Australian Contractors Integrate their Office, Team and Field Operations with Consistent Technology Innovation

Packed with new enhancements, Vista 6.16 improves access to critical information and drives better performance

When you’re the leading construction software provider, it’s imperative to provide your clients with the best tools and resources they need to succeed. That’s why Viewpoint consistently reinvests more of its revenue back into research and development than any other company in our sector. We’re committed to helping our clients grow and profit by embracing and deploying the latest construction software and technologies.

Today’s solutions can significantly increase productivity by streamlining processes and automating workflows. They allow contractors to work smarter rather than harder. They integrate once-siloed functions and data throughout the construction organization and create true, real-time collaboration between the office, team and field.

In a recent video interview on the product enhancements with Viewpoint’s Vista’s 6.16 release, Viewpoint Chief Products Officer Matt Harris spoke of a commitment to advancing technologies, focused around connecting the office, team and field.

“We’ve created and integrated whole of systems—a series of products that work the way our users want to work, either in a browser application, mobile applications or in the client itself,” Harris said. “One of the best benefits of it all is that by creating an integrated environment across the office, team and field, we’re eliminating having individual systems with individual data silos.”

The latest Vista ERP software release is a shining example of this continued commitment to innovation and construction collaboration. Here’s a look at just some of the new features in Vista, development with other Viewpoint products and how they’re benefitting Viewpoint clients:

Construction Accounting Software Enhancements

For the back-office construction professionals, Vista’s construction accounting functionality now includes a dedicated accounting work center with new features that include a new range of months filter and additional standard queries for reporting.

“The work center is something that we’re really excited about…It’s a quick and easy entry point into all of the different forms or tables, your accounts payable, accounts receivable, general ledger, really anything that you may be using from an accounting perspective,” Harris said. “It’s something our customers have really adopted strongly.”

Other construction accounting enhancements include: accounts payable line level warnings to alert you if there are open purchase orders or subcontracts associated with an invoice; the ability to reassign accounts payable payment work files to a new owner to allow workflows to advance; and new security enhancements, allowing you to specify secure locations for electronic funds transfers and direct deposits.

The Right Tools for the Field

Delivering access to project information and expanding the capabilities of those working on the jobsites has been another area of innovation for Viewpoint.

“We have a great new integration between Viewpoint Field View, which is our mobile jobsite process management application, and Vista,” Harris said. “Now, for those people using Vista user-defined tables, that table can now be published to a mobile form in Field View, where a field-side operations person can take data collections from that form and then write that information back into Vista.”

On the service side, over the past few product releases, we’ve been very focused on improving our service management module within Vista. “Our customers have been telling us they’re getting a lot more out of it,” Harris said. “So, we’re doing even more in (Vista’s) 6.16 release.”

Some of the key enhancements include a quick reference pane in Vista’s Dispatch solution, featuring a new configurable quick reference card with critical information in context to technicians’ specific work orders, service contracts, jobsites and more. This enhances dispatchers’ efficiency and reduces potential for errors. Dispatchers can also drill down into specific technicians on the Dispatch Board to easily see information about their workloads, schedule and more.

New quotes can now also be created from existing work orders, making it easier to quote new work uncovered while out on a job. Other enhancements include derived flat price quoting allowing you to easily convert time and material quotes to flat price quotes when work is invoiced, and the ability to generate initial work orders and billings directly from service agreements.

Watch the full interview with Matt Harris here. Or, to learn more about all of Viewpoint’s products, and how they can help your company achieve stronger collaboration, increased productivity and better profit margins, simply connect with us.