New Features - September 2022

This quarter we're excited to announce the following:

• Redesigned & improved user interface
• New features to manage service level history
• Added bulk-actions for importing and updating data points
• Workflow improvements for every subscription level to save you time
• More API improvements (still in beta)

Check out the details below!

General Improvements

Redesigned User Interface

Mobile-ready screens and forms put you control no matter your device

Discovery's overhauled User Interface cleanly and succinctly displays critical information across Desktop, Tablet, and Mobile screens.  

The User Interface now better matches the powerful ways that Discovery simplifies workflows and processes for waste and recycling managers across North America.

Overhauled Services (+ simplified them)

Vendor and Client Services have combined into a newly unified "Services" entity. The power is yours!

We simplified life for everyone. The concept of a "Service" is at the core of Discovery's powerful auditing and reporting features. A Service is powerful because it allows for the combination of contract and activity/operational data across business segments, such as a Customer Service helpdesk, Operational Team, Procurement Team, and ESG/Sustainability/Reporting team. All using the same data set with no "version control" needed.

We unified the previously separate-but-linked-together "Vendor" and "Client" services to simplify User experience and speed up User throughput. Fewer things, faster. The Service is made more flexible for businesses that support multiple business models within their organization, as Services can now optionally be tied to any of the following:

• Vendor Contracts
• Client Contracts
• Vendor Accounts
• Client Accounts

Finally, bulk importing (and in the future, bulk updating) your data is so much simpler with unified Services. We've already received terrific User feedback on the new & improved architecture. We'd welcome yours too at Help@discoveryapp.io.

History and Event Tracking Across the System

Start time-traveling through your waste & recycling data

Things Change... and now your business is able to better retain the history of your portfolio data and act upon it for reporting and decision making purposes.

We've all seen the incredible number of things that evolve on a daily basis: A vendor may change the days of service because of a routing overhaul or a neighbor complaint. "Back to School" seasonality means increasing service back to 5 days-per-week. Or a favorite nuance - a rear load route was converted to front load and the bin information needs updated for accurate procurement in the future.

No matter the change, Discovery keeps a timestamped permanent log, without any extra data entry from your team. This log creates an event stream of categorized activities across your entire portfolio of business.

It may not be immediately obvious, but a detailed and accurate event history is a strong competitive advantage. With event history from Discovery, you gain the power to ask time-relative questions in a scalable fashion that you'd only be able to do manually on a per-case basis with Excel and a home-grown database.

This event history spans all major areas of the system, including both Client and Vendor Contracts, the newly unified Services table, and more.

New Import and Export Capabilities

Getting information in-and-out of Discovery is critical, and now, easier than ever.

As our Users needs evolve, so do the tools and technology in Discovery.

Large waste data sets require support for bulk importing and exporting. This helps to make it easier to onboard large customers or make ongoing activity changes across large sections of your portfolio.

Here are the new Bulk Import and Exports:

Bulk Imports new in this release:

• Services
• Client Contracts

Data Exports new in this release:

• Services
• Locations

New Features by Subscription Plan

The following are updates specific to a GEAR subscription plan (Gather, Extract, Audit, Revenue). As always, Gather features are included in Extract subscriptions, Extract features are included within Audit, and Audit included in Revenue.

Gather Subscribers

Tenants leveraging our Gather plan (or higher) can find the following improvements live in Discovery:

• New API Endpoint for Gathered Vendor Invoices
• Updated the Gathered Vendor Invoices screen to show the source of the document (web scraped, uploaded, emailed)

Extract Subscribers

Tenants leveraging our Extract plan (or higher) can find the following improvements live in Discovery:

• Improved the Extracted Vendor Invoices section with additional search filters and data points
• Better event and history tracking
• Improved User Experience for Including and Excluding line items from an OCR Vendor Invoice

Audit Subscribers

Tenants leveraging our audit plan (or higher) can find the following improvements live in Discovery:

• Unified Client Services and Vendor Services into Services
• Improved Vendor Invoice automation with machine learning qualified by DSQ employees
• Added Services index page, added simplified create and edit workflows
• Added the ability for Bulk Importing of Services

Revenue Subscribers

Tenants leveraging our Revenue plan can find the following improvements live in Discovery:

• Create and manage Sales Tax for your business
• New Manage Revenue screen
• Added management functionality for Fiscal Periods to open and close them
• Created Location Fees (to replace Management Services)
• Billing Groups are now Client Accounts, and the features have been simplified
• Lifecycle management for Fiscal Periods (Open, Close)
• Bulk-markup feature for Billable Expenses

API Improvements

Power users leveraging our API will notice the following improvements

New endpoint for Location Fees

Location Fees are available to Tenants with the Revenue subscription. They empower you to create Client Invoice Line Items on a one-time or re-occurring frequency. The lines will be grouped with a Location on the Client Invoice, separate from any Service related fees (which typically originate from Billable Expenses or Client Service Fees).

New endpoint for unified Services

As part of our infrastructure upgrade to simplify Discovery, the endpoints for "/vendor-services" and "/client-services" have been unified into the "/services" endpoint. The previous endpoints have been deprecated and are no longer available.

Various bug fixes

• We fixed a pagination issue on some API endpoints that made it hard to navigate all API results.
• We resolved an authentication issue that affected the ability to view PDF attachments for Vendor Invoices and Client Invoices.

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If you made it this far, you're awesome. Thank you for spending your time to better understand the progress we continue to make on delivering the best software for your needs.

I do have one favor to ask from you. If you're a current user of Discovery, send us a testimonial please. Compare Discovery to your old process. What do you love about Discovery? How does it make your work easier? Faster? Better? Be specific and quantify it in terms of time or dollars or percentages. It really helps us understand where you see value. As always, all customer names and companies remain anonymous. help@discoveryapp.io is the place to send your testimonial!

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