To help with this, we’ve also released some new reports and new ways to view your transactions and invoices. There are also a couple of new reports our customers have been asking about, and a few changes to security settings.
Read on to find out more about the August product update.
New — Unearned income
Unearned income is money you have received in advance of having earned it. Another way to look at it is the difference between what you’ve earned vs what you’ve invoiced.
This feature is most relevant to larger more complex businesses with revenue of over $10M who are required to comply with the accounting standard on revenue recognition known as IFRS 15*. This feature replicates how you would report on your revenue received in advance liability via a spreadsheet and applies only to fixed fee and percentage of contract stages.
Your unearned income transactions now have a dedicated view within the project transactions page. The view is ‘live’ and your transactions are displayed as you make changes to the stage or the invoice.
Read more about unearned income in Synergy product manager Paul Hemmings’ latest blog, Unearned income — not counting your chickens, or your money.
This is a Synergy Enterprise feature.
Update — Reports
To help you keep track of your unearned income we have created three new reports. The reports ‘unearned income — by discipline’ and ‘unearned income — by cost centre’ are filtered by the account codes you use. The third, ‘unearned income — by primary contact’ is filtered by your listed project contacts.
We have two new highly anticipated reports available in the report engine: ‘invoice vs costs groups’ by project/stage and by month. This allows you to compare the actual costs vs the invoiced costs for a specific time period.
‘Staff — performance by project and stage’ filters by periods of transaction invoice date. The costs and profits columns are only available to directors and above.
Update — Project transactions view
This release has worked some magic using our project performance feature. Using the stage progress slider, Synergy is able to help both project managers and CFOs (woah, right?!)
Stage progress (via the slider in project performance) now helps show both earned value (or ‘earned percentage’) andearned revenue (or ‘complete percentage’). Earned value is the percentage of budget consumed based on progress; earned revenue is the percentage of the fee consumed based on progress. There is, of course, more to it than that, so head over to the help files to find out more.
The other update in this section is about stage names. If your stages have long stage names, you can now hover over the stage name and see a tooltip that shows the full stage name.
Update — Stage progress bar in the work breakdown
The stage progress bar is now a slider. It replaces the progress bar which only updated in increments of 10 percent. This allows for more accurate accounting when you need to marry up the invoice percent to your earned percent. It also allows the project manager to be more precise in their estimates especially towards the end of the stage.
Update — Invoices
When a draft invoice is in progress, you can now see a timestamp in the invoice percent complete that shows when the complete percent was last updated.
The complete percent is not shown on a final invoice.
Update — Personal information on your profile
To protect your privacy, your personal information in the contact card is now only visible to directors and above. This includes your private phone, mobile, fax and home address.
Update — Online payment processing — Stripe
Our third-party credit card payments system (Stripe) is now even more secure. We updated our systems to meet the new ‘3D Secure 2’ authentication requirements in Stripe’s latest update. You might need to authenticate your details if your card is affected.
New — On-premises project folders synchronization
We have a new setting that allows customers to set up their document folders on their local file server when creating a new project in Synergy. Speak to our customer success team to find out about pricing.
