SmartTrade Blog

2012 has been a watershed year for SmartTrade as we invested heavily in redeveloping our core software, a task that will continue through 2013 as outlined below. We achieved our milestones within a month of the planned date so can justifiably claim to have done pretty well compared to most IT projects. 

Central to our redevelopment philosophy is to ensure we continue to be, arguably, the most affordable job management solution in the market.

Examples of this philosophy at work are:

• • There will be no price increase for customers who migrate to SmartTrade Essential;
  • SmartTrade Ultimate will be priced at an 0 plus GST, a 0 premium to SmartTrade Essential. SmartTrade Ultimate will incorporate a range of functionalities that we currently offer as separate modules individually priced up to 0 plus GST meaning that the price of SmartTrade Ultimate will effectively be a significant price decrease;
  • SmartTrade Mobile, designed to work on any device that can access the internet, is priced significantly below the current pricing for our existing Windows 6.5 application for PDAs;
  • Our customers will increasingly be able to optimise their purchase of SmartTrade applications to achieve the most economical solution for their needs by mixing and matching SmartTrade Essential, Ultimate, Mobile, SmartTime, and SmartForms (currently in Beta testing), plus a number of other applications we have in the pipeline;
  • SmartHost is a hosting service we offer customers who prefer not to suffer the overhead of owning and operating their own server. Thanks to the sharper prices we have negotiated with new data storage providers we have this year been able to nearly halve our price we charge for the service from /user/month to /user/month plus GST. The improved performance characteristics of our new products mean we are now able to offer our customers further cost saving opportunities for hosting services.

While our new core products remain client-server based, the base software resides in the user’s device, they are becoming increasingly web centric:

• • SmartTrade’s new core job management products SmartTrade Essential and Ultimate can operate remotely utilising web connectivity meaning they have “cloud” like functionality.

    SmartTrade Essential is a client-server (PC) application that has been developed for Microsoft Windows devices. Any portable Windows device having a connection to the internet can be setup to back to the office based Microsoft Windows device (the server).

    SmartTrade Essential can also be used remotely on an Apple PC, laptop or tablet (the client) provided you also have remote protocol (RDP). We recommend the free version of PocketCloud, a 3rd party RDP software application. The user must install PocketCloud on their Apple devices given we aren’t able to login to their Apple devices to do it for our customers. To assist customers we provide a detailed set of instructions that make it easy for users to install PocketCloud themselves. Please call our support team for assistance if you want to use SmartTrade Essential on an Apple device.

  • SmartTrade Mobile is HTML5 based and will work with any device that can connect to the internet. Accordingly, SmartTrade Mobile will work on Apple and Android devices without the need for any additional software. We have descriptions on our website showing how the above system configurations work.
    
  • The new SmartTrade Mobile and SmartTime™, our mobile timekeeping application with GPS functionality that was released in May and now has more than 150 users, are both web [HTML5] based; 
  • SmartForms™, our innovative “cloud” based e-form application for mobile devices will be ideal for customers who undertake recurring compliance work. SmartForms eliminates the paper plus we have also integrated SmartTime into SmartForms enabling compliance testing staff to log their time as they start and finish each compliance job. We will shortly commence the final development work targeting a commercial release of SmartForms in early 2013. 
  • Smeedi®, an innovative electronic data interchange (EDI) product developed by Smeedi Ltd, a SmartTrade sister company, is a pure “cloud” application. Smeedi will be included as a standard feature in a future release of SmartTrade Essential as well as in SmartTrade Ultimate when it is released next year.

    EDI, primarily used to automate sending invoices, has typically been too expensive for small and medium enterprises. Smeedi now gives businesses of all sizes the opportunity to exchange invoices between supported accounting packages at a significantly lower end-to-end cost than post or even e-mail. The beauty of Smeedi is that if the invoice recipient has a supported accounting package and is a registered Smeedi user the invoice transactional data is automatically imported into the recipient’s accounting package saving on keying costs and errors. Unregistered recipients receive a notification by e-mail allowing them to either view the invoice in the Smeedi “cloud” or they can open up the pdf copy of the invoice they receive with the notification e-mail.

  • Our development pipeline will see fully "cloud" based web versions of SmartTrade Essential, Ultimate and Mobile released in the second half of 2013.

Here is some feedback from Lee at Rhino Security who is using the new SmartTime application.

Q1. Why did you initially choose SmartTime?
It was bloody cheap, it used existing technology (smart phones) it was simple for tech to use and understand. We could trial it with no disruption to on-going processes.

Q2. What was it like before you used SmartTime, how did you get your timesheets etc done?
We used to get technicians into the office on Wednesday morning to hand in hand written jobs sheets and hand written timesheets, we then manually transferred the hours to large project jobs sheets and tried to decipher technicians hand writing. The process took admin staff the entire day, we now have it done by 9.30am. I can’t believe we used to work with such outdated systems, the change was dramatic and instant. We used to have 30-45 minutes down time per tech each Wednesday filling out bits of paper ( and trying to find the ones they lost ) Now time spent returning job information is billed to clients.

Q3. What was it like working with SmartTrade to implement SmartTime, the installation and training for example?
There were some initial teething problems, but the support was top rate. In total there was about 30 minutes training, no more was needed. The manual was short and concise, in most cases not even needed.

Q4. Is SmartTime easy to use? What do you like most about working with SmartTime?
Yes it very easy to use, most of the techs did not even need to read the manual. What do I like about using smart time, it is pretty much idiot proof.

Q5. What three biggest benefits do you and your business get from using SmartTime and would you recommend it?

 Job information is loaded into the system as soon as a job is completed, allowing the invoice to be generated and sent same day, this improves cash flow

 Time sheets are filled out by techs as they go from job to job, no more problems with techs trying to recall what they did a few days ago because they lost some paper work

 Filing in the office has dropped 95%

Some excellent feedback there from Lee, if your business is interested in SmartTime please give us a call on the number above or send us an email at [email protected] and we can discuss a solution to propel your business.