The latest update of PLANERGY will be released soon and an important part of this update will be changes to the design of the PLANERGY application. This improves the look and feel of the software to make it easier to use.

These changes have been planned to minimise their impact on how you are used to using PLANERGY but there are some changes that you need to be aware of. Below we explain the changes but if you are having any problems completing a task in PLANERGY please contact our support team and they will be happy to help.

New Design

Full Screen Layout For Large Screens

PLANERGY has always used a responsive design (it resizes automatically to fit the screen size you are using), but on larger screens it did not make full use of the screen width. The new design will use the full width of the screen you are using making it easier to use.

Navigation Updates

Left Side Menu

The main menu on the left of the screen has been updated. There are icons added for each group of pages and the entire menu can be minimized to free up additional horizontal space. There are a few important things to know about how the menu will behave differently to the old main menu.

Collapsible Menu

Using the circle with the orange arrow at the top of the menu you can expand or collapse the menu.

Accessing Sub-Menus

If the menu is expanded only one submenu will be open at any given time. You can press the arrows on the right of the menu to open the section and see the additional menu options for that grouping.

If the menu is collapsed the submenu will appear when you hover over the relevant icon in the menu.

Help and Support buttons

The help and support buttons previously appeared at the very far left of the screen, these are now added at the bottom of the left side menu.

Old Layout

New Layout

Control Panel button moved

The button to access the Control Panel previously appeared in the left side menu. It has now been moved under the User Profile section in the header menu.

To access the Control Panel you now need to use the profile menu. This is accessed from a circle with the first letter from your first name and first letter from your second name at the right-hand side of the header menu. Pressing the icon will display the additional options below it and Control Panel is included here.

Accounts Payable menu options

For some users who have been using PLANERGY for many years you will be used to seeing Accounts Payable options in this menu.

When we introduced AP Automation functionality this greatly expanded the Accounts Payable functionality available in PLANERGY but your menu was not updated to reflect this. With the release of the new design the menu has been standardized and the Accounts Payable options are now found in a separate Accounts Payable module.

If you would like to learn more about PLANERGY’s Accounts Payable Automation, please contact the support team for more information.

Old Layout

New Layout

Header Menu

Module Navigation

The links to access different PLANERGY modules are located in a similar place to where they were available in the old design but the look and feel of these has been changed.

Old Layout

New Layout

Logout and User Settings

The logout and user settings options were always visible on screen in the old design. To access these options now you need to use the profile menu (a circle with the first letter from your first name and first letter from your second name). Pressing the icon will display the additional options below it.

Order View/Edit Page

Order Status

Order status now appears next to the requisition or purchase order number.

Old Layout

New Layout

Comments

The comments section that previously appeared on the far right of the screen now appears at the top right corner of the document.

Old Layout

New Layout

Your Orders

The tabbed navigation to move between Waiting For Approval, Approved, and Rejected pages has been removed. You can access each of these from the main left side menu.

Old Layout

New Layout

Receiving

The receiving page is now split into 2 separate tabs for receiving and returning. Previously it was possible to return items and receive items. To return items you now have to open the Return Items tab and you will see the options to return items.

Search Pages

The standard search pages, this includes Purchase Order Search and Invoice Search, are all updated with similar changes.

Quick Search

Quick Search is now available, this allows you to search based on any information quickly with a single input field. This searches across all data.

All other search filters are hidden under the Advanced Search expander. You can open this by clicking anywhere on the section. This will reveal all of the search filters for searches or exports.

Export

The location of the export options have moved to the top right of the search results table.

Old Layout

New Layout

Search Results Settings

The options for configuring how the search results appear has been moved and is now available on the top right, above the search results table.

Old Layout

New Layout

This opens a popup where you can change the display settings for the search results table.

Invoice Documents Search

Reconcile Invoice Button

The Reconcile Invoice button is located in the same place it was before but now uses an icon.

Old Layout

New Layout

Reconcile New Invoice

Supplier Invoice Panel Buttons

The buttons used to interact with the invoice document have been updated to use icons. The same options are available and appear in the same order as in the old layout except the ‘Next Document’ button has been moved to the Header Section.

Old Layout

New Layout

Header Section

This has been updated to have navigation options to move to the next and previous invoice document. Previously these were available in the buttons in the Supplier Invoice Panel.

Old Layout

New Layout

The latest update release of PLANERGY went live over the weekend of the 14th/15th of May. See below the updates made in this release.

What’s New

The latest update release of PLANERGY went live over the weekend of the 14th/15th of May. See below the updates made in this release.

Integration – Amazon Business – Order Confirmation, Shipment Notification, and eInvoice integration

The PLANERGY PunchOut integration with Amazon Business is updated and now includes standard Amazon Business notifications integrated into the PLANERGY Procure-to-Pay workflow.

Notifications can be set for each user so they can decide if they prefer these notifications in the application, by email, or through Microsoft Teams or Slack.

The notifications are tracked in the audit trail for the PO ensuring everything is centralized following best practices for Record-to-Report.

Order Confirmation

When Amazon Business confirms your order the update is reflected in PLANERGY with the order status updating to ‘PO Accepted’ for orders that have been fully confirmed.

When only part of the order is confirmed that will be ‘PO Partially Accepted’ and the accepted items will be highlighted with a green bar beside them. Items that have yet to have an order confirmation will have no color bar. Rejected items, or items that cannot be supplied, will be highlighted with a red bar and if you hover over the bar it will show the reason it cannot be supplied.

If a purchase order is fully rejected by Amazon Business the PO status will update to ‘PO Rejected’ and all line items will be highlighted with a red bar and if you hover over the bar it will show the reason it cannot be supplied.

Notifications for Order Confirmation are linked to the existing notification, ‘Supplier Acceptance of PO sent by Me’. Notifications for Shipment Notifications will have a new notification setting added in the next update release but will initially be received by the requester in all channels.

Shipment Notification

When Amazon Business confirms shipment for items on a purchase order this will be reflected in PLANERGY with the order status updating to ‘PO Shipment Sent’.

On the View Purchase Order page there will be a new ‘Shipment’ button tracking the various shipments related to the purchase order.

When you click the button it will show the relevant shipment notification information from Amazon Business. Each shipment will be tracked separately with all relevant information including Notice Date, Shipment Date, Delivery Date, the Items and quantities included in the shipment.

Shipment notifications are also available in the Receiving section of PLANERGY. When reviewing there you also have the option to copy the quantities in the notification to speed up the process of partial receiving.

eInvoice

Amazon Business will send invoices directly to PLANERGY where they will be automatically processed and matched against the relevant POs. They will be available in PLANERGY to view in cXML format sent by Amazon. Fully streamlining the Procure-to-Pay process for your Amazon Business orders.

Invoices will be immediately available as saved invoice for the PO and in the Invoice Search list.

Additional charges, Shipment Cost and Special Handling Cost, are included on the invoice. Discounts appear as a negative value line item reducing the cost of the overall invoice.
Credit Memos are added as separate negative value invoices with separate line items for total, shipment cost, and special handling cost.

Notifications in PLANERGY related to Amazon Business eInvoices are linked to the notification setting ‘AP Automation – New Invoice Received’

Advanced Reporting – Purchasing KPI reports: Purchase Order Cycle Time and Purchase Order Approval Time

In the Purchase section of PLANERGY we have added a couple of very useful standard reports under Advanced Reporting to track KPIs related to purchase order processing – Purchase Order Cycle Time and Purchase Order Approval Time.

Both reports include a doughnut graph for top performers and a searchable, customizable table. They can also be filtered by date range.

Purchase Order Cycle Time

Purchase Order Cycle Time is calculated on the number of days from when the requisition was created to when it was sent to the supplier. Top performers for this metric average 5 hours or less. If you are looking to improve on this KPI, you can find tips to improve your PO cycle time here.

Purchase Order Approval Time

Purchase Order Approval Time is calculated based on the number of days a requisition takes to be fully approved and become a PO. This can be very useful for identifying the worst performing approvers or departments that are causing bottlenecks. It can also be used to identify the best performing people and departments for praise.

If you are looking to improve on this KPI, this article has tips to improve PO approval time.

Accounts Payable – Comment on Invoice Documents

It is now possible to add comments to the invoice documents received from your supplier before they are saved for processing through PLANERGY. This allows queries to be raised and discussed at an earlier stage in the process. For example, when you want to delay payment for an invoice because it is being queried with the supplier.

As with the comments elsewhere in PLANERGY this can be used to add notes or start an internal discussion. All comments are fully recorded in the audit trail.

You can also add comments to the documents from the Invoice Documents search page.

Integration – PunchOut Available For Staples and Henry Schien

We are continually adding to the list of suppliers where we can integrate with their electronic catalogs. The latest to be added are Staples and Henry Schien. If you use either of their suppliers you can link your orders to your approval workflows in PLANERGY while ordering directly from their online stores.

Advanced Reporting – Approval Rules Export Includes Version Number and Status

Version Number and Status columns have been added to the approval rules export making it easier to compare changes to approval rules over time and across the versions of a rule.

Other Improvements

  • PLANERGY’s new logo has now been added in the header of the application.
  • Accounts Payable – for invoice documents where invoice date is not identified the field will be left blank. Previously the data it was received was used as a fallback but it is often not the case.

The latest update release of PLANERGY went live over the weekend of the 23rd/24th of April. See below the updates made in this release.

What’s New

Things are moving so fast here at PLANERGY our writers were struggling to keep up! There have been releases in February and March, so these release notes serve as a catch up for these as well as an update for April.

So you may have seen some of these features in PLANERGY and already started to use them. We hope you like them!  

Accounts Payable – Supplier Invoice Document – Word and Excel Documents Preview as PDF

If the supplier invoice is received in Word or Excel format PLANERGY will now convert the file into PDF so it can be viewed in the PDF viewer when reviewing the invoice. Previously you would have to open the original file to review it, so this should save additional time when processing invoices in this format. The original Word or Excel file will be attached to the invoice as a document in it’s original format.

Accounts Payable –  Supplier Invoice Document – Highlight Data Identified On The Document

When data is identified on the supplier invoice it is now highlighted on invoice view panel as well as on the invoice processing panel. This makes it easier to scan and review the data if you want to manually check the information.

The highlight is a square with a different colour used for each of the fields identified to make it easier to compare the data in the two locations. This highlight happens for the Invoice Number, Invoice Date, Invoice Total, Supplier Name and PO Number.  

By default the highlight will be present when you are first processing the invoice. If you later review the invoice you can activate the highlighting by pressing the new ‘Highlight’ button.

Purchase – Advanced Reporting – New Report and Graph: Purchased Item Price Variation

A new report is added to Advanced Reporting in the Purchase module, Purchased Item Price Variation. The report is a line graph that highlights variation in the purchase price of individual items so you can compare and identify variations over time.
The graph also highlights the average price paid for the item over the period under review by the graphs filtering. You can filter by company, item, and date range. The report can also be added to your Advanced Reporting Dashboard as a widget. A good place to start with this can be shipping charges. This can vary greatly from supplier to supplier and there could be a great opportunity in your company to make savings by introducing a preferred shipping company policy.

Integration – Amazon Business – PunchOut Shipment and Special Handling Amount

When processing Amazon Business PunchOut orders the shipment and special handling charges assigned to the order by Amazon will be automatically included to the PunchOut PO in PLANERGY as individual line items. This cuts out some manual input that was previously required and ensures all relevant costs are available for review when approving Amazon Business PunchOut POs.

Accounts Payable – Advanced Reporting –  Budget Month Column Added To Invoice With Line Items Report Type

A new column, Budget Month, is added to the available columns for customization to the Invoice With Items export.

If you are using the Advanced Budgeting options that allow individual POs to be assigned to different budget periods it is now possible to report on these at the line level of the invoice.

Accounts Payable – Invoice Documents – AP Automation Email Address Added To The Invoice Documents Page

We have had some feedback that it can be difficult to remember the email address suppliers should email invoices to, especially for multi-company accounts where there are multiple email addresses. The email address for each company is now visible on the New Invoice section of the Invoice Documents page.

PLANERGY CheckOut Updates

We are continuing to improve our Chrome/Edge compatible extension that pulls cart information from leading online marketplaces to allow you to push the information through the approval process in PLANERGY more easily. It is available to download from the Chrome Web Store here.

Option To Install PLANERGY CheckOut In Application

When PLANERGY CheckOut is enabled for your account there is now a popup prompt to download the extension for Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge if it is not installed already. The popup appears when a user clicks on the New Online Catalog Order menu option. This will help make it easier for your team to start using the feature quickly.

Expanded List of Suppliers Supported By PLANERGY CheckOut

Support for a large number of new supplier’s websites in various regions has been added. This makes the extension more flexible and usable than ever. If you would like us to look at supporting any additional online marketplaces you order from please do let us know!

Viking Direct (https://www.vikingdirect.com/)
Home Depot (https://www.homedepot.com/)
Screwfix (https://www.screwfix.com/)
Lowes (https://www.lowes.com/)
Grainger (https://www.grainger.com/)
Best Buy (https://www.bestbuy.com/)
takealot (https://www.takealot.com/)
mouser (https://www.mouser.com/)
digikey (https://www.digikey.com/)
McMASTER-CARR (https://www.mcmaster.com/)
Ironmongery Direct (https://www.ironmongerydirect.co.uk/)
East Coast Fibreglass Suppliers (https://www.ecfibreglasssupplies.co.uk/)
Arco (https://www.arco.co.uk/)
Galleon Supplies (https://www.galleonsupplies.co.uk/)
Euro Office (https://www.euroffice.co.uk/)
healy’s tools (www.elsons.co.uk)
Proctec Direct (https://www.protecdirect.co.uk/)
ITS (https://its.co.uk/)
SDS London (https://www.sdslondon.co.uk/)
Sprayguns Direct (https://spraygunsdirect.co.uk/)
HLN Suppliers (https://www.hlnsupplies.co.uk/)
FFX (https://ffx.co.uk/)
Daro (https://www.daro.com/)
Quill (https://www.quill.com/)
Hafele (https://www.hafele.com/)
Fischer Scientific (https://www.fishersci.com/)
Miltenyi Biotec (https://www.miltenyibiotec.com/)
VWR (https://www.vwr.com/)
Chemglass (https://chemglass.com/)
Qiagen (https://www.qiagen.com/)
Merck (https://www.merckmillipore.com/)
New England Bio Labs (https://www.neb.com/)

Advanced Reporting – Receiving With Items Audit trail report update

New columns are now available for selection in the report type Receiving With Items Audit Trail. The report can also include items that have not been received too. This makes it easier to report on receiving information. The new columns available are:

  • Order Authorized Date
  • Order Requested Date
  • Fully Received

The customer has need to track long delivered items and not fully delivered items. With latest changes, that could be done using this report, since they could compare AuthorizedDate with Receiving date and to filter by not fully delivered items. They would like to chase suppliers which have a long delivery or a lot of partially delivered items/POs

Integration – PunchOut – Improvements for Henry Schien Integration

PunchOut integrations can be set up for any supplier that have PunchOut Catalogs. When working with a customer to integrate with their Henry Schein account there were some additional integration options for this supplier and we have updated our PunchOut Settings to accommodate this.

Two new PunchOut settings are added to cover these options:

Two existing field names have been updated:

  1. Identity is renamed to From/Sender Identity
  2. Secret is renamed to Shared Secret

UI – Alternating Color For PO and Invoice Line Items

When using custom fields on the PO or Invoice line item information the individual line items run across multiple rows on screen. We have had feedback from users that this made it difficult to differentiate the line items easily.

Alternating line items now have a different background colour and there is better spacing between the line items to make it easier to see where a line item ends and another begins.

Custom Home Page Dashboards

The home pages for the Purchase and Accounts Payable module Home pages now have customizable dashboards. Each user can customize the dashboard to their needs by choosing from the available widget panels, positioning them, and sizing to suit their needs with the ability to include up to 8 separate widgets on the dashboard.

A default dashboard will be available that can then be customized as needed by the user. The widgets available to an individual user will be restricted based on their user permissions.

To add new widgets you can press the ‘Add New Widgets’ button:

This will reveal the widgets that can be drag and dropped into the dashboard:

The widgets available will be expanded (Please do let us know if you have a request) but the initial widgets are:

Purchase

1. RSS – It is not possible to remove, but it is possible to resize and change position
2. Shortcuts – Widget which includes Home page Buttons
3. My Recent Orders
4. MY Recently Ordered Items
5. My Orders Waiting For Approval
6. Orders Waiting For My Approval
7. My Orders In Creation
8. My Orders In Approval Process
9. My Approved Orders To be Sent/Received
10. My Open Orders To Be Received
11. Expenditure in last 12 Months
12. Top 5 Expenditure
13. Top 5 Purchased Items Qty
14. Favorite Reports
15. My Recent Purchase Activity
16. Purchase Order Statistics

Widget listed below are available when Accounts Payable is not a standalone module in your PLANERGY account. 
17. My Recent Invoices
18. My Invoices Waiting For Authorization
19. Invoices Waiting For My Authorization
20. My Authorized Invoices To Be Posted
21. My Recently Posted Invoices
22. Expenditure and Invoiced Bar Chart
23. Top 5 Not Invoiced Expenditure
24. Invoiced Total Chart
25. My Recent Invoice Activity

Accounts Payable

If your account of PLANERGY uses Accounts Payable as a standalone module you will have a separate dashboard with a group of widgets specific to Accounts Payable available to you.
Accounts Payable Dashboard Widgets:

  1. RSS
  2. Shortcuts
  3. My Recent Invoices
  4. My Invoices Waiting For Authorization
  5. Invoices Waiting For My Authorization
  6. My Authorized Invoices To Be Posted
  7. My Recently Posted Invoices
  8. Expenditure and Invoiced Bar Chart
  9. Top 5 Not Invoiced Expenditure
  10. Invoiced Total Chart
  11. AP Favorite Reports
  12. My Recent Invoice Activity

Login – Session Expiration Login Popup

A new sliding session expiration popup has been introduced. When you are logged out due to your session expiring, due to a period of inactivity in the browser tab where you are logged in, a login popup will appear when you return to the browser tab.

PLANERGY uses sliding session expiration. This means when your session expires, If the user logs in the content of the page will be not refreshed. This ensures that they can continue to work from where they left the session.

Accounts Payable – Invoice Search – Posted Status Column Available

You can now include Posted Status as a column in the Invoice Search results.

Posting status for invoices is important for reporting within AP to understand which invoices have been sent to your accounting software or ERP. You could always run reports and filter based on this information but including it on screen has been requested and we are sure this will be a helpful option.

Accounts Payable – Invoice Documents – Flag Invoice As Spam

When using PLANERGY’s AP Automation module you have a dedicated email address per company to receive invoices from your suppliers. But like with any other email address, especially if you publish it, spam can come through.

A new option is added to flag an invoice document as spam in the Invoice Documents section. When the spam button is pressed from address and it’s domain will be set as spam. If further emails arrive and the automated invoice scanning does not identify a supplier or PO Number then those emails and documents will be automatically set as spam too. You can find any documents set as spam by filtering by Document Status if needed.

Spam/Not Spam document status

Accounts Payable – Highlight Invoiced Items and Invoiced Items With A Difference To The PO Before Saving The Invoice

A new feature was added in a recent release to allow you to highlight the items on the PO that are being processed on the invoice. You can also highlight the relevant PO item that has a different price or quantity to the invoice.

You can now do this before saving the invoice. This makes it easier to identify which items are included from the PO on the invoice and which items on the PO do not match. Exceptions can be reviewed and handled much faster before saving the invoice. This is especially helpful if you don’t have an invoice tolerance set because you would not be able to save the invoice with a discrepancy. 

Accounts Payable – Invoice Date Identification Improvements

Date formats on invoices sent by suppliers can vary greatly. We have updated the list of supported invoice date formats and how we manage them. Invoice date identification is greatly improved with this release.

Purchase – Advanced Reporting – New KPI Reports: Average PO Approval Time and Average PO Cycle Time

Two new KPI reports are added to Advanced Reporting in the Purchase module.

Both reports include a doughnut graph listing the top 5 departments and can be filtered by date. A table will list all departments and the average approval time for the period filtered to.
Purchase Order Approval Time AVG By Department

This report calculates the average time to approve POs by department. This allows you to see where the biggest bottlenecks in your PO approval processes are so they could be reviewed and improved.

Purchase Order Cycle Time AVG By Department

This reports the average time a PO takes from initial request to be sent to the supplier.

Both reports include a doughnut graph listing the top 5 departments and can be filtered by date. A table will list all departments and the average approval time for the period filtered to.

Purchase – Supplier Email Non Delivery Notification

A new notification is added to let you know when an email to a supplier does not deliver. The notifications ensures you are aware when the email does not deliver so you can communicate to the supplier though a different channel and let them know there is likely a problem with their spam filtering blocking your PO emails. 
The person that manually sends the PO will receive the notification. If the email was automatically sent by PLANERGY as soon as the PO was approved this non-delivery notification will be sent to the user who requested the PO.

Other Improvements

  • Integration – Xero: Account Name from Xero is now imported in the GL Description field in PLANERGY
  • Notifications: Pending changes approval request email and notification title updated to be clearer
  • Accounts Payable: Copying Text from an invoice document that is an image has been improved with much greater accuracy
  • Accounts Payable: Invoice document search page automatically loads the previous company you viewed on the page
  • Smaller fixes: Performance and functionality tweaks are made throughout the application.

The latest update release of PLANERGY went live over the weekend of the 22nd/23rd of December. See below the updates made in this release.

What’s New

Bill.com integration

PLANERGY now has a full native integration with Bill.com. You can import suppliers and Chart of Accounts from Bill.com and export invoice from PLANERGY to Bill.com.

The integration supports multi company and can be enabled by your Account Owner user from the Control Panel > Integrations section.

Exporting invoices from PLANERGY to Bill.com can be done manually per invoice, in bulk from the Invoice Search, or can be configured to send automatically when the invoice is authorized for payment in PLANERGY.

Purchase Order Email Delivery Improvements

Recently we have seen an increase in reports of POs not being received by suppliers when they are sent from the system.

Our team have reviewed this and there are various reasons why an email might not deliver. We have identified a number of improvements that should ensure emails deliver in the majority of cases. But please do let us know if you are still experiencing difficulties.

POs will now be sent from a no reply email address. Previously it was possible for the supplier to reply directly to the email and the reply would come to the inbox of the user that sent the PO. But without IT updates to your email server this can negatively impact deliverability.

To allow the supplier to reply a new ‘Click Here To Reply’ link in the body of the email will offer them the option to reply to the user that sent the PO email from PLANERGY. The subject of the email will reference the PO number.

We will continue to add further improvements to ensure PO emails deliver as needed. To help ensure deliverability we also recommend informing your suppliers that your POs will be delivered from the PLANERGY email server, purchaseordercontrol.com, and that they should whitelist this domain and not mark these emails as spam.

Multiple Contact Email Addresses Per Supplier

We have received feedback from users that for some suppliers you need to send POs to multiple email addresses. It is now possible to enter more than one supplier email address in the Supplier Email field by separating the email addresses with a comma.

If you are using automated PO sending when approved, each email address will receive the PO automatically. The list of email addresses will also automatically populate the field for manual emailing of the PO.

Accounts Payable –  Highlight Invoiced Items and Invoiced Items That Are Different on PO and Invoice

A number of new view options have been added to the AP Automation module to make it easier to analyse the data on the multiple screen views of PO and invoice information.

When viewing a PO on the View / Edit invoice page there are new options that allow you to highlight the items from the PO that have been matched to the invoice currently being reviewed. There is also an option to highlight the items that have different values for item price or quantity when compared to that invoice. This should be helpful, especially when partially invoicing against a PO with a large number of items.
 
To enable the highlight options there are new icons above the line item section, ‘Invoiced’ and ‘Invoiced Diff’.

When ‘Invoiced’ is pressed the relevant lines from the PO that appear on the invoice will be highlighted with a green border.

When ‘Invoiced Diff’ is pressed an additional flag is added beside the value that is different on the PO when compared to the invoice. If the item code, item name, quantity, or item price are different they will be flagged. If you hover over the flag it will show the value present on the invoice.

When either view mode is enabled, if you hover over one of the highlighted line items on the PO it will give you the option to press to highlight the corresponding line item on the invoice.

When this option is pressed the corresponding invoice line item will be highlighted too.

The side by side view with these highlights make it very easy to understand what is matched from the PO on the invoice currently under review.

Accounts Payable – PO View Screen Now Has Multiple View Formats for Line Item Details

If your account has custom fields and line item information appears across multiple rows on the PO you will have a new option to expand or retract the data at the line level when viewing the PO in Accounts Payable has been added. This is similar to the option that is available on the standard View PO screen. New buttons for List and Details view are available above items section.

Details view will be set by default and all custom fields will be visible.

When you press List view, each line item will take up a single row and custom fields will be hidden. A single header will be used in a standard table layout making comparison across line items easier.

When you press Details view, custom fields will be visible again.

If you refresh the page or open some other PO, PLANERGY will remember the most recent view you were using so you don’t have to reselect it again.
 

Notifications – Accounts Payable – New Scanned Document Notification

A new notification setting is added, “AP Automation – New Invoice Received”. When an invoice is processed using the AP Automation module, either received directly by email from the supplier or manually uploaded by a user, a notification can be sent to users to update them in-app, by email, through Microsoft Teams or Slack.

By default, the notification will be disabled for all channels but can be updated from the User Notifications settings available from the notifications bell at the top right of the screen or from the User Settings page. Enabling this notification will send updates only for invoices the user would have permission to view.


A notification will be received in the channel selected by the user every time an invoice is processed automatically. The notification will include the supplier’s name and the PO number it was matched to. The notification will include a link to view the relevant document in PLANERGY.


 
The notification title will include all information correctly matched from the invoice (supplier, PO Number). When something has not been matched correctly it will not be present in notification title.
 



Advanced Reporting – New Report and Graph: Total Quantity of Purchased Items

A new report, ‘Total Quantity of Purchased Items’, including a donut graph view has been added to help analyse the quantities of items ordered. This can be extremely helpful for analysis for strategic sourcing and for quickly identifying any anomalies in expected purchasing behaviour.

The graph shows the top 5 most purchased items with the report showing relevant total quantities of items ordered based on the filtering assigned for the graph.

Integration – Sage Intacct – Additional Integration Columns Available

To allow for integration with Sage Intacct a number of additional columns have been added and are available to be included on custom integration exports on the Invoice Search.

  1. Current Date (a timestamp of when the export was run)
  2. Item Code 
  3. Item Description
  4. Location Code
  5. Line Item Number (1, 2, 3, etc.) first line item number is 1, second is 2,…

Integration – Twinfield – Non PO Invoices Can Now Export To Twinfield

The recently introduced Non PO invoice processing options added in our Accounts Payable module is now updated to be compatible with our Twinfield integration. It is now possible to export Non PO Invoice to Twinfield.

Budgeting – Improved Budget Increase Request Process

We have received feedback from users that budget increase request notifications did not include enough information for the budget holders to understand which specific budget (monthly or total) the budget increase request relates to.

We are always happy to hear this kind of feedback so we can take action to improve PLANERGY. The notification now includes additional detail highlighting which month’s budget the request relates to.

Other Improvements

  • System Emails sent from no-reply email address: Welcome, Password Reset, and Password Reset Confirmation email are now sent from a no-reply@ email address similar to POs to increase deliverability reliability
  • Smaller fixes: UI and UX minor tweaks for easier day to day usage of PLANERGY.

The latest update release of PLANERGY went live over the weekend of the 4th/5th of December. See below the updates made in this release.

What’s New

AP Automation – AI Algorithm Self-Correction Update

Based on learnings from the scanned data across the last 6 months on all accounts using our AP Automation module the AI algorithm for processing invoices in our AP Automation module has been updated. The learning process and self-improvement through our machine-learning model will improve at an even faster rate giving a higher first time match rate.

In simpler terms, the data taken from your invoices will be more accurate and will improve at a faster rate!

Custom Fields – Drop Down List Fields Ordered Alphabetically

Drop Down List custom fields are now ordered alphabetically by Display Name automatically. This makes it easier to add new options to the field without having to manually reorder the list of options.

Advanced Reporting – 3 New Invoicing Graphs

3 additional accounts payable graphs have been added to Advanced Reporting in the Purchase module of PLANERGY. The reports are available to be added to your custom dashboards.

The reports are also available in Advanced Reporting for Accounts Payable as a standalone module when using Non PO Invoicing. The new reports are on Accounts Payable > Advanced Reporting > Favourite tab as default reports.

  1. Invoiced Total Chart – Is an area graph that presents invoiced value in the last 12 months. It is possible to filter graph by company and set the number of visible months.
  1. Top 5 Invoiced Suppliers – Is a donut graph that lists the top 5 supplier for invoiced value in selected date range.
  1. Top 5 Invoiced GL Codes – Is a donut graph that lists the top 5 GL Codes for invoiced value in a selected date range.

Receiving – Recipient on Receiving page

The recipient assigned on the PO is now visible in the Receiving section. This is added thanks to some customer feedback. This can help streamline the receiving step by letting the person receiving the goods or services know who they were intended for.

Advanced Reporting – New ‘Requested Date’ filter on Accounts Payable > PO Invoice Status report

A new filter ‘Requested Date’ is now available on PO Invoice Status report in the Advanced Reporting for Accounts Payable.

Accounts Payable – View PO when processing an invoice document

A new PO view panel is available on the New Invoice From Document and Invoice Document View pages. This allows you to easily view the full PO details to compare against the scanned invoice and the items imported for processing against the invoice.

Initially the page will load with the New/View Invoice panel and Supplier invoice panels visible. There are arrows on the left and right side of the screen.

The panels work like a carousel. When you press the right arrow, the supplier invoice panel is moved to the left panel and the new PO view panel will be visible on the right panel. This allows you to compare the PO and scanned document and the PO.

When you press the left arrow, the invoice panel is moved to the right panel and PO View panel is visible in the left panel, so the user could compare new/view invoice pages with the PO view page.

There is also now an option to collapse header section. This allows for more vertical space to focus on the two panels you are viewing.

Receiving – New attached document notification

When uploading a document in the Receiving section you will have the option to notify another user that a new document has been assigned to the PO.

New Order – Pre-populate new lines with previous lines data for custom fields

PO line item and Invoice line item Custom Fields have a new option “Copy Value From Previous Line”, which is by default disabled. When the setting is enabled, if you add a line item to a PO or Invoice the custom field value from the previous line will be added automatically. This will save time with manual entry if the field is commonly the same for all items on a PO or invoice.

Control Panel – Account Details – Display Customer Code data

Each PLANERGY customer has a unique Customer Code assigned for easier tracking and communication. The Customer Code is now available in PLANERGY in the Control Panel Accounts Details page available to Account Owners. This code can be used by the Account Owner to identify their PLANERGY account when communicating with our support or finance teams.

Accounts Payable – Non PO Invoice – Multi Currency

When processing a Non PO invoice you can now select a different currency to your accounts base currency and the conversion rate will be visible on the invoice.

Receiving – Comments on the receiving page

The option to add comments is now available in the Receiving section. When someone is receiving goods or services they can share a comment with somebody else to keep them up to date making internal communication even easier and ensuring all relevant updates are tracked in the Audit Trail.

Other Improvements

  • Integration Updates: Small improvements made to PunchOut, Xero, and QuickBooks integrations.
  • Smaller fixes: Improvement to login page cookie warning on mobile devices, login PLANERGY message section has improved responsive layout, and improved email sending email sending for POs with larger attachments.

The latest update release of PLANERGY went live over the weekend of the 6th/7th of November. See below the updates made in this release.

What’s New

This release introduces the ability to process Non PO Invoices using the AP Automation module and a new Chrome extension for importing cart information from web stores into PLANERGY purchase requisitions.

Non PO Invoice

Non PO Invoice is a new feature in the Accounts Payable module that allows you to create invoices without matching it to a purchase order. A common scenario where this can be useful is for utility invoices where the charges cannot be accurately confirmed beforehand.

When an invoice is created without a purchase order, it will be labelled as a Non PO Invoice. When the invoice is created for purchase order, it will be labelled as a PO invoice. The Non PO invoice function will be available as part of Accounts Payable section when AP is included in Purchase module and also it will be available as part of AP as a standalone module.

It is a switchable feature that is disabled by default. It can be enabled by contacting [email protected] .

Once enabled, users can be setup with new Invoice Permissions related to Non PO Invoicing to be able to use the new functionality.

After that the user will see a new option in Accounts Payable section to Reconcile New Non PO Invoice:

From this link they can proceed to process a Non PO Invoice.

Users can switch between the standard PO Invoice form and Non PO Invoice form directly from the New Invoice page using the Switch To button.

A new search filter on the Invoice Search page is added to help filter invoices in your search based on the invoice type.  

Non PO Invoices will go through an approval process similar to PO invoices but the users available to authorize these invoices will be defined by the new user permission ‘Non PO Invoice Authorization’.

Non PO Invoicing is also available in the PLANERGY AP Automation module. Invoice documents received by PLANERGY can then be processed as PO or Non PO invoices.

Authorized Non PO Invoices can be posted to Xero, QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, Sage 50, and Sage 200. If you want to process Non PO Invoices and are using a different integration, please contact our support team and they will help with this.

PLANERGY CheckOut Chrome Extension

A new extension for Chrome is now available, PLANERGY CheckOut. The extension will work in Chrome or Microsoft Edge and allows you to create purchase requisitions in PLANERGY directly from shopping carts on thousands of ecommerce websites.

The extension can be installed from the Chrome Web Store here. Full instructions related to the extension are available in this help article – How Do I Setup PLANERGY CheckOut? Once the extension is installed you will have an option to run it when you have a cart filled on any ecommerce site using any of the most popular ecommerce platforms

The item information in the cart will be imported into the line item section of the purchase requisition in PLANERGY ready to be processed and approved as a PO.

Other Improvements

  • Smaller fixes: A number of improvements have been made throughout the software to improve usability and speed.

The latest update release of PLANERGY went live over the weekend of the 9th/10th of October. See below the updates made in this release.

What’s New

This release introduces a new Accounts Payable Early Payment Discount feature, improvements to manually closing out invoicing of a PO, PunchOut integration improvements, along with many other improvements.

Early Payment Discount

With this new feature you can track invoice early payment discounts to understand how much you are saving from these agreements. It is a switchable feature that can be enabled by contacting [email protected].

When Early Payment Discount is enabled, a new section will be available on supplier details page so it can be set for relevant suppliers.

Per supplier you can set:

  • If early payment discount is automatically prepopulated to all invoices or it has to be done manually.
  • The number of days from invoice date when early payment is available
  • The percentage discount applied by the early payment discount
  • If early payment discount is applied to the total including VAT or NOT including VAT

 
When Early Payment Discount is setup for supplier, new fields will be available when processing an invoice on new invoice page:

There’s new search field added to Invoice Search page, EPD Date, allowing you to search by the date EPD is available until.

Close Invoicing Improvement

An update to the close invoicing process has been made to help with a common exception when processing invoices.

The Close Invoicing button is now available for Purchase Orders that have been invoiced to their full value but not all of the items on the PO are invoiced. This scenario is often caused by a free texted item being added on the invoice (for delivery charges or similar unconfirmed costs) increasing the invoiced value while PO items still remain uninvoiced. This results in the order continuing to be listed on Received Uninvoiced report.

Now it is possible to manually close invoicing for these orders and remove them from the Received Uninvoiced report.

Added Control Panel warning popup when the edit will impact your ability to search and report

We added a warning to all Control Panel edits, which could impact searches and reporting across the application. For example, if you edit a department name older orders would need to be searched and reported under the name used before the edit.

We advise against these edits and the warning is to help avoid these reporting problems.

PunchOut – new setting to always require approval for Punchout order edits

PunchOut orders were previously editable without approval in all cases. We have added an option to allow you to select the behaviour that best suits your company. You can now enable a requirement for approval when a PunchOut order is edited.

Other Improvements

  • Invoice Approval: Quick approve option for invoices improved
  • Advanced Reporting: Report type ‘PO Invoice Status’ has improved performance for the PO Approved By filter
  • Smaller fixes: Better tracking of invoice posting date for edited invoices, monthly budget exceeded warning shows for pending changes approval process, improved behaviour for default GL Code assigned to the supplier, and many more.

The latest update release of PLANERGY went live over the weekend of the 4th/5th of September. See below the updates made in this release.

What’s New

This release introduces improvement to AP Automation, Advanced Reports, QuickBooks Desktop integration, new Integrations section available to Account Owner user and, along with many other improvements.

AP Automation Improvements

  • Notification when invoice line item price and quantity do not match PO line item price and quantity

When an invoice document is scanned using AP Automation and if the line item quantity or price is different to what appears on the matched PO, you will see the field highlighted and an exclamation sign next to it.

  • Copy Text directly form invoice documents (in PDF or image file formats) into invoice fields

If the invoice document is in one of the following formats: .pdf, .jpg, .jpeg, .gif, .bmp, .png, .tif or .tiff it is now possible to copy text from the document and paste it into invoice field in PLANERGY.

Click on Copy Text button to switch the view from Invoice Preview into Canvas.

Draw a rectangle around the text to copy.

Click on a field on new invoice form to paste the selected text.

PunchOut Changes (Important If You Are Already Using PunchOut integrations!)

  • New Punch Out Order has been renamed to New Online Catalog Order
  • Amazon Punchout now requires Ship To address

New section has been added to user edit and profile pages where the Ship To address can be entered that will be used when ordering from Amazon Punchout.

The Ship To Address is now required to raise Amazon Punchout orders in the system. Without it, users won’t be able to raise any Amazon Punchout orders.

New INTEGRATIONS section (Account Owner user only)

We have added new section in Control Panel that lets the Account Owner user to enable various integrations available in PLANERGY without the need to contact support. These include Slack, Microsoft Teams, Amazon Business, Single Sign On providers, accounting softwares, and ERPs.

Your Account Owner can now enable these themselves but if you need any help configuring your integrations please contact the support team.

Advanced Reporting – PO Invoice Status report improvements

We have added new filters to PO Invoice Status report:

1. Invoicing Status

2. PO Status

3. PO Value Range

4. PO Approved By

QuickBooks Desktop improvements

  • Manually edited total tax export is now supported – Previously It was not possible to export manually edited tax on the invoice to QuickBooks Desktop.
  • It is now possible to import Class as (Department or Cost Code) and Customer Job as (Department or Cost Code)

Other Improvements

  • AP Automation: Recognized Total is now also available on Edit/View invoice pages
  • Smaller fixes:
  • AP Automation – Ability to reselect the PO an invoice is matched against if the PO that was scanned is cannot be processed.
  • Integrations (Twinfield, Xero, QuickBooks) – Batch Post Invoice Audit Trail improved.
  • Custom Fields – Number of Rows Setting updated.
  • Notifications – Microsoft Teams messaging for Department Budget Requests improved.
  • Receiving – uploading documents on the receiving page from mobile devices is improved.

The latest update release of PLANERGY went live over the weekend of the 12th/13th of June. See below the updates made in this release.

What’s New

Customisation and Integration are the order of the day with our latest update release. New integrations for Slack and Microsoft Teams introduce even more options for how you receive notifications from PLANERGY. The options available for PunchOut supplier catalog integrations have also been expanded. Custom reporting dashboards and customisation of the standard reports are also now available to let you tweak the software even more to suit your individual needs.

More details on all of these below, and as always we love to hear your feedback on the updates so let us know what you think!

Microsoft Teams and Slack Integrations

We have added new integrations for Microsoft Teams to allow you to receive notifications in these applications. Each user can decide which channel their notifications should go to and which specific notifications should be sent there.

You will then receive the notifications you have selected in that channel:

Our help content related to these integrations is not yet added to the Help site but if you need any help getting up and running please contact the Support team.

AP Automation Improvements

Continued improvements for our AP Automation module improve the field mapping and data extraction for PDFs. Invoice Number, Due Date, Invoice Total, and Line Matching are greatly improved.

The scanned invoice total will also now be available just below the total based on the PO information for easier comparison.

PunchOut Integration Improvements

As more of you have started using PLANERGY with PunchOut catalogs we have been receiving feedback and improving how these work. A few improvements are included in this release.

Unit of Measure

When a PunchOut catalog has a unit of measure this can now be mapped to the Unit of Measure field in PLANERGY. An additional field UNUOM assigned to the Unit of Measure will be available for this purpose when your account is using PunchOut catalogs.

Catalog Only PunchOut

The standard process with PunchOut integrations is that orders are created in the suppliers webshop, approved in PLANERGY, and then placed through the webshop. In some cases, you may not want to place an order through your suppliers webshop and just use PunchOut to get up to date pricing into PLANERGY. In this case items are selected using PunchOut but the final order will be placed using a standard PO sent from PLANERGY.

Additional Customization Options

This release introduces a couple of key improvements to allow better customization to suit your own needs.

Advanced Reporting – Custom Dashboard

If you are a user with access to the Advanced Reporting section of PLANERGY you will now be able to customize the dashboard to choose which reports are shown. You can resize and reposition the reports to suit your needs. You can also have multiple versions of the same report or graph with different filtering. This can be very useful if you want to keep track of multiple departments, for example.

There will be an additional list of available reports that can be included but if there is a report you would like to see included here let us know.

Custom Report Tables

Every report in PLANERGY can now be customized at the user level. You can decide which columns you want visible on each report and set the number of results shown per page. The available columns are initially restricted to the default list previously visible on the report, but if you would like to see a new column made available on any of the reports please do let us know.

The options to edit are available from a new settings button at the top left of the results table.

Other Improvements

  • Notifications Improvements: The introduction of Microsoft Teams and Slack integrations are coupled with some improvements to the loading of the notifications and improvements to the settings page for notifications to make it easier to customise your own settings.
  • Oracle Peoplesoft Integration Improvements: The options for assigning data to the currency field have been improved.  
  • Smaller fixes: Received Uninvoiced rounding improved, supplier approval messaging improved, Safari browser layout improvements, and many other improvements.

The latest update release of PLANERGY went live over the weekend of the 5th/6th of March. See below the updates made in this release.

What’s New

This release introduces further improvements to our AP Automation module with even better AI. If you are using the feature to track if a supplier views and/or accepts a PO you have the flexibility to turn it on or off at the supplier level. There is a new optional setting to remove approval requirements for edits to a PO. Our login page has also received a fresh lick of paint, and you may see a hint of some other big news to come on the left side of the screen on the login page, our rebrand to PLANERGY. More on that later. For now, let’s stick with the updates in the release.

AP Automation AI Improvements

When processing invoices using our AP Automation module you will see some improvements to the AI and workflow. Invoice number, invoice date, and the scanned total from the invoice will now be populated on the left of the screen along with the relevant information mapped from the PO. Processing invoices has never been easier!

Remove Approval Requirements When Editing a PO

Over the years we have had many requests to remove the requirement for edits to POs to be approved. In most cases we don’t recommend using this option, because an edit can change the value of the originally approved PO the edit should normally go back through the approval process. But if it suits your requirements to be able to edit POs more quickly without going back through multi-step approval workflows. Just make sure you are careful to only give the right users permission to make edits when using this option as they will be able to edit without further approval.

To enable this option please contact our support team and they can help update your account settings.

When using this feature the person with permissions to edit will be immediately able to save the changes using the ‘Complete Changes’ button on the ‘Pending Changes’ page.

Per Supplier Settings For PO View and Acceptance Tracking

When using tracking of when the supplier views a PO or the workflow that tracks the supplier’s acceptance of a PO with confirmed delivery date this was previously set at the account level and applied to all suppliers. It is now possible to customize this on a per supplier basis.

By default the setting will still be applied to all suppliers but on the Edit Supplier page you will now have an option to disable this for individual suppliers where it may not be relevant to the goods or services they will provide.  

New Login Page Design

The login page has been redesigned to be a bit more pleasing on  the eye and improve user experience when accessing the software.

Other Improvements

  • Print and Download Purchase Requisitions: Options to print and download a PDF version of requisitions are now added to the View Requisition page. Previously that was only possible for POs.
  • Notifications mobile UX improvements for mobile devices: You can now swipe left to delete a notification or swipe right to mark a notification as read when viewing notifications on a mobile device
  • Updated currency list: Zimbabwe dollar (ZWL) has been added to the list of available currencies in the software
  • Smaller fixes: Custom exports can now include the ‘Discounted Price’ as a column, Roles can now include the licence type when using the Requesting module, and many other little improvements.