What's New in Powered Now?

We have exciting news that will revolutionise the way you work and boost your trade business to new heights! Introducing our latest software release packed with exciting new features to help you achieve remarkable results with ease!

Powered Now's New Release includes a range of powerful scheduling features designed to make managing your team's workload easier than ever before.

It also has several major features available to all users and a whole load of new features only available in a new tier, Premium. Some customers will automatically receive the Premium version at no further cost because of the historical deal they were already on.

These new developments move us much closer to being a one-stop for running smaller trade companies. 

Our latest release is packed with exciting new benefits to give you More Credibility, More Control, with More Customisation – including a super powerful diary with more capability to manage tasks and adapt the way YOU work.

Watch our full demo here.

Here are some of the things that we have added across the range.

HR System

There’s a new HR system for recording employee details, including name and address, records of their right to work, qualifications and their annual or quarterly reviews - in fact, any documents that need to be stored in their records.

Employee holidays, sickness and other absences can be tracked and this is all integrated into the diary system.

Simple Vehicle Management

You can keep track of what you need to do for your vehicle fleet using Powered Now notifications. You could do this before but a lot of people weren’t aware of it, so we are highlighting this capability.

Reminders can be set to track when MOT and service are due, when the lease expires and more. Find out more about Powered Now Simple Vehicle Management.

New Diary Features

The Powered Now diary has had a huge overhaul and is now much more powerful and flexible to be able to be configured to work the way that you work.

There’s more capability to manage tasks with a task list integrated with the diary to give a single source of work for every employee.

The new powerful staff scheduling feature and the ability for customers to book appointments online are only in the Premier version. 

The new diary and notification features fall into several sections:

• The settings are tidied up and expanded and are in their own areas called “Diary & Schedule” and “Communications”.
• “Diary and Schedule” pulls together all the diary settings and adds some new ones
• “Communications” pulls together all of the notifications that can be done to both customers and staff and these are now clearly distinguished.

Some of the new features that can be enabled through the new Diary and Schedule Settings are:

• There is a choice when an appointment is created by a  user, whether the appointment is always automatically  allocated to that user or not
• A link to Waze of the default navigation app on your smartphone. It means that when looking at the appointment, a single click opens the navigation app and takes you to the appointment. No more trying to copy and paste addresses
• The definition of “Working hours” has been extended and a lunch break and what would constitute an evening session can have their hours defined
• The way appointments are displayed in the diary, other than the monthly view, can be set with a variety of pre-canned choices. So for instance, if the postcode is most important followed by the appointment description, that format can be chosen. There have been a variety of requests for changes such as displaying the customer name in the appointment description which are met using this feature
• Another choice is how the colour of an appointment is displayed in the diary - as a dot, as the full background, or not at all

A brand new feature that can be set up is “Appointment types” or templates. These are fully optional but if you often do certain types of appointments, these can be specified. You can choose the short description, default appointment length, initial colour of the appointment and price. In the premium subscription, there are more options controlling if and when the appointment type can be booked online.

Appointment lengths can be for a certain number of minutes, half a day or a full day.

There has been a major overhaul of the entire appearance of the diary and what can be done from appointments making it clearer and easier to use. When you view an appointment you should notice the following changes:

• Where the customer’s name and address is different from the site, both are displayed
• From the view of the appointment, like in v8, you can still:
• Edit the appointment
• View the timeline of the appointment
• Check-in to the appointment and start a time log
• Change the appointment status
• Add a note, time-log, photos or a form/certificate
  
  
• From the view of the appointment, you can now also:
• Open in the map app to navigate straight to the appointment
• Send an “On my way” message to the customer
• Send any other message
• Add a signature
• Open a project
• Download the ical for the appointment

The diary is more usable with an improved view in the agenda view and days clickable to navigate to from the weekly to the daily view. An “All day” option has been added with morning and evening options too.

Simple appointments can be created with no connection to a contact. These can be used for leads where the decision to create a customer record has not yet been made, or for simple ToDo’s that can be allocated to one or more employees.

You can now filter all appointments on their status/colour, along with the existing ability to filter by user.

“The unplanned for the day” option has been expanded so that the appointment can be requested for any time in the day, the morning, the afternoon or the evening.

Map Function

With one click, employees can open their favourite map application and navigate straight to their next appointment.

With one click a chosen navigation app can be opened on a smartphone to enable navigation straight to the next appointment.

Ease of use will mean this is done more frequently. It means less wasted time and fuel by avoiding getting lost and traffic snarl-ups together with safer driving due to not being tempted to enter postcodes into the navigation app on the go.

Notifications

Notifications to customers and employees have received a big overhaul, making them clearer, more comprehensive and fully configurable.

• You have complete control over what and when notifications are sent and by which medium.
• The exact messages sent can be specified.
• Exactly who receives the messages is controlled.
• A message that someone is on the way is sent with a single click.

Communications tab

All in all, more information can be held in Powered Now meaning there is even less need for paper and other systems, improving communication and saving time all around.

Premium Subscription

The new Premium Subscription, as well as providing UK phone-based support, has some exciting new features:

Avoid misunderstandings

Customers now have the chance to reply to messages and emails sent to them, with the replies stored on the project timeline. This means that provided face-to-face discussions and phone calls are also recorded in notes, there is a single, central record of all communications with customers. The chance to avoid misunderstandings and quickly refer back to previous discussions is immense. 

New Customer Portal

Customers can use a new portal to directly book appointments. The place where this should lead to more business is when this is connected to reminders. This would apply to a larger residential customer that you do a lot for and particularly for business customers where you may have a stream of work or even a maintenance contract.

Customers can see details of future and past appointments in the portal as well as see details of who will visit.

Every certificate or form that has been completed can have a reminder set. This reminder is automatically sent to your customer, typically 11 months after the time it was raised.

In this reminder you can have a link to the online booking facility and your customers can click the link and book an appointment for a time that works for both you and them.

Obviously, this is very quick and easy for them and they can do it right away. So you can expect that to directly generate extra business and will keep some of the nationals at bay that are always trying to muscle in on your customers.

All the documents that you send are available for your customer to view online. This should eliminate those irritating calls for duplicate copies of things - they can find them for themselves.

A couple more benefits are that when you or one of your employees are visiting a customer for the first time, they can click on the notice about the appointment and see the details of the person visiting. We found from research that a large minority of people are somewhat nervous when they are receiving a new person to perform work and that this will help with their unease.

All documents in one place

Customers can search for and look at all documents that they have been sent in the past.

New Scheduling View

A new scheduling feature makes it a snap to plan every employee's day, with full drag-and-drop capabilities.

Telephone Support

What are you waiting for? Start your free trial today!

Discover our latest release

New Powered Now Release - Simple Vehicle Management Software

New Powered Now Release - Forms and Certificates Reminders

New Powered Now Release - Smart Scheduling Features