Our Documentation Gets a Launch Window, and Four Fixes That Protect Your Numbers

Big news about our documentation this week, plus a round of careful fixes in the places where small errors cost real money: travel pay, breaks, and the numbers that reach QuickBooks.

The documentation platform has a launch window

In July we told you we were building a new home for the Flow Platform documentation. That project is coming to fruition, and we can now share timing: we expect to launch in the second half of September.

What you will get is one place that holds every manual for the platform, organized by module, searchable, and kept current as the platform changes. No more hunting through old emails and attachments for the answer to a question someone already wrote down.

The first new manual is already published: a complete guide to the Flow QBO Center, the screen where you connect Flow Platform to QuickBooks Online and control what gets sent there. It walks through the whole setup in order, so the person who sets up your QuickBooks connection can follow along start to finish instead of guessing which switch does what. It sits in the staff manual, so sign in with your platform account to read it.

We also brought the manuals closer to the work. Until now, opening a manual meant leaving the platform for a new browser tab, and by the time you found the answer you had lost your place. Manuals now open inside Flow Platform, right next to the screen you are working on, so you can read the instruction and do the thing without switching back and forth.

Timesheet previews built for the person reading them

Reviewing a timesheet before it goes out used to involve some fighting with the preview window. Four things changed. The preview now opens sized to fit your window, so the page is readable the moment it appears instead of after you zoom. It uses your own organization's wording for the timesheet labels, so the document your customer receives matches the vocabulary your team uses everywhere else. It remembers how you like to view it, so your preference carries to the next timesheet and the one after that. And when you download one, the file arrives with a meaningful name instead of something generic, which means the timesheet you saved this morning is still findable this afternoon.

Getting the money right

Four corrections landed this week in billing and pay. Each one is small on a single event and meaningful across a month.

• A break now counts once, even when it is recorded twice. If an interpreter taps the break button twice, or a break gets logged from two places, the platform used to see two separate breaks and could subtract the same rest period twice, once from the invoice and once from the interpreter's pay. It now recognizes that the two records describe the same stretch of time and treats them as one break. Your customer is billed for the work that happened, and your interpreter is paid for it.
• Travel time is back for accounts that pay travel by distance. Some accounts pay travel in steps: the first stretch of miles at one rate, longer distances at another. When a trip fell into one of those longer steps, the platform was checking the wrong step's settings to decide whether travel time was paid at all, and travel time could quietly vanish from the bill. It now reads the settings for the step the trip actually landed in, so the travel time appears and is billed as your agreement says it should be.
• QuickBooks receives the exact amounts. The quantity on each line, the hours or units being billed, is now calculated the same way for invoices and for vendor bills going into QuickBooks Online. What you see on the Flow Platform invoice is what lands in your accounting system, so reconciliation does not turn into arithmetic.
• Time recorded in the app stays exact. Many accounts round manually entered time to set steps, say the nearest fifteen minutes, because a person typing a time is estimating anyway. But when an interpreter checks in and out in the On the Spot! app, the platform has the real minutes. Those submissions now keep their exact time instead of being pushed into the rounding meant for manual entry.

Smaller things you will notice

• Your place in the list is kept. Select events in a table, then refresh or change a filter, and your selection is still there. Previously it cleared and you started over.
• Your QuickBooks view is remembered. A new My Settings tab saves which QuickBooks filter you prefer, so the screen opens showing what you actually want to look at rather than resetting to the default every time.
• Rates show their real decimals. Rates carrying fractions of a cent, common with mileage, now display in full and with proper currency formatting, instead of being rounded on screen into a number that looks wrong.
• The invoice history reads cleanly. When a line is removed from an invoice, the history now notes whether that item is set to be billed later, and it no longer records edits that changed nothing. The story of an invoice is the story of what really happened to it.
• Reports understand branches. Organizations running multiple branches can now break the operational report down by branch, so each location's numbers can be read on their own instead of only as part of the whole.

Questions about any of these? Visit our Help Desk and our team will be glad to assist.