Product Updates

Over the past several months, the team has been adding reports and datasets to the custom Reporting module in Fulcrum.  We’ll continue to perform touch-ups, but we wanted to provide a summary of the output from this project to have it all in one place for you all.  In addition to the prebuilt reports, datasets are now available for all of the following:

• Detailed Job Cost Breakdowns
• In Process Tracking
• Inventory Detail
• Invoice Detail
• Job Activity by Operator
• Job Data
• NCRs and CAPAs
• NCR and CAPA Impacts
• Purchase Order Details
• Purchased Goods Issue Reasons
• Quote Detail
• Sales Order Detail
• Scheduled Job Activity
• Scrap Detail
• Shipping Detail
• TimeClock

There are almost too many to list, but there were a bunch of nice updates to help make things clearer throughout the app.  To name a few:

• Job Page
  • Better indication of editable materials
  • Clearer option to return picked material (as opposed to doing a negative pick)
  • Tooltip for Purchase Order button
  • Better indicators for build to stock vs build to order
• Jobs Grid
  • Multi-select label printing
• Purchase Orders
  • Add ‘required’ indicator on payment terms and accounting codes if you have an accounting integration
• Job Tracking
  • Moved department dropdown to the main page so it’s easier to find
• Customer Grid / Page
  • Add custom contacts to the grid
  • Search by customer contact

When the last operation of a job or assembly is closed, Fulcrum now auto-closes any open upstream steps—keeping data accurate and preventing double-counting.

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It’s not uncommon to nest parts on a sheet and have it not fill up the entire sheet of material.  For cases like this, you may want to add other parts to make sure you’re utilizing the entire sheet and avoiding drop.  If your nesting program returns additional parts to help maximize your material utilization, you can now easily add those to your nest in Fulcrum by creating a job directly from nesting.

QuickBooks Online is our most common integration, so we decided to add a few quality of life improvements.

• The invoicing grid will now give visibility into whether or not a record has synced (PO grid to follow!)
• The integration settings will now be able to pull customers, vendors, taxes, and accounting codes from QBO (this is mainly to expedite launch for new Fulcrum customers).
• Increased specificity in error messages - both in terms of noting the exact line item causing the issue, and steps to resolve it.
• Settings UI redesign to make it easier on the eyes.

Thanks to some recent performance work, it became much cleaner and easier to filter the sales order grid by customer.

Now that the report builder has a full list of datasets, we’re able to use that data to provide dashboards.  The Executive Dashboard lives in Reporting > Report Builder and is intended to be a high level look into the business, which includes:

• Throughput monthly
• Total Inventory Cost
• Average Monthly Margin (%)
• Sales Forecast
• On Time Delivery

Due to the complexity of updating inventory values, shipped goods costing, and job costing, the price of a line item had been fixed after receipt.  However, it’s not uncommon to get final pricing after receiving the item.  Fulcrum has been incrementally expanding the possibilities here, and is now doing a full release of this feature:

We’ve enhanced the ability to adjust billed amounts after a purchase order has been fully received. Previously, this functionality was limited to standard purchase orders that met specific criteria (such as no inventory usage or transfers).

With this week’s soft release, adjustments to billed amounts are now supported for all purchase order line items that have been received in full, including both standard and outside processing purchase orders. These updates will automatically adjust job costs and inventory values overnight.

If you’d like early access to this feature enhancement as part of the soft release, please reach out — we’d be happy to include you!

We don’t have a ton of performance updates this week, but that’s because we’ve been heads down on getting off of our old infrastructure and completely onto SQL. This means we can finally optimize the application for this new data structure, which is exciting.  A nice first step here is rewriting the sales order grid.

In an effort to improve data consistency, we've refactored the sales order grid so that all data, including shipping and invoicing statuses, are calculated on demand from primary data sources.  Previously, we maintained a "cache" for faster lookups, and despite the effort we would expend to try and keep it updated, it would still occasionally go out of sync with the source records.  This is no longer necessary in SQL-world, so in addition to the consistency improvement, we will also be able to drop all of the background updates that were responsible for trying to keep this “cache” up to date – meaning more horsepower for running the app.

More to come!

To minimize human error when your customers receive your products, Fulcrum has added barcodes on packlists.  To enable it, head to Business Setup > PDFs & Email > Show Barcode setting > set to true. Then, enable it for any of your customers that want barcodes.  The customer-specific setting helps avoid a sudden change in communication and formatting with your customers.

With that on, the following fields will get converted into a 1D barcode:

• Customer PO Number (if filled in)
• Sales Order Number
• Item Name
• Quantity Shipped

Here’s a video overview of the setup and how it looks on the PDF.

Some accountants need to know their WIP at the end of the month for reporting purposes. However, if they missed downloading the WIP report on time, there was no way to retrieve that data retroactively. The new month-end WIP snapshots solve this problem - providing consistent, reliable historical data and freeing accountants from time-restricted tasks.  This report is available in Accounting > Reporting > Work In Progress.

This release includes two notable updates to the Custom Report Builder module:

• Job Activity by Operator - this report provides the quantity completed and daily labor time of each operator, broken down by job, item, and operation. This allows you to see who worked on what for how long, and how many parts an operator completed (both for WIP and finished goods).
• Custom Field Data - over the next couple of days, the majority of datasets will get a custom field column. The formatting will be text data of all the fields, so using a ‘contains’ filter is your best bet.

Raw material was previously shown by total pounds in Purchase Planning, which made it hard to decide what sizes and quantities to buy. Now, you can see nesting details and how many parts each job will produce—giving purchasers clearer info to choose the right sizes.

Fulcrum has been beta testing a pricing option using Shop Rate that is being fully released today.  You’ll see a new “Shop Rate” option in pricing areas of Fulcrum, such as quote line items, sales order line items, and items’ sales tab.  When that option is selected, the price will be calculated as:

( Material Cost * ( 1 + Material Markup ) ) + ( Estimated Times + Operation Shop Rates )

To ensure your operations have the necessary info for the calculations, be sure to fill in values in Business Setup > System Data > Operations > Hourly Shop Rates:

Having good data is so important, especially when it comes to costs and inventory.  While Fulcrum does display warnings for unpicked material, operators are busy humans and sometimes press through the warning without picking.  This can create situations with understated costs or showing inventory as available that was actually used on a job.

To help reduce missed picks, Fulcrum has added a new setting in Business Setup > System Data > Job Settings called “Auto-pick material on job completion”.

When this setting is on, it will auto-pick planned materials when a job is completed from the job tracker or the job's page.  A few points // FAQs:

• If there isn't enough material in inventory, it won't complete the pick
• If there is already a pick against the material, it will skip it under the assumption that it was intentionally under-picked.

Important Note: If your operators can get in the habit of picking, that will always be the best case scenario.  Explicit picking is more accurate and explicit than any automation.  For that reason and as noted above, there are guardrails on this feature and we stuck to safe assumptions.  That being said, if picking is being missed enough in your shop to cause a data problem beyond the occasional touch up, then check this out!