discovery's prediction for the next time an invoice will become available.
We have some very exciting things planned for Vendor Accounts in the future, which we plan to release later this year and update here on the blog, so stay tuned!
New Report: Missing Invoices for Vendor Account Report
One of the hardest parts of growing any business that requires receipt of a large volume of invoices is ... well, staying up to date on receiving invoices! With our newly updated Vendor Accounts publicly facing in Discovery, we took the time to update our pre-existing report, "Vendor Invoices by Account Per Month" to leverage these new datapoints.
Starting today you will notice a toggle at the top of the report that allows users to filter to ONLY show Accounts Missing a Vendor Invoice for a period that falls between (and including) the Start and End Fiscal Periods.
This filter leverages the Vendor Account's new Billing Frequency column, which will filter out any Vendor Account set to a Billing Frequency of "Not Billed", and will take into consideration Quarterly, Semi-Annual, or Annual billing Frequencies.
New Report: Services Missing a Vendor Account
When a new service level is created, adding it to a Vendor Account is optional. This is ideal because there can be a time delay between the service level being created in Discovery and the Vendor creating the service or account in their system.
To account for this, we have added a handy checklist-style page that allows users to see which services are not tied to a vendor account, and do one of a few options:
- Note that this service level does not have a vendor account, and will not get one in the future. This removes the service level from this list.
- Contact the Vendor to find this information (phone and email from the Vendor record are shown)
- Enter the new account number on the left-most column of the row.
Added the ability to Audit charges using specific fees for a Vendor Service (instead of the value on the Contract).
Discovery now validates extraneous charges (overage, extra pickup, etc) on a vendor invoice against fees for that specific Vendor Service. This works as an over-ride to the Vendor Fee that may exist on the Vendor Contract. Charges that are out of range will automatically have revisions and adjusted line items created from them.
This is a big customization win for customers, as there are often slight nuances to the pricing structure for services within a contract.
For example, you may now have a "Delivery" fee listed in the Vendor Contract at $100/unit, and a separate "Delivery" fee for the recycling toters on that contract for just $50/unit. In the event a Delivery fee is identified and tied to the recycling toter service level, $50/unit will be used for the audit, otherwise $100/unit will be the basis for auditing.
Work Orders, such as Rolloff/Compactor Empties, Bulk Item Pickups, etc, now update their Quantity based upon the appropriate Vendor Invoice Line Item.
Discovery has been dutifully processing vendor invoices since 2014, which means we've always been grabbing the Quantity of a line item for auditing purposes. For example this may be the tonnage from a roll-off, or the number of extra yards of waste/recycling picked up by your hauler.
A few years ago we created Work Orders, which help track the life cycle of many event-driven requests, like emptying your roll-off, or getting an extra pickup on your small waste container.
Starting today, the "confirmed quantity" of a work order is now updated if the system matches a vendor invoice line item to a similar event on the same date.
For example - if a Work Order exists for removing bulk items, and later a vendor invoice line item is found tied to the same service level and with the Vendor Fee for "Bulk Item Removal", the quantity from the Vendor Invoice will update the Quantity on the Work Order.
Ultimately this keeps your data updated, and will more accurately populate our leading Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) Reporting for standards such as GRESB and ENERGYSTAR Portfolio Manager.
Tickets (incidents) may now be created for unexecuted services and locations
When onboarding new locations, many times users have a hard time keeping track of the status of their client's accounts. Historically, Tickets (formerly called Incidents) could only be opened for 'current' Services and Locations. This presented a problem, however - how do you manage a track a new location where you do not yet know all of the data (service level details, contract status, or maybe even who the vendor is!).
This presented a significant user workflow problem for users, and to help address this we're opening up the ability to create Tickets for Services and Locations that do not have a fully executed Client Contract associated with them.
We believe this more closely matches our customers' workflow, and better allows for Discovery users to manage waste and recycling contracts, service levels, and reports,
Forms for complex objects (e.g vendor contracts) now have verbose help text
Help text to the rescue! Discovery now shows help text for complex business items, like a Cancellation of Auto Renewal/Reservation of Rights process shown here:
Security Updates
Add browser session management to the User Settings screen of Discovery
Discovery users may now log out old browser sessions. In the case that a user account is ever compromised through attack vectors such as session or cookie poisoning, users now have a way to destroy those browser sessions in order to prevent them from accessing discovery.
Various Password Management, Logging, and Throttling Improvements
Changing a user password now requires that the employee enter their current password. We've also introduced login throttling and other tools to help keep your account safe.
Upgraded our front end tools to the latest releases
We are big fans of Inertia.js, and in doing our latest upgrade have completely refactored our forms to use the new Event API.
