Estimating Monthly Webinar September 2024

Okay. Alright, everyone. Thank you all for joining our monthly estimating webinar. I know we have some new customers here today joining us. So if this is your first, time attending, first off, we're so happy you're here with us today. And the purpose of these monthly webinars is to show our customers the latest features we've rolled out for both heavy bid and preconstruction and really give all of you an opportunity to ask questions, as we go along and demo how to use these new features. So please drop all of your questions in the chat. I'll be keeping a close eye on those throughout the webinar. Alright. So let's, before we jump in, though, let's kick it off with some introductions. I'll go first. My name is Melissa Teague, and I'm the product marketing manager for heavy bid and preconstruction. And part of my job is to really understand our customers. So know what your day to day looks like and how our products can better help you. So with that, I sprinkled in some poll questions throughout this webinar to get a better idea of how you handle your daily task, and just kind of what your day to day looks like. And with that, I will hand it over to Paul now for his introduction. Thanks, Melissa. For anybody who doesn't know me, my name is Paul Lambert. I'm the technical product manager for preconstruction, which means I am in charge of all the day to day everything for Precon, and I work with Amanda on, improving and expanding the product. So if you have any questions about, either current features, anything that you see today, or have any suggestions for features that you wanna see in the future, feel free to reach out to me. My email will be on the slide deck a couple of times. But it's just paul dot lambert at hcss dot com. We also have Erin here just in case there are any heavy bid questions. Those inevitably come up sometimes, and I'm sure you're all very familiar with Erin. Thanks, Paul. So the agenda. So for today, we're gonna talk about our latest release, which is the materials analysis report. It's going to help you gain insights into the types and quantities of materials in an estimate. And we're also gonna give a quick recap and demo of some of the other releases we've rolled out throughout this year, and that's gonna save you time and improve your workflows. And those are our new contact management features, so things like multicontacts, the update contact button, adding contacts inside project details. Also, we have a lot of new releases around project customization and administration, so things like duplicating a project, bulk deleting projects, a new percentage field. We have new default values, and we also have the ability to add your company logos to reporting. And then at the end, we're gonna wrap it wrap it up with the q and a. But like I mentioned before, feel free to drop your questions in the chat as we go. Alright. So let's get started. I'll hand it off to Paul now. Thanks. So we're gonna start out with the material analysis report. This is our most recent, major release. This, was released earlier this month for, our users. And the material analysis report is a way for you to view information about a particular estimate from inside Precon. We will jump into how to do this in just a moment. I'll go through a demo on all of these features so that you can see how, how that works and how to access them. But the main point of this feature is to give you better insight into what materials are being used. A common example of this would be for somebody on your procurement team or your resource gathering team, to understand where they can reduce the cost inside of an estimate. So let's take a look at a demo real quick, and I can give you an example of, what that can be used for inside there. So if you are inside Precon here, I'm just on the basic Precon screen. Over on the left hand side under estimate insights, I'm going to choose the estimate that I wanna view. In this case, I'll use one Earth. And on this left hand side, we're going to go to materials. Up at the top, you'll notice there's a switcher type, so I can switch between permanent materials and construction materials. These are code two and three in heavy bid, and it will change which materials are being shown. Up at the top, I have the top five materials being used in this estimate, and there's a switcher here for cost per unit or total material cost. So cost per unit, in this case, we can see is nine hundred and five dollars each for the two PC IC. Or if we look at total material cost, it'll give the cost of the, material across the entire estimate. This is really useful if you're looking to reduce costs because if I'm looking to get, for instance, a ten percent discount on one of my materials, it's going to be a lot more impactful to get a ten percent discount on this hundred and forty six thousand dollars than it is to get a ten percent discount on this five thousand dollars. This is also useful at a high level for some of the executives or anybody that's just looking over numbers and trying to better understand the cost drivers inside of the estimates that they are creating. Down the bottom here, we have all the different materials that are being used from this material type, and we show where they are in the estimate as well. So you can see this two b a two b a zero three zero, is being used twice in this estimate, one in bid item twenty, one in bid item sixty. It gives you the quantity of each of those, and then the total and the unit cost. So here you can see it's only seven dollars fifty cents in bid item twenty, and it's seventy five dollars in bid item sixty. So not only do you understand where your your cost drivers are, but you can easily see where they are in the estimate in case you need to look for, more information and kinda narrow down why it's being used there or if there's a substitution you can make anything like that. Do we have any questions on this? We have one question. Let's see. It says we use cost type one for our internal materials, which is half of our revenue for the company. It would be very important to get this level of granularity for this to be useful for us. Let's see. Yeah. So this is, right now, we just have material type two and three. We are looking at potentially adding, more in the future for customization so that instead of choosing permanent material or construction material, you just put in the, leading number for the code. And in your case, if you're using cost type one, you would just type in one and view the materials that way. We don't currently have a date set for this. One thing that I would recommend is putting this in the ideas portal. That way, if we have, you know, for if we have a bunch of other customers that are also running into a similar use case that they need this for, we can get all the requirements at once. And, obviously, if we have a ton of customers that all need this, that's going to be prioritized, as something that'll be useful for everybody. So I I would encourage you to put it on the ideas portal so that we can start collecting a little bit more feedback about that. But that is an improvement that we've been looking at potentially for the future. Alright. We have one more question here. It says, can the top five materials from this estimate be changed to include a larger number of materials? Out of the box, it's only going to do the top five. We're looking at increasing visibility into reporting in the in the future in general, but especially as it regards to, materials and vendors and the the way that they are supplying goods and services to you. So for right now, it's just the top five. In the future, my guess is that there will be a very large expansion on this, and this is kind of, like, the first step in the initiative that we have to try and make reporting significantly better inside of precon. Alright. Are there any other questions? Nope. Alright. We're gonna pause for a second to do a little poll. Let's see here. So you'll see in your screen, there's a question. If you don't mind selecting your answer, the question is, how do you currently track material costs for your bids? Do you do them manually, spreadsheets? Do you use basic software tools, heavy bid? Do you use other software, or you don't really have a consistent process? So we'll just wait a second here and then announce what the majority chose. Alright. Okay. So it looks like, no surprise, the majority uses HeavyBid, our estimating software. And then a lot of people manually use spreadsheets as well, about twenty one percent. So good to know. Alright. So we will move on now to contact management new releases. Yeah. We have, several different upgrades to contact management. One of the biggest ones is from a UGM ask that came from quite a few, actually, different companies, at UGM. And the ask was to be able to include more than one contact when you are using a contact field. So previously, if you put in a company or a contact field, you could either not fill it in or you could put in exactly one. With this new update, you're able to add more than one. There will be a small stipulation on that in just a second that we'll dive into. But the most common use case that we heard for this, while we were at UGM was for subcontractors who are bidding a a project or a part of a project to multiple prime contractors. The state department says we need this project done. There are a bunch of prime contractors that are all, planning on bidding for that, and they're all looking for the same work to be done for that. And so they're all asking for quotes from the, subcontractor. And previously, when you could only put one, you could either add a bunch of different fields, which made your data very messy. Or you could add in the same project a bunch of different times. And the problem was that was throwing off the numbers. If you have the same project in your opportunities five different times and you're only going to do it once, your potential revenue looks five times bigger than it actually should be. So this is a relatively straightforward solution to that to allow you to track anywhere from zero to as many contacts or companies as you have in a project. So let's go ahead and take a look at how this is done. We will hop back into project tracking. So this is the base screen for, Precon again. Over on the left hand side under customize setup, we're going to choose either the company or the contact type. Here, I will use contact, and we'll just put it right here. We'll put in our field name, whatever it is. We'll just use example, multi contact here. And then the part that makes this different is just clicking on this checkbox that says multi selection. Now this is the, the little caveat that I was talking about. Once you make it multi selection, you can no longer switch it back. So there's technically two different kinds of each of these. One is, only being able to upload one, and the other is being able to put in as many as you want. If you change it to be as many as you want, then you won't be able to change it back. This is going to be okay for ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of you, because if you choose multi selection, you can still just put in one contact or one company depending on the field type. So the only time that this might matter is if you are pulling data from Precon and putting it into a third party software if you're doing, specific kinds of reporting or data manipulation through API or something. Technically, the multi selection version of contact and of company are a different data type than the single selection. So if you are doing those, then that may be something to consider. Feel free to reach out to support or to me if you have any questions about that. But for anybody that's not doing that, multi selection is just the same thing but with more functionality. Once we have in the one that we want, we will click save up at the top left hand corner. And let's hop into a project to see what it looks like. We'll use this one here. And then when I scroll down to example multi contact here, you can see right now it has zero in there. We just have a a blank placeholder. But if I give this drop down, I can choose we have Aaron here. And then if I want more than one, I just click that drop down again. We add in Paul. If I want another one, we can throw in example two. I can continue going as many times as I want. And if any of these need to be removed, I can just click this little x next to them. I will delete them from that field, and now we just have the two. So this could be useful, like I said, both for contacts and for companies. They work the exact same way. The only difference is which of those that you're using in there. The other thing that you can do, I walked you through how to add a new one in. You can upgrade an existing field that you already have. If you already have a point of contact field in your, customized setup, you can just click that checkbox that says multi selection, and it will change it from a single entry to an as many as you want entry. Up at the top, if we just save that real quick, we can see it's holding both of these here. And then on the report, it will show both of them under that example multi contact field. Or if I'm using something else like point of contact or owner, it will show them all under that section just like it currently shows one. So relatively straightforward, it's a single checkbox to change it, and then you just click on the down arrow whenever you want more and click on the x whenever you want less. That's all there is to it. But there was, there there were quite a few people that were asking for this, and it simplifies the the process for a lot of our customers. Do we have any questions on this? Alright. Then we will hop into the unified contact, I believe. This next one is a bit of a fringe, ad as well. We added in a button that is able to update a contact across all of your projects. That's that's the long and short of it. It will update all projects. That means all of your past ones, all of your current ones, anyone that's perspective work, anything like that. If the contact that you're updating, in this case, we're updating Paul Lambert, if I click sync, what that's going to do is find every single project that has me listed anywhere on there and update the information. Where is this useful? So occasionally, contacts will change over time. If you have a contact that goes from one company, they leave that company and go somewhere else, you might update where they are in your contact management system. Most of the time, you want to preserve the historical accuracy. Meaning, on all of my past projects, I want them to show the information that was correct at the time that I entered that information or that the project was completed. So I wanna make sure that the project manager is showing the company that they were at at the time that I entered that. So most of the time, you wanna preserve historical accuracy. The sync button overwrites the historical accuracy. It will update them to whatever your current information is that you have entered in your contact management system. The biggest use case for this and, the the main reason that we entered, or that we created this feature was for people who accidentally put in a typo. So, here we have Paul Lambert. If I misspelled my name, and then I created a whole bunch of projects either through the import or just over time. And then I realized that, I don't want to have to go back into every single project, see if Paul Lambert is listed on there or not, and then update the information if if they were not on there correctly. So this is able to do all of those at the same time. It's able to take every single project that had my name on it somewhere and update the contact information for me. Most of the time, you will not be using this. When you do need to use it, it is very useful. I just want everybody to be very aware of the fact that it overwrites your previous, historical accuracy. It is only for the contact that I do it on, though. So if, for example, I was using that multi contact feature that we just went over, and I had point of contact as Aaron and as myself, and both of our information have since been updated. If I were to use the sync button here, it would update my information, but it would not update Aaron's. So it does just do the contact. You have a a contact by contact basis on who you wanna update. Just be be aware that it is going to, change the historical accuracy of that. I know that was a little bit confusing and a little bit of a fringe case. Do we have any questions on that before we move on to, adding a contact on the fly? I see one question here. It says, can I choose certain projects to not get updated with the new contact info? No. The way that this works is it will find every instance of the project with that contact and update them. So you can either go through and individually update specific projects, by going into project details, going down to that, that contact on there, removing them and adding them back, then they'll have the new info. Or you can do all projects. But you can't say update all of my projects except these five. It's either you choose one at a time and you individually update that one project, or you can use the sync button and it will do every single project that's in your database. Alright. Thank you, Paul. I don't see any more questions coming in right now. We're gonna pause for a quick last poll here. So this is asking, what do you currently use to manage your contact information? Do you use Excel? Do you use CRM systems like Salesforce or HubSpot? Email systems like Outlook, a Rolodex, or other. Not seeing any Rolodexes. Alright. Rolodex. Mom were on this webinar, I think she might. Yep. Same. Definitely my dad. Okay. Good. We're gonna end this. So it looks like the majority said Outlook, about fifty two percent followed by Excel. So very good to know. Awesome. Yeah. We have, some updates coming out in the future for people who use Outlook for their contacts. There there will be an update certainly within the next six months, and we will make announcements on that once we have the details fully finalized and are are ready to release everything on that. But we are looking to, make that contact management a little bit easier. We already made the improvement earlier with Precon and HeavyBid working together, but we are actively looking at ways to expand, both the ease of use for getting contacts into, HCSS and also using those contacts throughout the HCSS platform. Alright. The last piece that is related to new, contact management features is being able to add a contact, on the fly. And what used to be the case was if I was in the middle of creating a new project oops. And I wanted to add in a person here. I would go in and say, oh, yeah. I'm I'm looking for, the I'm looking for Tyler Jones. I don't see him in here. I would have to save the project, stop what I'm doing, go over to contact management, Go to the company that they're a part of. Add the contact in here. Finish up that. Save it. Go back. Go back to project management. Find the project that I was working on, and then choose them. It's a lot of clicks and very annoying, especially if you still had a couple of required fields that need to be put in first and you had to, like, finish up with that and then switch over. It it was a little bit annoying to do. So what we've done is add the ability to create a contact on the fly. So if I want to add another person to, example, multi contact here, we're gonna add Mickey Mouse. Under this add new contact to contact management, I click that. I choose the company that this person is a part of. And it turns out, apparently, Mickey Mouse works for Amanda a Construction. And we just type that in here, add in any additional information that I want about them, and click add. Tada. They've been added in. That's all there is to it. So now instead of context switching and having to click thirty five different buttons and save in the middle of something that you didn't wanna leave in the first place, it's a couple of buttons, and we're done. Yeah, Rob. We needed a couple of extra people in the company. So Legolas and, I believe Frodo and Gimli got added in. We have a a couple of extra people in there. I will give just a second for questions here in case anybody has any. The theme of today is mostly fairly straightforward, features, but just things that have been requested and making things a little bit easier and smoother to get your your project up and running instead of having to spend extra time on there. There's one, question slash comment. They just asked, maybe in the future, you could it would be nice if we could add a new company here as well. That is something I can take a look at again in the future. We did consider that as part of, as part of this feature trying to include that. We had some technical limitations on being able to set that up easily. But that is something that as we continue to make changes and improvements to precon, we can re sorry. We can revisit in the future, to try and get the ability to add that company on the fly as well. I do have a question about that. When you say add a company, do you mean for a company type field, or do you mean for a contact type field being able to add a new contact to a new company? I don't see, a response yet. But That's fine. I can follow-up after the webinar. With you after. Alright. Let's hop into project customization and administration. We have, several small things in here as well. The first one is the ability to duplicate a project. Previously, if you wanted to duplicate a project, that would involve, opening up a second tab of precon and then copy pasting from one tab to the other tab, which is a very, inelegant way of doing things, unfortunately. So we've added in the ability to duplicate a project. The, like, actual use of this is very simple. I go into the project I wanna duplicate. Up in the top right, I click on these three dots, and I click duplicate project. And it's going to bring over everything that doesn't have to be unique. So all of the information, that was in there before is copied over. The only thing I have to put in is a project name. So we'll do example forty five and save, and it's done. Duplicating a project directly like this may not be as useful. One of the big use cases that we've seen for this is for our customers that, do similar groupings of work. So if you do a project that is very similar for, you know, eighty, ninety percent of your work, or you primarily do two kinds of work, like most of your public work is very similar to itself, and most of your private work is very similar to itself. Or most of your state work and most of your county work are each similar in their own categories. What you can do with this is set up a template and use that. So, I could go in and create a project for the first time. We'll use public work template. We're gonna get recon ID. By default, it'll be perspective work. I don't have a job site because that will change each time. But for the county, I actually do almost all of my public work in Fort Bend County. The owner for that is always TxDOT. The type of work, is almost always a we'll say a new location freeway. The point of contact is usually the same person. It's Aaron. He's really good at heavy bid. It comes in useful, and then any documentation, things like that. So at this point, I have a template. I save this. And then in the future, anytime I get new perspective work, I can just duplicate this over, and I can add in the project number. I can add in the job site, but all of these are already done for me. And I can create a template for, like I said, said, one for public state work, one for private work that's specific to asphalt, one for private work that's specific to, replacing a piece of infrastructure. Whatever the case is, for each type of work that I do that's going to have very similar things over and over, I just create a template for each of those, and it makes it very easy to duplicate. So, Paul, one of one of our spectators here noticed something on your screen that is not quite general release yet. I was curious if you would be comfortable sharing an Easter egg on it. On my current screen? Not on the current screen. Previous screen. Oh, previous. Something something thing having to do with quick pricing. Oh, yeah. You didn't see anything. I don't know what you're talking about. That's that's, very hush-hush right now. Yeah. So we will be having a lot more information coming about the, coming out for this in the near future. This is something that we are almost done with. We're in the final, the the final stretch of, quick pricing. We've been working on this for several months now. Quick pricing will be a way to, use existing data, to quickly get a general idea of how much a a project will cost. An example that I'm sure a lot of people in here will be familiar with is if you're working for somebody like TxDOT and you are already a heavy bid user. You've been uploading estimates for a very long time. You can upload the, bid that comes out or the the request for a bid that comes out from TxDOT that says here's the list of all the things that we need you to do for this project. You upload that, and our system says, great. Based on the client number that you already have from all of your estimates, we're just gonna go ahead and pull in all the historical data for you. You then say, great. Now, get rid of anything that's more than five years old. Get rid of anything that's not from TxDOT. I don't want you including, Oklahoma Department of Transportation quotes in here. That that pricing doesn't make sense for this. You filter it down however you wanna filter it down. And at the end, it says, so based on your historical data, in order to, clear the trees, the lowest price from your filtered information was thirty seven dollars. Your highest was a hundred and seventy two, and your average was, eighty nine dollars. And it will do that for each bid item all the way down the list. So in the span of a couple of minutes, you go from having no idea to having something that can help you with a go no go decision on whether or not you want to start bidding this. Like I said, we'll have a lot more information on this, and we'll have a a full demo and a lot of that sort of stuff, coming up likely in November. So stay tuned for that, and we'll we'll show you the entirety of how that works. But there's your your little Easter egg, is this quick price sheet coming up. Do we have, any other questions about duplicating a project or anything else that has come up? One of our, spectators found another screen that he didn't turn off with with QMS. Do you wanna you wanna shed some light on that real quick? That is something that is coming out next month. See, I I just kinda left it on. I thought, do I need to turn it off? And I figured no. So you guys get all the previews today. Yeah. The quote folders on the inside screen, that is something that is, I don't know if active development is the right word. We have completed development on it. We are in the final stages of testing it and making sure that it's ready for general release, but that should be coming out, next month for you. And it is the ability to view quote folder and quote sheet information, from estimates inside Precon. I'm not going to display it yet because one of the part of the testing that we found had a a small error that makes my current company not work with it. And, again, we'll be putting out more information on that. We are going to be doing a lot of work over the next year, year and a half on quote management and being able to interact with those, as part of several of our larger goals. And so, in in the near future in October, you will at least be able to view the information that's currently in heavy bid quote folders and quote sheets inside Precon. There will be future updates, that will be coming out that we are excited for but not yet ready to announce. Any other Easter eggs that I missed here, Eric? That's all that everyone's at least seen so far on the screen. Okay. Alright. Next thing that we had on the list here was bulk deleting a project. This is something that we have found a couple of our customers needing. Previously, if you wanted to delete a project, you had to go into the project itself. So for instance, you would go into this project. You'll go to the top right hand corner and click delete project and confirm. If you're just doing one, that's not a problem. But if you, for instance, imported and you accidentally imported the wrong file and you realize that too late, and now you have a hundred and thirty or five hundred projects that you just imported, doing one by one sucks. So we've added in the ability to bulk delete by going to this top right hand corner to these three dots, clicking show bulk operations, click on the ones that you want to delete. Like, my computer's struggling. Here we go. Click on the ones you wanna delete, and then click delete projects. It does come up with a confirmation after this saying, are you sure you wanna delete those? I don't know if this shows up for you guys. It does. Awesome. And so you can just delete whichever projects you want there, and it saves you a little bit of time. We don't expect people to use this all the time. Ideally, you're only creating the projects that you need. So hopefully, you're not having to delete projects constantly. If you have too many projects and it's slowing down your system, we are currently working on better solutions than deleting, your projects, and more information will be coming out about that in a couple of months as well. But we are also actively looking to increase the number of bulk operations. Right now, deleting is the only one. But bulk editing, being able to bulk export, things like that, bulk creating PDFs, all of these are things that we're looking at improving in the future, so that you can manipulate your data more easily when you're looking at an aggregate of all of the different projects that you have. Any questions on, bulk deleting? I see, one question. It is, if I accidentally deleted a project, can I bring it back? The simplified answer, no. One of the reasons that we put up that confirmation, after you click the the delete up at the top is because once a project is deleted, it's deleted. If something happens where you delete a very important project, you can call into support, and support can try to restore an older version of your, system similar to a backup of HeavyBid. Precon sort of does the same thing automatically. But we we can't guarantee that the version that we're able to bring back has all of the rest of your information. It may be information from, a while back with multiple changes in between. So in general, be very careful when you're deleting things. Assume that when it's deleted, it's gone forever. If you run into that horrible situation where you deleted something very important, our support is available twenty four seven. Call them, and we will do our best to, try and help you with that. Alright. Next one, percentage field. This is something that is used by a lot of our customers, or at least trying to include a percentage field is something a lot of our customers do, whether this is for risk assessment, whether this is for percent chance to win a project, whether this is for percentage complete, if you're trying to track, like, the operations side, whether this is, if I'm creating a ten percent bid or a fifty percent bid and tracking that, there's a lot of places where you want to use a percentage field. And, previously, the way that you did that was you used a number field, and you either typed in seventy and you called the field, like, percent or something so they knew that it was percent, or you typed in point seven if you were doing calculations so that when you did multiplication, it multiplied by seventy percent instead of by seventy, the number. We have made a little improvement here where you can now get both of those at the same time. So under customized setup, we're going to put in a number field, and then we can call it whatever we need. So percent chance to win. And down at the bottom, we're going to switch it from number to percentage. And then, we will save. And when we go into a project, we have percent chance to win. I type in seventy. You can see it auto puts in the percent thing for you just so you can be double sure. But now this shows as seventy percent. If I do calculations with it, it will calculate as point seven. So if I have a hundred times this seventy percent, it will give me seventy. Whereas if this were a number field and I typed in seventy, it would give me seven thousand, if I did my math correctly. And I can't promise I did. But you get the picture. This both tells you that it's a it displays as a percent, but it also calculates correctly for you. So minor change, but, it's very nice when you're using this in conjunctions with other fields, such as the calculated, field type down here. I don't know if that's showing on the screen, but, yeah, the calculated field type. And then I'm probably gonna go ahead and blast through these last two on here, and then we can hit any other questions as they come up. So if you have questions, feel free to throw them in the chat, and we will get to them in just a minute here. Next one on the list is default values. So, we saw something we saw a similar use case just a minute ago with the duplicate, project in order to create a template. Default values is another way of saving you time for information that is consistently repeated. So if I know that, the vast majority or even all of my, jobs that I'm going to be putting in here, all of my projects are going to be for TxDOT. But I also need TxDOT to show on there every single time. I can go to whatever field I want that to consistently show up with. I can click use default value, and then I can choose my default value. In this case, TxDOT. So I'll go ahead and save this. And now when I go in and I create a project, you can see, before anything happens, just because I clicked on create project, this is already populated with TxDOT. Now if I do work for TxDOT ninety five percent of the time and the other five percent is for somebody else, I still have the ability to change it. This is a bad example because we only have one option in this this particular list. But if I put in, say, a text field in notes, I always put, you know, Jimmy's responsibility, as my default value. I can then delete that when I'm creating a new project and type in Christina's responsibility instead. So this is just pre filling it for you. You can still change it after. You can still, delete it. You can do whatever you need to do, but it's just going to pre fill it for you. So whereas you might use duplicate a project if you have multiple different types of work where you need multiple templates. If most of your work uses the same, information over and over and you need to have that information in your project, you can use default values to very quickly, have that happen every time you create a new project. And we'll touch on this last one here, and then we'll be able to hop into any questions that have come up. So this last one is a customized logo. Give me just a second. Sorry. So, the logo that we're talking about here is inside of your scheduled reports. Scheduled reports are for our full featured customers under customized setup here. If we go to subscription setup, ignore that pay item library. I know that's an Easter egg. I got no somebody's gonna find it. That is part of quick pricing. We will go over that in the future. I promise. But under subscription setup here, we have two subscriptions already set up. And what it's doing is taking the basic project list template, and it's sending it to Paul Lambert at twelve o one PM every Monday to Friday. At the top of that report, there is a logo. In the past, that logo has said HCSS. This is now something that you can customize so that when you are sending this report to whoever you are sending it to, one of the most common use cases is to set up each estimator with their own, project list template and email it out to them. You can set it so that all of the emails that are leaving from this particular business unit have the logo you choose. Meaning, instead of having the HCSS logo at the top, maybe it's your logo. Maybe if you are an enterprise customer and you have seventy different BUs, for each BU, you create the logo or you use the logo of the subsidiary, that is receiving this work, whatever the case may be. The way that you set this up is up in the top right hand corner on the gear icon. Click on company profile, and then just click on, yours will be HCSS. I have already changed mine over. But you click on this picture and upload the logo that you want. Click save when you're done, and there you go. Every future email will include whatever logo you have here at the top of that email subscription, that they're receiving on whatever frequency you have set up. Alright. That is all of the major features that have come out in Precon in the past several months. I know we touched on, like, fifteen different things here, I wanna say, something like that. Quite a few. So if there are any other questions that have come up, I am more than happy to answer those now. The first question that came up is, as new fields and functionalities come into play, is there any guidance on converting existing fields into new field types? Any guidance on it? The closest that we will have is explaining the functionality of each type. So what I mean by that is if you follow on our roadmaps, website, and give me just a second. I will actually pull that up for you so that you can see. Here we go. So on our roadmaps website, this shows all the different releases that we're doing for you. So whenever we put out a new field type, you'll be able to view it here. You can see our most recent release, that we put out included the material analysis report. But if you click view release history, you can go through and find every single thing that we did. So here we have the multi select contact slash company. We explain what it is and a brief example of how to use it. And then you can make the decision if this is something that you want to change one of your previous field types into a new into the newer field type, if you want to just add it in, or if maybe this field type isn't as useful for you right now with your current situation. That's the easiest way. We we won't have guidance on when you should change one of them because that's going to be specific to your use case, but we will at least explain what the new one does for you. No. I think I think he's looking for how how can you convert existing fields. So, for instance, customer has been on pre con for for since its inception, basically, and a lot of those fields are in text. How do you convert those existing fields into a multi select or a percent or something to that nature? As we make these improvements, we're still kind of trying to figure out the easiest way to convert people over. One of the most common examples of this is the owner field. A lot of our original customers were typing in the name. It was, essentially, a text field for project owner. And now that we've introduced well, I say now. We've had contact management for a little while. But now that it's becoming more commonplace, people are using that instead. And we're going to continue to build functionality off that. Text field into a contact field, that will retroactively update all of your previous projects. Your previous projects would still be on that text field. So we are trying to think of ways to make that transition easier for you. For now, it'll just be using the new field and collecting that information so you can use it for analysis. Miss Paul, we have one more question. It's is there a way to import the contacts we have created in heavy bid into heavy bid pre con? Yes. Aaron, do you wanna take that one? Sure. So in heavy bid, we, you need to be running, one of the the newer versions of heavy bid, but we actually put in functionality into the system preferences that will essentially take your system vendors and merge them with your contact management system, up in pre contract. And depending on if you have information in both places, have you been it's gonna ask you a few questions on how you want that, how you want that data handled. Basically, do you want if you have any merge conflicts, do you want pre con or contact management being the source of truth, or do you want heavy bid being the source of truth? You get to choose that. And then, basically, anytime that you would use system vendors in heavy bid, instead of utilizing the system vendor database, you're making a call to contact management and grabbing data from there. If you want, help in getting that set up, I recommend giving a support a call. They'll be happy to, give you give you a walk through and get that set up. Yeah. I'm showing on screen right now, we have a a help article in help dot h t s s dot com, that kind of walks you through all the different steps. It does look like a lot of steps. If if you want any help, like Aaron said, just call in and, support is happy to to walk you through that and make sure everything gets set up correctly for you. Yeah. The the help article is scarier. It looks scarier than the than the process actually is. It's actually just clicking one button, but it runs through a lot of checks. That article gives you an overview of what those checks are actually doing. Yeah. It's like a two two, three minute process. Mhmm. It takes longer to read the article than it does to do the actual conversion. We've got another question, from Bob. Can the old field be hidden so it doesn't get used in the future and doesn't require being deleted? We don't currently have the option to hide fields with the exception of pre con ID. And even then, it's, I'm not sure that hiding is the right way to describe that. We are looking at the few in the future, different ways to help manage that change, such as hiding old fields or mapping old fields to new fields, so that your your previous projects are able to to do that. So short answer, not right now. But it is something that's on our radar and and something that we're trying to improve in the future. Do we have any other questions? Alright. If you do have other questions, feel free to email me. You can see right now, my email on the screen. I'm always happy to hop on a call and walk you through it or get you a a help article that explains it. Or, if you just have product, suggestions or anything like that, feel free to reach out. And then support is right here as well. Our support team is absolutely phenomenal, and very responsive on the phone. For anybody who hasn't called in before, they're they're nice. I promise they don't bite, but they will help you fix your your issue. Alright. And last but not least, wanted to bring up UGM. So we want to my reminder one that our annual users group meeting is happening February eighteenth through twentieth. So registration does open up next week, I've been told. So if you scan this QR code here, you can sign up for our email notifications that'll send you an email as soon as it opens up. And if you haven't been before, UGM is a great opportunity to not only get to know our products better with, you know, one on one support sessions, but customers also love attending, just to see what our future vision is for our products. And you can give us direct feedback during our town town halls and different sessions. And it's a great networking, you know, experience. So just learn from your peers, go into our, events at nighttime and such. So we hope you can make it, and please scan the QR code so you're notified when you can register. And that is it for today. So thank you all so much again for attending. We really appreciate you giving us your time, and we will send you a recording of this webinar. And have a great day. Thanks, everyone. Bye, everyone.