Customisation FAQs

To request a customisation, describe your requirements in as much detail as possible. Where appropriate, include any attachments such as sample forms or spreadsheets showing column headings and field calculations, ideally based on the existing data in your Simpro Premium build.

With all this information, please email support@simpro.co or customisations@simpro.co. This will create a case and someone from the relevant team will get back to you. It is recommended to start with Support, unless you are absolutely sure that all possible standard options have been tried and exhausted.

We will do our best to assist, however it might be that the request cannot be implemented exactly as you want it. We will endeavour to suggest a viable workaround or help you to find the best solution in other ways, based on the business requirements provided. Hence, we ask you to be as specific as possible regarding what you are after and for what reason(s).

We recommend against customising your system for the following reasons:

Customisations cost money: Creating a customisation and making any adjustment to it is chargeable, and can be pretty expensive. This expense is only justified for a good long-term investment. Ask yourself: will this customisation save your business money in the long run? Will you get a good return on this investment? You should only proceed with customisation if your answer to both these questions is a resounding 'Yes!'

Development takes time: We have built a lot of flexibility into Simpro Premium, so it only takes you a few minutes to tweak your setup and get your system operating optimally. Meanwhile, our current customisation development lead time takes six to eight weeks after accepting the Customisation Scope document, signing off on the quote, and paying the deposit. The Scope document itself would also require a fair bit of time to prepare, in order to cater for all the possible conditions, flows, and exceptions. So it is quite a lengthy process for both the original development, and any subsequent adjustment.

Customisations make your system unique: That might sound exciting, but unique is just another way of saying 'non-standard', which may lead to complications or even problems. For example, a customisation can make your workflows less flexible; in certain cases, you may be unable to adjust certain parts of the setup or access newly released useful features, if they interfere with the customised part of the system.

Customisations can break: Regular software updates are part of what make our products great, because we regularly add new features suggested by users, and introduce security enhancements. However, due to these new features and technology, your customisation may become incompatible with the new enhancements. We aim to preemptively address issues, however, they would be as unique as your customisation. Hence, they might require significant time to fix, and it would be hard to give timeframes until fully investigated. Generally, the costs will be covered under the CMA agreement that you are paying, however, when significant modifications are required, the works may be chargeable.

These disadvantages of customisations are why we encourage you to use a standard solution, as well as why we will do our best to help you find the right one.

If you just joined Simpro Premium (or are trialling it), customisations would seem like the best option to adjust the system to your processes. However it is very probable that you will find new ways of doing things in Simpro Premium very soon, and what you deemed as an absolute necessity at the start, may need to be significantly reworked or dropped altogether. This would mean potential stress and a loss of money for you. Hence it is essential that you start using Simpro Premium first, and only request customisation after 6-12 months after going live - then you will be best equipped to get a solution that really works for you, in established workflows.

Most common customisation types that generally do not affect your ability to receive software updates are as follows:

• PDF forms to be sent or printed from the system, such as invoice, quote, or job form customisations.
  • Please note, we strongly recommend using Form Builder which provides endless possibilities, rather than customising PDFs, which will be rigid and inflexible.
• Reports to give you additional information about your business. If the data is already available in the system, we can display it in a customised version of an existing report (e.g. with a new column or a new filter), or alternatively, we can create a new, fully custom report.
  • Please make sure you check BI reporting though - it might be you can extract the data yourself, immediately and free of charge!
• Scripts to perform background tasks or to automate parts of your workflow, for example, importing tasks, archiving quotes, or making bulk changes at a database level.
  • Please note some functionality, e.g. bulk archiving old quotes, is part of standard Simpro.
  • The Simpro API is also a valuable tool for performing background tasks; it is ready to use and free of charge.

Requests that do not fall into the above categories can still be discussed, however, there is a good chance that they cannot be implemented as a customisation.

However, even with the “typical” customisation requests there could be complications or challenges that may significantly impact their feasibility or complexity. These are scenarios when data exists in the system but cannot be combined, e.g. it is not possible to compare billable costs to actuals on an itemised level (you can learn more about it in the article on Estimated and Actual Costs).

Please note that not all Simpro products and not all areas are customisable. This can be due to the difficulty of maintaining custom versions while providing regular updates to our existing products, or just because of the huge amount of effort (and, correspondingly, prohibitive costs) involved in certain changes.

Specifically, we cannot:

• Customise mobile applications such as Simpro Premium Mobile, Digital Forms, and Simtrac.
• Make additional modifications to Form Builder forms.
• Modify core pages (e.g. amend the list of jobs to incorporate extra data), as those will break with each core update.
• Make global, system-wide amendments, i.e. introducing serialised stock or non-standard pricing

Additionally, we reserve the right to decline the customisations in the following cases:

• if they are effectively cosmetic changes;
• if they mimic standard functionality (with just a slight difference);
• or if they go against product logic or legal requirements.

We also don’t entertain any requests that involve mass emailing people (welcome packs, congratulations etc) - as this will lead to us, that is Simpro, being recognised as a spam generator. There are special apps out there for marketing campaigns, e.g. Mailchimp.

1. The first step starts with you. Understanding what you require in detail and coming to Simpro with a detailed explanation of your need for a customisation, workflow, processes, desired outcomes, what has already been tried and did not work will ensure the smoothest job done.
   • Please be as open as possible - the more information you provide, the better the end result will be.
   • Please also ensure that all relevant stakeholders from your company are included in the discussion from the start, and confirm that they agree with the proposed solution.
2. After receiving this information, we will discuss your requirements in detail, and especially the drivers behind those. We will aim to provide standard options if they have not been mentioned previously.
   • Where possible, we might suggest a ballpark estimation early on, to assist with the decision whether detailed scoping is worth the effort. However, please note those preliminary figures may differ from the final estimation, as sometimes the devil is in the details.
3. If the customisation is theoretically possible, and you decide to proceed with investigating the request further, the next stage is Scoping. A Simpro Business Analyst will create a Scope of Works (SOW) document detailing all your requirements and how they are going to be addressed from the technical perspective. Please note that we are aiming to change the barest minimum, so if something is not listed in the document, it will continue working as per standard. If you have questions or concerns, or believe something has not been taken into account, please don't hesitate to say so.
   • We reserve the right to request upfront payment for scoping days, where potential works are considered significant or require extensive investigations.
4. When you "sign off" on the Scope document, confirming the proposed solution meets your requirement, it will be estimated by a developer to determine what effort is required to implement the changes. Based on this estimation, a quote will be produced.
   • Please note: these final estimations may differ, sometimes quite significantly, from the original ballparks.
5. When you receive the formal quote, please sign it electronically. The quote will then be processed on our end, a job (Order) created, and a deposit invoice sent to you. This needs to be paid in order for the works to be placed in the development queue.
6. After you pay the deposit, the development work starts. It usually takes 6-8 weeks including all reviews and testing. Unfortunately it is not possible to tell the exact date as it depends on many factors, however, we aim to deliver as soon as the feature passes QA, without unnecessary delays.
7. Please ensure you test the customisation within 2 weeks (10 business days) from delivery. If we get no feedback, we trust the changes are working fine, so we will finalise the job, add a Customisation Maintenance Agreement (CMA) to your account, and request the balance payment.
8. If there are any issues, they will be sorted promptly.

In case of unforeseen / missing functionality discovered after the works have been started, a change request would need to be created, and that may be chargeable depending on the amount of changes required.

We need to know exactly what you want, and the only way for us to establish that is by asking you about every aspect of your request in detail. We don't want to work on assumptions, as that risks the end result appearing or working differently from what you envisioned.

The question you will hear the most is, 'Why?'

Many of our clients tell us what they want to see, which is a great starting point, but it may not be enough to find the optimal solution. We want to go right back to the problem you want to address and come up with alternative solutions, such as cheaper or simpler customisations to implement, or ideally, suggest features already included in our standard product.

We will also ask you a lot of questions about the data that you want to use, where it comes from, and what it really means. For example, if we are customising a report, we might ask, 'What does "completed date" mean for your business? Can it possibly differ from our standard definition?'

It is only by asking these questions that we will really understand your goal and deliver the best solution for you.

When considering a customisation, please make sure you engage the end user(s) from the start, getting input from the actual person who will be using the function. Make sure they (a) know the system well enough, and (b) have read the scope and approved the solution. This will reduce the risk of you spending thousands on development, and then discovering there is critical functionality missing, requiring further investment.

Unfortunately we cannot show you how a custom report will work in the system without actually developing it, and that is not achievable during the investigation & scoping phase.

However, we can show you a small sample of representative data in a spreadsheet or image file, to give you a clearer impression of the layout and purpose of the report, so you can check whether it meets your business needs. The key word here is 'sample'; please don't confuse this with data entry.

Once the customisation has been implemented, it may differ visually from the examples provided, but the functionality will remain the same. For example, the filter buttons may be in a different spot on the page, but they will still perform the same function.

Each customisation is unique, and they are estimated individually. This means we cannot provide a quote until our Business Analyst has fully determined all requirements and scoped a solution. The quoted amount covers time as required for scoping, development, testing and uploading the solution to your build. Where a job is considerably large, we will aim to indicate how much effort / cost is required for each stage or component. The development efforts are estimated by our expert developers.

Please keep in mind that although the amendments may look simple on-screen, the system and processes underneath could be very complex. We need to do significant background work to ensure your system remains stable and well maintained, including backing up your build, investigating the database structure with data that is applicable for your industry, and checking thousands of lines of code to ensure the solution will fit.

We then implement and test the changes thoroughly in both development and staging builds before releasing to your live build. All of this takes time; it is never a five-minute job.

Besides a one-off cost for development, all customisation quotes include the maintenance component, also referred to as CMA. This charge would be activated when the customisation is delivered to you.

As a rule, we request a deposit upon approval before the works can commence. The deposit amount may vary depending on the customisation size and other factors. The deposit is non refundable, the only exception being cancellation of job before any works have been started.

We also reserve the right to request upfront payment for scoping days, where potential works are considered significant or require extensive investigations. This amount will be deducted from the final price of the job, so the overall total should not change. This is done in order to make costs more predictable and easier to handle.

While the new features and updates that are going out every couple of weeks provide a wealth of new functionality and benefits, they are also creating a risk that your customisation may 'break' due to the new changes in the code.

Considering this, with every customisation we will automatically include a Customisation Maintenance Agreement (CMA) which is a recurring fee charged at 20% per annum (paid monthly) on the full price of the customisation.

The CMA ensures that we will rectify most problems with the customisation caused by our updates to the core product for the duration of the agreement at no additional cost. Plus, we will run regular maintenance checks and preemptively fix potential issues where we can foresee those.

However, we still rely on you to advise us if the customisation breaks or starts behaving abnormally. We urge you to contact us as soon as possible with full details of the issue, including the date you first noticed the problem and screen captures or other samples that clearly illustrate the problem. We will handle the enquiry taking into account the urgency of the issue and the impact on your business.

For the customisations that do not have a CMA (those that were created many years ago, prior to us putting our CMA agreements in place), you will be charged for any fixes at the usual customisation development rates.

The CMA only covers fixes to customisations where the break was caused by a Simpro Premium update. It does not cover any functional changes you may request, or breaks caused by modifications by the client or any other entity; these will be quoted separately. For example, if you use a customisation to import a file from a third party, and the third party then changes the file format, this will not be covered by the CMA. It will be treated as any other change of requirements, requiring a new scope and quote.

Sometimes, you may need to make your data available in another system or to integrate with a different application. Simpro Premium provides an Application Program Interface (API) which you can use to integrate and extract Simpro Premium data.

We do not typically create these applications for you, however we do have a list of recommended partners who can develop applications and integrations to assist you with your application and data requirements.

For the list and description of API calls, or if you require assistance with those, please use the below resources:

• http://developer.simprogroup.com/apidoc/
• https://apiforum.simprogroup.com/
• https://www.simprogroup.com/au/partners/find-a-partner

If you believe many businesses have requirements similar to what you want, please post your feature on the Simpro Product Portal.

To access the Product Portal you must be logged into Simpro Premium. Hover over Help in the System menu and click Product Portal.

Note: If you share the link to the product portal, it is only accessible if the user it’s shared to is also logged into the same Simpro Premium build. If you attempt to access the Product Portal while not logged in, or attempt to access the portal using a link from another Simpro Premium build, you will receive a 404 error message and the page cannot be reached.

If other clients rate your request, it may get implemented in the core product as part of our regular release schedule.

We thoroughly investigate and scope all proposed customisations to avoid this situation, but we occasionally find during development or testing that the original approach interferes with core functionality, or reduces flexibility for further development. If this happens, we need to take a different approach to avoid creating incompatibilities.

We understand this may be inconvenient for you, but as is the case with most software development, we need to be flexible. We will let you know if this rare situation arises, and do all we can to minimise the disruption.

Our current development lead time is six to eight weeks from the date you approve the quote, and pay the deposit.

It might seem like a long time, however please consider that at any given time, our developers are working through the backlog of customisations, fixes, maintenance, and improvements, and each of those someone is waiting for, so there is no way to jump the queue.

We encourage you to use this time to reconsider your decision to customise and to check that the approved customisation is exactly what you require, especially as this is your last opportunity to cancel your request or make small changes. Any considerable changes will need to be fully scoped and estimated again, with another five to seven weeks of lead time after your quote approval.

We will start developing the customisation as soon as we have a slot available. The estimated development and testing time is outlined in the customisation quote, however if problems arise, it may take longer - we will communicate with you as soon as this becomes evident, and will greatly appreciate your patience.

After the main development works are done, the customisation needs to be reviewed by senior developers and thoroughly tested in both development and staging builds before releasing to your live build. All this considered, it is very hard to predict the actual delivery date. One thing for sure - we never delay things intentionally, and will always let you know as soon as the changes are ready to be tested and/or uploaded to your live build.

Note: As a rule, additional works that are caused by Simpro Premium’s internal difficulties are not going to result in additional charges, even if those works exceed the original quoted time.

However, if the amendments have been requested by yourself because of changed requirements or circumstances, those would need to be re-scoped and estimated again, possibly with another six to eight weeks of lead time after the new quote approval.

Once you receive the message that the customisation is available for testing or has been included on your production system, you are expected to thoroughly test and confirm it works as per the scope that you have approved within ten business days. Please do this as soon as possible, as it is much easier to get a developer to make fixes to a 'freshly-baked' customisation.

If you fail to confirm the customisation is satisfactory or send feedback within 10 business days, we will consider this as signed off and finalise the job. The balance of the original invoice must be paid as soon as possible. We reserve the right to disable the customisation if payment is not received within a month's time.

If you find any issues with the implemented solution, please let us know immediately. Fixes will not incur any fees if you have a CMA, otherwise there could be a cost involved to rectify them.

Our quotes are only valid for 30 days. Any quotes not approved within thirty days must be re-scoped and re-estimated.

The reason for this is because the core product is continuously evolving, with new functionality added every few weeks; those new features and improvements may have an impact on the solution, so the customisation scope needs to be reviewed to ensure it remains valid.

We encourage you to approve the quote as soon as you are confident the solution is right for you, also keeping in mind the lead times.

If you have approved the quote, you will have received an email confirmation from Simpro Premium letting you know the job number and the development ticket number for your request. Please use these numbers as a reference whenever you make enquiries.

Please remember the customisation is only added to our development queue once you have approved the quote and paid the deposit. If you cannot find our confirmation, please check whether you have sent your approval before contacting us for an update.

As outlined in our Terms and Conditions, Simpro Premium retains ownership of all code we create, including code developed for the purpose of customisation.

However, we understand that the source code is a critical part of your business systems and you will want assurance that it can be accessed and maintained if required. At your request, we can place the source code in software escrow with Assurex Escrow Pty Ltd once you have an agreement in place with them.

If you want to see what customisations are added to your build, go to System > Setup. The “Customisation” menu link is available at the bottom of the page. If your build is a multicompany, this information will only be accessible via the Template Company.

Click the link to open a page where you can see the list of customisations that have been implemented for your company, with brief description, references, and Scope document that can be downloaded.

Yes - that happens! Sometimes you can start using the new functionality and only then figure out there are missing-but-useful bits and pieces. However, incorporating the new changes may require considerable development efforts, and sometimes a whole rewrite of the custom function.

Hence, any amendments taking over 30 minutes of development time will incur a further charge. Additional scoping and quoting may also be required, depending on the complexity of the changes, as we aim to have all modifications documented and signed off, to ensure everyone is aware and comfortable with what is going to be implemented. And, again depending on the complexity, there needs to be some extra waiting time for the changes to be implemented.

We understand this can be very unwelcome. This is why we strongly encourage you to ensure that all the business requirements, all the pages and functions that need to be modified are listed in the original Scope, to ensure nothing important is missed or excluded.

Our initial scoping phase is aimed at thoroughly exploring your requirements to give you the best possible solution. However it is only you who can tell what you are using and what is relevant for the request. Our BAs know Simpro and what it can potentially do, Simpro is very versatile: every customer may use their own flows, fields, and functions. When scoping customisations, we aim to introduce as few changes as possible, to minimise potential issues and optimise costs for your business. And, we are quoting per-hour, not per-feature.

By approving the scope and the quote, you are confirming that the scoped solution meets all your requirements. Our developers then work from this approved scope. Should you later decide the approved customisation does not meet your requirements any longer and/or needs to be adjusted further, this is classified as additional work.

Unfortunately, it happens sometimes. This is one of the reasons why we discourage customisations. It usually means the customisation is no longer compatible with some core software components.

First of all, please assess whether you still need the customisation. Perhaps the same functionality can now be achieved via the standard methods? If it is not critical to your business, you may choose to remove it, which we will do free of charge. Otherwise, if the customisation is still required, we will attempt to fix it, but this development work may incur additional charges, unless the customisation is covered by CMA.

Unfortunately, we may not be able to quote for the required works in advance because the time taken to uncover the cause of the break and then rewrite the code is so highly variable. Therefore if a warranty or CMA is not applicable, we will ask you to agree to pay all charges associated with fixing the customisation.

Once you have confirmed you will pay for the fix, we can begin development. The fix may take some time, but we will take into account the urgency of your request. If the broken customisation interrupts your workflow, we can disable it until it has been fixed.

Please note that all customisations are client specific and are not covered under our standard Software Maintenance Agreement. Historically, customisations included a three month warranty, after which any maintenance was chargeable. This has been replaced by the Customisation Maintenance Agreement (CMA) due to the frequency of system changes.

The main reason for possible failures is that customisations are created for a particular version of Simpro Premium. The customisation is static, while the core product is dynamic and evolves continuously. Therefore when you receive feature updates, customisations can become obsolete. Although every care is taken to make them as independent as possible (so they last longer), they would still use data, structures and formats of the core system, and when those change, customisations need to be amended too.

We would never introduce a bug or 'break' a customisation on purpose. This is counter-intuitive to what we do, which is to provide solutions. However, as we are not able to predict how the software will change in the future, bugs may occur. And we hate them as much as you do!

There is a lot of effort involved on our end for a bug fix: we investigate the issue from the front end (confirmation and replication); locate / pull out the relevant code; take a database snapshot and install it on a local server; update the code (which is the most unpredictable part); run through quality assurance (QA); review code; upload to your build; and perform live QA where possible.

So as you can see, there are many steps and multiple people involved in the process. Usually the rectification is covered by CMA, even though our costs are way higher than the amounts paid as part of that agreement. However in exceptional circumstances, where the bugfix requires major amendments to the customisation, we may ask to make an additional payment towards those works.

That would be great! Please notify us immediately once you confirm internally that the customisation is no longer needed. We will clear the custom code from your build and remove the recurring CMA charge from your account.

If you have several customisations and only want to remove one, this is also fine, but may require some additional investigations / development to confirm the remaining customisations will keep working after the obsolete one is removed.

Please note the past charges will not be credited, because the works have already been done on our end.

Note: if you later realise that removing the customisation was a wrong decision, then reinstatement or recreation could be discussed. That might incur a charge, depending on how much time is passed between the removal and the request to restore, and what adjustments or revisions are required. It might be that the original customisation was done in a way that is no longer acceptable, e.g. if it was a “breaking change”.