Release v2.35: Bulk Processing of Interpreter Invoices & Payment Summaries

One of the biggest challenges that our customers face is the processing of large numbers of invoices and payments. In fact, one of our LSP customers recently told us that it can take up to three full days to process approximately 3000 jobs each month. We knew that we needed to offer functionality that would dramatically reduce this burden and we are pleased to announce that Interpreter Intelligence’s v2.35 release will include the ability to process multiple invoices and payments simultaneously. That three days of work will now take just minutes.

Bulk processing of invoices:
As you likely know, there are two ways to deliver invoices to customers through Interpreter Intelligence: 1. by downloading a .pdf which can be printed and mailed, and 2. by directly emailing an invoice to a customer. Instead of downloading or emailing a single invoice at a time, the newly released feature set provides your Finance team with the ability to deliver multiple invoices simultaneously. The new functionality is quite straightforward and a user would start the process by searching for the invoices that they want to take action on. A number of filters are provided to enable the user to narrow down the list to only a targeted set. Invoices can be filtered by customer, date range, invoice status, billing address, and by a number of other versatile criteria. The resulting list of invoices that match the selected filter criteria are then displayed, from which the user can then select a single invoice, multiple invoices, or all invoices for processing. Once the invoices are selected, they can either be downloaded as .pdf files into a single .zip file (a convenient way to print multiple documents at once), or can be emailed automatically to the respective customer(s).

Invoices of a specific status can be selected for bulk updating and controls have been included that restrict invoices from being downloaded or emailed that do not meet the appropriate invoice rules. For example, if an invoice was already emailed to a customer, it will not be resent if it was mistakenly selected. Likewise, if a selected invoice was previously canceled or was not fully approved, it will not be sent out or downloaded. Rest assured that these rules will support your ability to process invoices most effectively while ensuring consistent communications with your customers.

 

Bulk processing of payments:

Similar to the new bulk invoice processing features described above, the most recent release of the Interpreter Intelligence platform enables Finance teams to also deliver payment summaries to Interpreters in bulk. The process for searching, filtering, and selecting payment summaries to be processed is exactly the same as it is for bulk processing of invoices, with users being able to select one, multiple, or all payments returned in the search results. Payment summaries can also either be downloaded in bulk to a .zip file, or can be automatically emailed to the appropriate Interpreters.

Summary:

Interpreter Intelligence Release v2.35 includes two sets of features that provide the industry’s most efficient way to process invoices and payments. As always, please feel free to contact our support team with any questions.

Password resets and more

With our most recent deployment we’re excited to announce the long awaited automation of the user password reset requests. You will no longer be required to manually reset a user’s password when they have forgotten it.

From this deployment onwards, when a user clicks on the “Recover it here” link for forgotten passwords an email will be sent to their email address from which they can reset their own password. This will most certainly free up some of our time to help support your needs better and will hopefully free up your time also.

In addition to the automated password reset, the “Password Expired” functionality is now also enabled. From the Admin > User Management page you can now chose the “Password Expired” checkbox to expire a user’s password and force them to choose a new password on their next login. This will be the default behavior soon for new accounts.

With this feature we are also enforcing more stringent password requirements. Specifically, passwords changed during password reset and expiration will need to be a minimum of 8 characters long and must contain at least one letter, number, and a special character such as !@#$%^&. While initially choosing a new password will be a minor inconvenience, the additional security benefits this change brings are clear.

There’s more

Along with these security enhancements there have been a number of additional features included in this most recent release. These changes have mostly been related to additional flexibility on the financial side of things. Options have been added to include the cancellation reason, date and time and cancellation notes on the invoice and payment respectively and flags for showing the interpreter and the customer on the invoice and payment description respectively. Please refer to the release notes for a full list of changes.

If you have any questions, comments, feedback or if you need further explanation about any of these most recent changes please don’t hesitate to get in touch

Interpreter Availability

This coming Friday, November 15th, we will be rolling out a new feature which will impact the way you are used to assigning interpreters.

When assigning an interpreter to a job you have been presented with a list of interpreters to chose from which match the job requirements i.e. proximity, language, gender requirements and other requirements specified on the job. Up to now this list of interpreters was presented without factoring in interpreter availability.

With the release on Friday, by default this list will now only show interpreters that are available at the date and time of the job. For example if interpreter Maria Blanco is assigned to another job at the same date and time as the job you are assigning, she will not be included in the interpreter list by default.

If however you do want to see the full list of interpreters, even those that are already assigned to jobs, you can control this behavior by unchecking the “Available Interpreters Only” checkbox as depicted in the following image (you can click on the image to see it enlarged):

When you uncheck the checkbox the list will refresh showing all matching interpreters regardless of availability. By using this feature and the interpreter calendar on the assign page you will easily see which interpreters might be best suited for the job and perhaps reassign interpreters as needed to better accommodate your full set of jobs.

Coming soon …

As a follow on to this, we will very shortly be releasing an additional feature in this area where your interpreters will be able to enter and manage their available days and times from the interpreter portal.

In this way the assign page will soon only show interpreters who are not already assigned to a job and have specified that they are available at the date and time of the job. You will be able to turn on / off this feature as needed by unchecking the “Available Interpreters Only” in the same way that was described earlier.

For Administrators

If you’re an application administrator you will be interested to know that you can control the availability behavior in some small way. By default if a job an interpreter is assigned to, overlaps the job you are assigning they will not be presented by default. If a job an interpreter is assigned to finishes immediately before the job you assigning they will be presented as an option.

This however may not be desirable and you may want to give a buffer of time at the start and end of a job which will be used in before determining if an interpreter is available. For example, you can specify a buffer of 15 minutes which perhaps some time between jobs before an interpreter is considered available again. This buffer can be controlled under the company configuration as depicted in the following image (the default setting is 0 minutes buffer between jobs) (you can click on the image to see it enlarged):

Wrapping up

We hope you find this new feature useful and don’t hesitate to contact us should you have any questions, issues or concerns at the support email address or by phone. Feel free to add any thoughts or comments you have below. We’d love to hear your feedback …