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

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

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 14^th/15^th 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 14^th/15^th 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.

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 23^rd/24^th 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.