Wow, I don't know where to begin. This new expense "upgrade" is a huge downgrade from every part of the process.
The expense entry screen is all of a sudden terribly slow for everybody. I am getting this feedback from people in office and at other sights. It's not just a bad internet connection in one spot.
There are too many steps required before you can even get to the coding step when entering an expense from scratch. You have to enter a description and amount before you can save the header of the transaction, and then you have to physically click on "save" before you can proceed to the lower grid and add coding. The fact that you also have to click "Add new item" before the coding boxes pop up is an additional step. These are two unnecessary clicks to each expense that were never required previously. When the interface is already slow to react as mentioned in #1, this really adds up to someone dealing with dozens of expenses. One guy said his expenses used to only take him 20 minutes and this month it took him an hour to code 16 expenses because of these two issues.
I get the idea of wanting to add functionality for splitting expenses, but why not have the "Add New Item" only be necessary when splitting an expense is necessary. Every expense is always going to need at least one code, why not have it default to having one line item already set up and ready to code to without extra clicks?
No more ability to drag and drop receipts? This is a huge downgrade. We have lots of folks who use the drag & drop feature and having to open a dialogue window to upload a receipt on each charge adds a lot of unnecessary steps vs the previous process. Dragging & dropping files is objectively faster than having to click a button to open a new instance of windows explorer and navigate to the file each time. Also punishing for users the more expenses they have.
The expense approval screen no longer shows job coding without having to click into each expense. This is a huge downgrade from a reviewer standpoint. Why does this no longer show in the grid of expenses for reviewers? I get that there's an arrow on the left that you can click to show more info, but this is cumbersome for people who have a lot of expenses to review, especially considering the coding appeared directly in this grid before.
We just lost some critical functionality in the Expense Posting dashboard. There is no longer a column available that shows where each expense was coded to. I see that you can find the coding if you click on the arrow on the far left of the grid on individual line items, but that means you need to click into every expense individually to see the coding instead of it all showing on the grid. That takes a TON of more time to review coding in this grid than it did previously and also doesn't allow for coding to be a sortable or filterable field in this grid, which I use heavily as part of my workflow.
The Export to Excel function in the Expense Posting Dashboard has also lost significant functionality. The report kicked out of there is borderline unusable and takes a ton of formatting cleanup to get it to be even remotely useful. I rely on this excel export report each month to report to others the activity on each individual's cards and where each charge got coded to. This does not export into an easy to review form and requires a ton of format cleanup each time to make it useful for this purpose. Where my CFO & managing directors need this info from me each month, it is very frustrating to no longer have a good way to provide this info to them.
Garrett Shaw
| Company | OSM Construction |
| Job Title / Role | Controller |
| I need it... | Yesterday...Come on already |
Dear Viewpoint Suggestion Box contributor;
We at Viewpoint sincerely thank you for your contribution to Suggestion Box on how we can improve Viewpoint products. While we can’t do everything at once, we rely upon your feedback to help guide the prioritization of our product improvements, and Suggestion Box is a critical tool for us to understand and prioritize our customers’ needs.
Viewpoint reviews Suggestion Box regularly for all of our products and updates statuses, adds comments, and performs various house-keeping (including deleting) as needed to ensure that Suggestion Box is maintained as a productive environment for product enhancements requests.
© 2024 Trimble Inc. All Rights Reserved. Viewpoint®, Vista™, Spectrum®, ProContractor™, Jobpac Connect™, Viewpoint Team™, Viewpoint Analytics™, Viewpoint Field View™, Viewpoint Estimating™, Viewpoint For Projects™, Viewpoint HR Management™, Viewpoint Field Management™, Viewpoint Financial Controls™, Vista Field Service™, Spectrum Service Tech™, ViewpointOne™, ProjectSight® and Trimble Construction One™ are trademarks or registered trademarks of Trimble Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and other countries. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
Hi everyone!
One last update for this suggestion and I'm going to mark this as shipped.
Couple notes: This update does not include every expense fix/feature we have implemented in the last 3 releases, I'm just focusing on the items in this specific suggestion.
I reread through the comments and I believe everything in the comment section has been taken care of as well (aside from asking for multi coding to be optional based on the customer).
Shipping this does not mean that we aren't looking at other suggestions that have come through outside the ones listed here as well.
February .2 release included:
Performance improvement for the expense posting dashboard and expense approval page (for all users)
Reducing the amount of steps required by auto filling the first item with header info
(we are working on another item right now - when a user hits "save" it will auto open "edit" mode - will provide a release for this when it's closer)
Drag and Drop functionality
April .4 release included:
Removing the chevron/drilldown from the Expense Posting Dashboard and Expense Approval
Bringing info back to columns on the excel export
Performance improvement for the expense posting dashboard and expense approval page (focused on large data sets)
Expense posting dashbaord saving grid layout changes
June .6 release included: (now available to on prem customers - full cloud deploy will be the week of July 8th, we wanted you guys to have a stress free 4th of July!)
Expense items selected on the Expense Posting Dashboard now remain selected after editing an expense
Thank you guys for all your feedback and working with us on all the changes you wanted to see!!
Please reach out to me if you have any questions
Got your email, thanks Kelie!
Jon/Kelley - Thanks for commenting on here! It's nice everything is in one place.
I'm going to reach out over email to get some more info from you both if I could.
We had one other customer report long loading times, they had a very large data set and we implemented a fix for it that seemed to clear up the problem.
Hopefully it's the same cause and we can fix it for you quickly.
We are experiencing the same issue, Jon.
Last week's Expense update caused our load times in expenses to go from 1-2 seconds to each screen taking 15-20+ seconds to load. I have a case open, but I thought this was already fixed. Well, it seems broken again.
Brandon - The issue you are experiencing "long load times for approvers to edit a line? Then when going back to the approval dashboard, getting booted from the portal and the expense line the were working on is gone, then appears again later in the day?" isn't something we have any other cases for so entering a case for this issue instead of a case for reverting back to previous functionailty would help us solve the problem, thank you!
No i submitted a case to revert back to the previous functionality, we are still getting daily complaints, so ill pass them on here. Do we have a date to fix all the functionality issues?
Brandon - Did you submit a support case for this issue? If you have the case number I can look into this further. Thanks!
This has caused so many issues with end users. Many just giving up on using. Need to go back to prior version to work out bugs and problems before releasing. Thanks for putting this list together.
Anyone else experiencing long load times for approvers to edit a line? Then when going back to the approval dashboard, getting booted from the portal and the expense line the were working on is gone, then appears again later in the day?
This is still a huge pain to my users, even with the "fixes".
Having to hit save on the header to populate the item and selecting Edit to code the single line item has proven very confusing to our users.
I agree with the comment earlier about wanting the multi line item option to be something we can turn on/off in our tenant globally like many other "features" that can be enabled or disabled.
The bulk of my users of Expenses are union field personnel who already don't want to do any "paperwork". unnecessarily adding additional steps or complexity is not helpful.
For cloud customers we have a maintence release scheduled for later this week that will be applied to your environment automatically
What do we need to do or when will the hotfix be applied to our cloud envirionment?
Hi everyone,
Putting an update here for the fixes that were included in our .2 February release
Performance issues with loading time were included in a .12 hotfix and in the .2 February release
When creating a new item - the header will now auto-create the first line item and auto fill the amount and tax
Drag and drop has been brought back - you can drag and drop on the main expense page or within the expense on the header/line. I will attach a couple photos for reference
Approvers who are assigned to all line items on the expense can now edit all header info
Removing the drop down from the Approval page and Expense Posting Dashboard to bring all the info back to the columns and allow for a clean export are still on track for our April .4 release
As well as the columns/filters holding their value after using the back button when in "edit" mode
If anything changes for the upcoming release I will update everyone here.
Thanks!
Everything about this, 100%. If we can't get this fixed I'll have to shift our organization away from HFF and into an outside solution- which isn't ideal.
Wow, I wish I knew how bad this was before we upgraded. Got hit with a litany of complaints from the field... from focus issues to viewer issues...
Another suggestion would be to stop using the term header and line... that sound's very APish, and most submitting expenses are not in accounting...
Since the new upgrade the expense approval process is very slow and time consuming. Need to revert back to the previous version. Additionally, keep getting notifications about the PDF viewer not working properly. Please fix this ASAP.
Thank you Kellie! Appreciate you all hopping on these issues quickly for us! Just as an FYI, when I was saying line item expenses as an "option", I was thinking of a company or global level, not at a user by user level Just throwing that out there in case that would be an option.
Hi Tyler, thanks for your feedback as well! Unfortunately we can't make the new features optional based on individual users. We are however working on the info entered in the header auto filling the information in the first line item automatically. So there will not be any duplicate entry for users who are not splitting expenses.
For the notes on the attachment:
approvers will be able to edit expense info in our .2 release, .2 will be available to all customers this week.
We are currently working on the back buttons
We will be removing the drilldown from the approval screen
Not sure if the attachment worked on my last comment. trying it again.