The idtPlans development team has been working hard to both make improvements to system performance, as well as implement a variety of client feature requests. Here’s a brief rundown of the improvements and new features that you may have missed.

General System Improvements

• Time Zone Localization
  This one has been active for a while now. You may have noticed that all system date/time stamps are now localized to your specific time zone. You can change your time zone at any time by editing your account preferences.
• Performance Improvements
  We continually monitor system performance and work hard to proactively apply performance updates. Here are some of the most resource consuming processes that were vastly improve.
  • project information page
  • custom variables
  • custom document generation
  • Issue Attachments
  • Offline Technology for iPad

Plan Review

• Post Approval Uploads
  An optional feature that allows an applicant to submit documents after a project has been approved. This is useful if they need to provide any supporting documentation during the inspection or construction process.
• Withhold Documents
  Many clients have asked for the ability to create approval documents, certificates, and stamp plans but not release those documents to the applicant until all fees have been paid. This feature was created specifically to do just that.  Once a project is approved, an administrator can complete their work by stamping documents, and generating the appropriate certificates but withhold these documents from the applicant.  Once the applicant pays their final fees, these documents automatically become available to them without any administrative action needed.
• Static Issue Numbering
  Issues have always had a numbering sequence. This was a handy way to identify which issue someone was referring to within a comment letter or at a point in time.  These identifiers were not consistent though and could change during the life of the project.  After much consideration, we’ve decided to make these identifiers static numbers that will no longer change during the life of the project.  This should help to reduce any confusion between review cycles.
• Reduce Duplicate Submittals
  Occasionally applicants would inadvertently create duplicate submittals. We’re now proactively attempting to prevent this by automatically detecting any pending submittals and asking the applicant if they would like to continue with an existing submittal, or begin a new one.
• Round Robin Reviewer Assignments
  You can now default a workflow to several members of the same discipline and have them automatically assigned sequentially. If a new project comes in, the first reviewer will be assigned.  On subsequent reviews, that same reviewer is auto-assigned to leverage their existing knowledge of the project.  When another new project comes in the next reviewer in line will be auto-assigned.  An administrator can manually override the round robin assignment at any time.

Fees & E-Commerce

• e-Checks
  We’ve added the option to pay fees via e-check in addition to credit cards, or offline payments. This feature has been in production for several months now and is working very well.  The merchant processing fees for e-checks are much lower than that of credit cards and encourages the online payment of large fees.
• New Feature to Categorize Fees
  This feature improves the way that fees are accessed and applied manually. Often times certain departments are in charge of their own fees.  By categorizing them by department, we can now provide a short list of fees, as well as output fees by category.  Some clients need applicants to make offline payments with more than one check made out to different departments.  This new feature facilitates that automatically.
  • Improved fee reporting output by category
  • Added custom variables for fee totals by category
• Improvements to Service Charges
  We’ve added the ability to create service charge formulas based on payment type. For example, if a user pays by credit card, you may wish to apply a 3% convenience fee to account for processing charges.  If a user pays by e-check you may need to base your service charge on another formula such as ($2.00 + .75%).  Fees are now recalculated every time a payment method is changed to apply the correct service charge if any.
• Improvements to Fee Auditing and Reporting
  We’ve added sequential identifiers to all transactions to better conform with auditing requirements. We’ve had unique identifiers all along but they will now be sequential (Reference ID).  Additionally, we’ve added functionality to apply credits back to transactions that may have withdrawn an application.

Inspections

• Improvements to inspection report formatting
• Added administrative functionality to edit inspection requests
• Added inspection overview filters modeled after plan review
• Reduced emails sent out when multiple inspections are requested at once.
• New feature to categorize inspections by department

Coming Soon!

• Cityworks Integration – final testing stage.
• Hansen Integration
• Homeowner Registration Improvements
• GIS Mapping
• Round Robin Inspector Assignments