Purchase orders, change orders, warranties, receipts… Construction projects generate mountains of paper. You can store these documents electronically with their corresponding entry in Abio.
If your client sends you a purchase order or change order, you can record it on the Area Entry screen under Job Costing.
Receipts, warranties, and inspection documents can be recorded on the Equipment Entry screen under Equipment.
Documents related to purchasing materials can be stored under Requisition Entry or P/O Entry. Waybills and packing slips can be stored under Receiving Entry, and receipts and invoices can be stored under Invoice Entry under the Payables menu.
If you’ve put together a bid for new work and want to save the signed quote, it can be stored under the ‘Bid on Work‘ entry under the Receivables menu.
Daysheets will be uploaded to the Supporting Documents tab on the Daysheet Entry screen under the Receivables menu.
General Interface
If a window has a tab called ‘Supporting Documents’, then you can save as many documents as you like with each record.
The list on the left shows all the documents you’ve saved for that record.
In the top right portion, you can describe the document, record when it was received, and in some cases, indicate if it should be included with invoicing.
The bottom right of the screen is the scanned document.
The borders between the areas are splitter bars. You can change the proportions on the window by hovering your mouse over either of the splitter bars, then holding down the left mouse button and dragging the splitter bar to a new location.
Use the Add action to add a new document.
When you’ve entered the description and the date you received the document, press <Apply> to save the record. The select files image will now be enabled (you need the description before you can save the record). You can either drag a file from file explorer over the area, or click the Select Files and choose a file to upload. The file you select will display in the picture pane.
PDFs
PDFs are displayed in an Adobe Acrobat Reader embedded within Abio. All the functionality of the reader is available to you in Abio. The Day Sheets that are created on Abio for Web are uploaded as PDFs.
When you hover over the document, the Acrobat menu is displayed. If you click the Acrobat symbol, the full menu is displayed.
Scanned Documents
Scanned documents, such as bitmaps and jpegs, are stored as images. The Print action will send the image, in its original size, to the printer.
If the image is intended to be included with an invoice in a billing package, it will be converted to a PDF and appended into a single file with the other images in the billing package.
Searching on Document Descriptions
Each record where documents can be stored will include a list of the document descriptions that have been uploaded.
There will also be a field in the filter list where you can enter a search string.
In this way, you can track down documents by their descriptions.
Including Supporting Documents When Invoicing
When you convert Day Sheets to Invoices to bill your client, Abio is able to track down all the supporting documents that belong to the current billing. It will collect them all, attempt to sort them according to the sort order you’ve specified, and combine them, along with the day sheets and invoice, into a single PDF that you can email to your client. You’ll be able to preview the billing package on the Preview tab of the Accounts Receivable Invoice.
In this example:
- two documents were found for the area the work covers,
- a receipt was uploaded for an invoice that is included in one of the daysheets
- three documents were uploaded for the original requisition for the job.
You can examine each document individually on this tab, and you can follow the hotlink to see the original record where the document was found. If you don’t want that document included in the invoice, you can change the include on invoice? flag to ‘N’.
The Preview tab processes all the supporting documents into a single PDF, along with the original invoice. This is the PDF that will be sent out with the invoice.
We cover that in more detail when we look at supporting documents for client billing.