Find out about the new and improved features in the latest Synergy release.
NEW
Planning board - previously known as Forecasting
In this update of Synergy, the improved forecasting feature now has more tools to improve insight into your budgets, resources and revenue – hence changing its name to ‘planning board’. The filters have been updated to include the project manager and project number as new search parameters. As a bonus, these changes bring a marked improvement in system performance.
Project planning - simply referred to as ‘planning board’ in Synergy Business
The project planning feature is all about streamlining your work to help you be more effective. Our developers thought carefully about how you work and the redesign binds a project to its stages. You will also appreciate the significant enhancements we have made that link the project fee, budget and resourcing.
The fee, budget and resourcing are all linked in planning mode — now, when you change any one of these, the other two will change automatically. Once you switch to delivery mode, Synergy unlinks them, so you can fine-tune manually, as the situation dictates.
When a resource is overallocated by more than 105%, the donut graph shows red.
Team builder (only available in Synergy Enterprise) is a new menu to manage the teams working on your company’s project.
In the new elastic project feature (only available in Synergy Enterprise), the duration of a project and its associated stages can be extended or reduced depending on your clients’ requirements.
Use project planning when you need your software to be responsive and flexible to changing deadlines and budgets.
Revenue forecasting - only available in Synergy Enterprise
This update builds on what the original product set out to do — improve your efficiency to help your business run smoother. In this case we’re talking about using your existing data to predict your cash flow in upcoming months.
A newly developed page footer shows your forecast totals per month and also how your business is stacking up against these target costs.
Foresight into how much you are bringing in at any given time is imperative to running your business effectively.
Resource planning (only available in Synergy Enterprise)
Your resources are vital assets in delivering your projects. This update dials it up a notch giving you a detailed overview of the projects your staff are allocated to.
In the newly developed row footer, you can see the total number of hours a specific resource is allocated to projects per week, and up to one year into the future. Thinking bigger? The page footer shows the total number of hours your workforce are allocated to projects, 12 months from the current date.
Greater insight into the number of hours a staff member is putting into a project, all the way down to the stage level.
Visualize your employees’ capacity easily with the newly designed rows that show when an employee is under or over-allocated, or optimally utilised.
Allocating your resources’ time correctly is vital to their productivity and your business profitability.
UPDATED
Work breakdown
It’s all systems go when a project starts, therefore the work breakdown has changed to be in a read-only state when a project is set to delivery mode. This will prevent any accidental changes being made to your project when it is in full swing.
Check out the simplified filters in the work breakdown available in all views. Easily filter to show the stages that are in the active or proposal status.
Budget
Apply negative values to a lump sum – useful if you need to discount.
A new budget line – Contingency has been developed. This is used to ensure the budget matches the fee and ensures that you cannot set a negative overall budget.
Edit the budget screen when in planning mode and see the changes apply to your fee and resources. This feature is not applied when you switch to delivery mode.
When in delivery mode, the budget is also set to read-only, just to make sure you don’t accidentally change it, but can do so if you need to.
Now you can update your resources to be calculated from the budget – even in delivery mode.
When a rate is updated, you will see these changes in the budget in planning mode. The budget is not updated with the new rates when in delivery mode.
Xero, MYOB and QBO add-ons
Keep track of your clients’ payments more closely. When payments are imported into Xero, MYOB or QBO, the export date now looks at the payment date and not the invoice date.