As has always been the case, define your base charges including tasks, on-site time, travel time and inventory as tax exclusive

Define one or more tax types in the Company settings area, including the ability to specify a default

Optionally select a tax type on any quote, job or invoice task or line item, which is then used to automatically calculate the total tax amount (the default tax type will be used if one is not manually specified)

View the new 'Total tax' and 'Total including tax' values for any quote or job

To maintain consistency across Loc8 (including workspace columns, filters, charge summaries, reports, web views and exports) some fields have been renamed: The existing Quote 'Quoted', Job 'Total charge', and Invoice 'Subtotal' fields have all been renamed to 'Total excluding tax'. The existing Invoice 'Tax' field has been renamed to 'Total tax', and the existing Invoice 'Total' field has been renamed to 'Total including tax'

How does this affect existing quotes and jobs? All existing quotes and jobs will be unaffected, however as stated above you will now see the 'Total excluding tax' field in place of 'Quoted' for quotes and 'Total charge' for jobs. Additionally, you will notice that the new 'Total tax' field will be set to 0 / 'None' (as we cannot assume you want tax automatically added) and by extension the new 'Total including tax' field will be identical to the 'Total excluding tax' value for the given quote or job.

How does this affect existing invoices? All existing invoices will be unaffected, however as stated above you will now see the 'Total including tax' field in place of 'Total', and the 'Total tax' field in place of 'Tax'.

How does this affect managing jobs that relate to quotes or invoices? When converting a quote into a job, the job 'Approval limit' will now be set from the quote 'Total including tax' amount. Likewise, the 'Estimated total', 'Quoted', 'Invoiced' and 'Paid' reference values on the job charge summary will refer to the 'Total including tax' amounts, so that we are always comparing apples-with-apples, so to speak.

What if our base charge rates (tasks, labour and inventory) include tax? Following on from the previous point, in order to introduce tax support, all interfaces will now include a 'Total tax' and 'Total including tax' field. These will be correct if you have always defined your rates as tax exclusive as per our documentation, however if you have instead included tax in your base charge rates the 'Total excluding tax', 'Total tax' and 'Total including tax' fields may be misleading. In this case please get in touch with our support team and we will guide you through the process of setting everything straight.

Create and manage stand-alone invoices without the need for an active 3rd party financial integration such as Xero or QuickBooks Online, including the ability to revise / edit the invoice, manage it's lifecycle and update payment information

Inline with supporting stand-alone invoicing, invoice statuses have changed. Please see the following section

Invoices are now more deeply tied to jobs, whereby an invoice can only relate to a single job. This provides much better continuity between jobs and invoices, including the ability to easily see associated invoices and payment details against jobs

Discounts are now added as their own line items on the invoice rather than being added on a per line item basis. This provides much better compatibility with all 3rd party financial integrations, and will eventually be extended to support percentage based discounting across the whole invoice

Choose who you email an invoice to when you send it, along with the ability to compose the email in full rather than depending on a pre-defined template

View and add comments against invoices, as well as email history in the messages tab

View change history against invoices

How do these changes affect existing invoices? All existing invoices will be unaffected by the specified changes to discounting and multiple job associations and will continue to be accessible via the same web view mechanism as before, however beyond now being able to view existing invoices within Loc8 will not benefit from any of the new functionality. Existing invoices will however be affected by the new statuses as discussed in the next section.

How do these changes affect existing jobs? All existing jobs will be unaffected

Please note that the invoice workspace in Prism mode has now been removed

Draft: This is used for all new invoices, and whilst in this status an invoice is fully editable

Pending payment: Replacing both Submitted and Authorised, this is used once an invoice has been sent. It is also possible to move an invoice into this status without sending

Paid: This is used once an invoice has been marked as paid. It is also possible to move an invoice into this status without recording payment information

Cancelled: This is used once an invoice has been Void. Once an invoice has been void / cancelled it can no longer be edited, sent or have its status changed

How do these changes affect existing invoices? All existing invoices in the Draft or Paid status will be unaffected. Any existing invoices in either the Submitted or Authorised statuses will now be in the status of Pending payment.

All new interfaces for adding and configuring the integrations

Detailed integration logging to provide visibility on success or failure of invoice syncing

Visibility of which financial system an invoice synced to and when, along with the ID of the invoice in the financial system, all from the invoice workspace itself

Simpler management of what General Ledger / Chart of Account codes to use when mapping Loc8 invoice line items

How do these changes affect existing integrations? Existing Xero and QuickBooks Online integrations will stop working, and as such you will need to enable the new integration manually. Please contact our support team if you need assistance.

How do these changes affect invoices that are already syncing? Existing Loc8 invoices that have already synced to either Xero or QuickBooks online will no longer continue to sync changes, and as such, you will need to manually reflect any future changes from the invoices in the 3rd party system back to the invoices in Loc8.

How do these changes affect future invoice sync logic? Syncing invoices between Loc8 and 3rd party financial systems will behave in much the same way as with the previous integrations, with the only exception being that the sync trigger is now when an invoice moves into the status of 'Pending payment'

Enable the customer portal against any Company type customer, using their primary email address

Enabling a portal now send out an invite email to the customer

How do these changes affect existing customer portals? There are no changes whatsoever, however if you disable portal access for a customer and then reenable it, the customer will be sent an invite email

Duplicate names are no longer accepted when creating / editing message templates

Deleting message templates that are in use now displays a warning

The 'Position' field for a customer contact is no longer mandatory

The 'Site contact' is now available as a column in the asset workspace

Creating a job from a workforce or asset inspector now works as expected

Creating a job now pre-fills the correct default charge template

Creating a quote no longer throws an error under some conditions

Activating a user or technician is now more consistently reflected in the 'Activated' field

Changing an asset status to Disposed no longer occasionally appears to delete it

Changing an asset status to Commissioned no longer throws an error

Custom field values are now pre-filled when creating an entity, according to the configured default value

Deleting a sub-task template now effectively removes the sub-task from associated task templates

Quote exports no longer fail when including some columns

Job exports no longer fail under some appointment conditions

PDF exports no longer fail when custom fields are included

Task exports now include basic tasks

(Contractor portal) The assignee filter in the job workspace now includes available assignees