Product release notes: 22.[xx]

In this article you will find a comprehensive list of all 2022 product releases for your convenience! 

• 22.01 Product Release Notes
• 22.03 Product Release Notes
• 22.06 Product Release Notes
• 22.09B Product Release Notes

22.01 Product Release Notes

New and Improved Job Renewals

Get tidier, faster job renewals in LMN Time! Job renewals can save weeks of work for contractors with lots of jobs.

Renewing jobs from the Job List view just became easier with our updated process:

• Replace values in your existing job names with new text. Need to change 2022 to say 2023 without appending a new year? No problem!
• If renewing jobs for the first time, you still have the option to add a suffix to your job names.
• Automatically update your invoice groups! Just like you previously could with job groups, now you can let LMN do the work of removing last year’s jobs from their invoice groups, and replacing them with the upcoming year’s jobs that you’re using Renew Jobs to create. No more having to do this manually means your office staff will be happier and more efficient.

Increase Payroll Report Date Ranges

When generating a Payroll Summary - Daily Hours, Payroll Report - Excel (Detail), or Payroll Report - Excel (Simple) report, you’ll now be able to set the range at 5 weeks, 8 weeks, or 13 weeks — which should come in handy for those situations where just four weeks of data isn’t quite enough.

Improvements to the LMN Time Mobile App

We’ve updated the Time Mobile app to version 2.4.0 with some small enhancements to improve your overall user experience.

What’s New:

• LMN Time Mobile will prompt you to log in less frequently
• For those who were affected, you now only need to log in once
• iPad 6th gen users can now view PDF files

Updates & Fixes:

• Photos overall should display more consistently regardless of how they were added
• Default lunch break time set in LMN will now be properly reflected in LMN Time

22.03 Product Release Notes

Hassle-free access to Homeowner Financing

With LMN, it’s easy to accept a homeowner’s payment via credit card or cheque. However, more and more homeowners are finding themselves in need of financing to pay for a major home contracting project. To make life easier for those homeowners — and to help ensure that our contractors aren’t missing out on sales — we’re partnering up with Acorn to provide residential customers with easier access to financing options.

As of this update, when preparing a Customer Proposal for a residential customer located in the United States, estimators can now include an optional Acorn line item with all of the following:

• An optional quoted rate that the customer may enjoy if they choose to finance the project through Acorn (e.g. “From $151 per month on Acorn”)
• A “Get Started” link, which will take the customer over to their site to learn more.
• A QR code, in case the customer is looking at a printed copy of the proposal.

Acorn Benefits for LMN Contractors

• Are you struggling to sell your residential customers on some bigger jobs because of the price tag? By giving them easy access to financing, you’re removing a major reason for them to walk away — which, in turn, can have a positive impact on both your closing rate and your average deal size.
• Because a homeowner can access rates within minutes via Acorn, they can get the required funds more quickly than if they had to do their own search for lenders — which may help speed up your sales pipeline.

Acorn Benefits for Homeowners

• Need financing to pay for your upcoming landscaping work? You won’t need to go searching for a lender — use the link or QR code on your proposal and, within minutes, you’ll have multiple lenders quoting you rates.
• Borrow with peace of mind knowing that the partner you’re using for financing, is one that is trusted by your landscaping company.

Get a bird’s-eye view of estimated materials with the Estimate Material Forecast report

Just got out of your busy estimating season and want to know how much mulch you’ve put on proposals so that you can place a bulk order from your wholesaler? Our brand-new Material Forecast Report is designed to help with exactly this situation:

• Start by picking a Division (optional) and setting a date range.
• Punch in a keyword for the material you want data on (e.g. “gravel”)
• You’ll be able to generate an Excel spreadsheet with a row for each material that you estimated during the selected date range. Within the columns, you’ll find tons of directly helpful information such as:
• Which estimate the material appears on & key details about that estimate
• Contact details for the customer associated with that estimate
• Quantity and units
• Number of visits
• Unit cost and price
• Total cost and price
• Profit percentage

Just sort and filter by columns so you can get the relevant data you need, to be more efficient with your materials!

22.06 Product Release Notes

Get signoff on Customer Proposals — without needing to signup on the Customer Portal

Life gets busy and let’s face it, sometimes having another password to manage is the last thing your customer needs. To help make life a bit easier for those customers, we’re adding the ability for them to review and interact with a Customer Proposal sent from LMN — without needing to create a Customer Portal account first.

How does it work?

• In Settings, you will have the ability to specify whether your LMN account will:
  • Require Portal authentication to access all Customer Proposals sent via LMN (this is the current setting for all proposals); OR,
  • Allow Proposals via LMN to be sent without Portal authentication. With this setting enabled, you’ll be able to specify for each Proposal whether or not your customers will require a Portal account to view it.
• Customers who receive a Proposal that does not require Portal authentication will be able to access it by clicking a “Review Your Proposal” button found in the email. Via that button, they’ll be able to perform the critical actions you need for your pipeline such as reviewing, sending back with comments, or providing final signoff.
  • What they won’t be able to do is monitor progress on the Job — this can still only be done with a Portal account (since this data comes from LMN Time, not from the Proposal). Don’t worry — after a proposal has been approved, we’ll show a message encouraging your customer to sign up for the Portal so that they can keep track of these details as the project moves ahead.
• Worried about a customer using the wrong link and being taken to an outdated version of your Proposal? Don’t be — when a new Proposal version is created, all of the previously emailed links will auto-forward to a link pointing at the newest version.

New and Improved Estimate List!

When your business is growing fast, your pile of estimates can get cluttered in a hurry — which doesn’t help when you need to bring up a specific list of estimates for follow-up or analysis. As part of this update, we’re pleased to roll out a fully redesigned Estimate List that will make it easier than ever for you to generate the tailored list you need:

• Standard and Service Estimates on One List. Ever been asked to pull up all the different estimates for a certain customer — then had to click between two different lists to do it? Say goodbye to that extra work with Standard and Service Estimates on one list! (Note: you can still use a filter to drill down to one type or the other.)
• Critical information up front. The Estimate List now includes several brand-new new columns, so that you can view and sort by critical data points like proposal status. Need to view a list of estimates that starts with the ones that were most recently updated? Now you can! Here’s the full list of new fields that we’ve added:
  • Type (Standard or Service)
  • Date last updated
  • Proposal Status (mouse over icon to read the full status name)
  • End Date
  • Estimate Price (total) 

• A new panel just for estimate filters. To make filters easier to navigate, we’ve moved these into a new sidebar where you can not only apply new filters, but visually keep track of the ones you’ve already applied. Within, you’ll also find some brand-new filters that we’ve added as part of this update:
  • Line Item — type in the keyword for a material or piece of equipment, and the Estimate List will filter to show only estimates that include that text within at least one line item.
  • CRM Tag - filter to only show estimates for customers who have certain tag(s) applied to them within CRM.
  • Proposal Status — Refine the view by one or more proposal statuses so you can view — for example — a refined list of all proposals that are Awaiting Approval.
  • Date Ranges — set a date range filter by Estimate Date, Contract End Date, Estimate Last Update, or Proposal Last Update.

• New bulk actions to make life easier. Now from the Estimate List you can perform the following actions in bulk:
  • Send a proposal reminder. (Note: you can only do this for estimates that have been sent out as Customer Proposals via Customer Portal).
  • Include estimates in statistics. (Note: previously you could only exclude in bulk.)
• Copy an estimate from the Estimate List. Need to copy in a hurry? Now you can do it without even having to open an estimate up, by clicking the icon found in the new “Copy” column.
• Choose a budget for estimates created via copying. When you copy an estimate using the Estimate List’s copy icon, you’ll be able to designate a new budget (or stick with the old one!) for the duplicated estimate you’re creating:
• Save a default view. If you’re a more specialized member of the team — for example, you only deal with clients whose work involves swimming pools — you can apply the filters you like, then click the new “Save as Default View” button. The next time you open up the Estimate List, your go-to filters will already be applied.
• Export Excel for Current View Only. Want to export an Excel-friendly Estimate List table that only includes your filtered down list? Now you can, by choosing “Current View” from the dropdown after clicking the “Excel” button.
• New Data Fields in the Estimate Excel Export. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from our contractors about data points that would be helpful to have within the Estimate List export. After this update, the exported sheet will now include fields for:
  • Estimate Type (super helpful now that your list may include both Service and Standard estimates)
  • Sales Pipeline Status
  • CRM Tags
  • Breakeven

Invoice Settings:

• It is now possible to change your invoice numbers to a number lower than the current one! As long as the new invoice number has not been used previously (a confirmation dialog box will appear to alert you).

22.09B Product Release Notes

Introducing Smart Reschedule!

Move a one-time job's visit; the rest of that crew's schedule will shift accordingly!

In the year 2022, many contractors have design-build and hardscape crews that are busier than they’ve ever been — with some of them booked so far into advance, they even have 2023 visits on their LMN schedule.

It’s great to be busy, but we know that situation can cause a headache if you need to push a one-time job’s visits back by a day or two (due to heavy rain, for example). The staff member who tackles your LMN scheduling may have to spend time dragging dozens of visits out by the same time span, just to fix the conflict that was caused when you dragged a crew’s full-day Monday visit to Tuesday.

Now, you can reschedule one-time jobs way more efficiently with our new Smart Reschedule tool:

• The Smart Reschedule feature can be enabled or disabled, both at the level of a visit, and within the calendar itself.
• Drag and drop a crew’s next visit ahead by a day or two. When you click “Yes” to confirm, Smart Reschedule (if enabled) will work its magic, moving all of that crew’s future work ahead by the same number of days (working around weekends and holidays). You’ll notice that not only have the remaining visits for this job been rescheduled — but so have all the rest of that crew’s scheduled visits, even for other jobs.
• Smart Reschedule can also be applied if you’re adding new one-time work via Calendar or Jobs.                       
  • Rescheduling a job and assigning it to a different crew? You can toggle on Smart Reschedule for that, too — LMN will resolve any conflicts that are created with the new crew’s other jobs.
• Not thrilled with the new schedule that Smart Reschedule generated? You’ll be able to reverse a Smart Reschedule shift, by clicking the “Undo” button found in the top right corner of your calendar screen. (Watch out though — the Undo button will stop working if you make any other additional changes.)

Roadmap & Requests Page: See What’s Next for LMN, Vote, and Submit your Ideas

Wondering what the LMN development team is working on next? Got a great idea but not sure whether it’s on our radar already? We’re giving our contractors the inside story with our brand-new Roadmap & Requests page, available via the Help menu in LMN’s web application.

See What’s Coming Next

For your reference needs, the Roadmap & Requests features overview is split up into three boards:

• Planned gives you a look at what’s currently being worked on here at LMN, with plans to launch to our contractors within the next few months.
• Under Consideration contains features that we haven’t started to build yet, but want to get your thoughts and feedback.
• Released provides a recap of features and tools we’ve recently launched. 

Vote for Your Favorites

See something on the Planned or Under Consideration board that would really help your business? Let us know by choosing Nice to Have, Important, or Critical. You can also leave a comment explaining your answer — this will really help us with delivering a feature that meets your specific needs.

Submit an Idea

Got a game changing LMN idea that you don’t see on the Planned or Under Consideration boards? Put it on our radar by clicking the “Submit Idea” button and telling us more about what you’re trying to get done. This is the best way to get your suggestions straight to our development team — no need to wait on hold for a support rep!

New and Improved Outbound Customer Facing Emails

Professional and modern emails reflect strongly on your business and can sometimes mean the difference between work won or work lost. We have redesigned all customer-facing emails giving them a fresh, professional look.

This is the next step on our way to you customizing these emails yourself, which we’re planning to have done in Q1 of 2023.

Updates to all customer-facing emails, including:

• From Estimating:
  • Proposal published
  • Proposal reminders
  • Comments and requests
• From Estimating & Time:
  • Invoice notifications
  • Invoice reminders
• From Customer Portal:
  • Payment change confirmation
  • Payment receipt confirmation
  • Customer invites
  • Successful registration
  • Password reset confirmation