Spark Updates April 2018
Project-wide price history, Standardized Fields, and Realtime Mass Action Notifications are among the updates this month The Spark development team has been busy as usual over the past few weeks, working on lots of behind-the-scenes improvements as well as several new features we’re excited to intr
The Spark development team has been busy as usual over the past few weeks, working on lots of behind-the-scenes improvements as well as several new features we’re excited to introduce.
Settings Menu Changes
Many of the other changes we’ve introduced recently can be found in the Settings menu, so it makes sense to let you know that we’ve changed the look and configuration of these pages!
Ratings and Statuses have been moved into the Contact and Inventory settings pages respectively. User Roles have been moved under Team Settings and are now displayed in list view by default, rather than card view. We have also moved the sections into tabs to better organize the layout, particularly for pages like Contracts/Agreements, which have many settings.
As always, only users with advanced permissions can view or modify these settings.
Full Project Price History
There’s now a much easier way to quickly review price changes across your entire project. At the bottom of the Inventory Overview page, you’ll find a section for Recent Price Changes, and you can click on All Price History to go to a list of all the price changes that have occurred over the life of your project. You can sort the list by whoever made the update, order it by date, or just search for specific units. This makes it easy to switch between units and compare the changes for one unit with another.
Contract/Agreement Statuses
We now have contract statuses in addition to inventory statuses.
Contract statuses can now be customized, from language to colour, to match the different steps in your contract process. This makes them independent from your Inventory statuses, which function the same as before. Note that each contract status is triggered by a contract event, so you cannot currently add or remove any additional statuses.
Standardized Additional Fields
Firstly, like contacts and inventory, contracts/agreements now contain an additional information section for miscellaneous data you may need to store or write to your PDFs.
On top of one-off additional fields, you can also add standardized fields that will be included by default on each contact, inventory or contract form, on a per-project basis. This will help create consistency and help avoid leaving out any information you want your team to include as you add more records to your database.
Standardized fields can be added in the settings pages for contacts, inventories and contracts.
Extended Mass Actions and Notifications
Mass actions were formerly only applicable to a maximum of 100 records at a time, and were updated in realtime. We have now added the ability for users with administrative permission to select all pages at once and perform mass actions on the entire selection.
To select all pages, you must first select all on the current page. Do this by selecting the checkbox in the list header. The option to select all pages will then appear in the mass action menu.
To accommodate this functionality, we have moved these processes into the background, which means the records will be updated while you continue to work. Realtime notifications have been added to alert you when the job has finished. If you have new notifications, you will see a red dot over the bell in the upper right, beside the Settings menu. You can hover over this to see your most recent notifications.
Currently, notifications are only enabled for mass actions, but this is the start of many more types of notifications in Spark!
That’s all for big changes this month! We look forward to showing you the next round of updates soon.
Feel free to email us at support@spark.re with any questions you have regarding the new features or Spark itself!
