June 2021 Release Notes

Your Kahua experience is improving as we work to release new features and correct errors. Below is the improvements you'll find in the latest release:

Desktop Hosts

Task Navigation To Source Document

A quick but useful usability improvement. In the Tasks app, you can quickly jump to the related document with a new link on the task itself.  The link will navigate the user to the project and app that the task is sourced from.   All permissions will be respected.

DocuSign File Size Limit

The individual file size limit has been increased from 23MB to 46MB. The cumulative total of all files remains unchanged at 92MB.  Kahua will continue to warn users in the event they attempt to send files that exceed either of these limits.

Design Review

• Users now have the ability to select multiple files to download in bulk from a Design Review Set
• When adding Comments to a Design Review, users can optionally include the page number with their comments

Domain Setting - Session Expiration

Two additional settings have been added to the Authentication tab.  These settings will automatically terminate a user session without the ability to save any unsaved content.  It is recommended that these settings only be enabled for highly secure use cases as these setting may result in loss of any in progress documentation:

• Expire user sessions after X minutes of inactivity – This setting will sign a user out after the defined period of inactivity.  
• Expire user session after X minutes – This setting will sign a user out after the defined period of time has elapsed, regardless of the user being active or not

Cost Management Apps Performance Improvements

Kahua cost documents historically contained empty, redundant attributes envisioned for purposes no longer applicable.  

Kahua has updated these documents and associated applications to only contain the attributes necessary for their business processes.  

This update applies to Kahua managed applications as well as customer and partner owned applications.

You will notice performance improvements throughout the cost system, plus project-based applications such as Capital Planning. In addition, less attributes improve the system usability for such things defining filters, building portable views, Kbuilder navigation, using the Kahua API, data store reporting, etc.  

A future update will cull this redundant data from the database, further improving read-based activities such as opening documents and running reports.

Your apps should work just as before, just faster and easier to manage.  

There is a minor risk that some integrations or external reports that Kahua has no knowledge of may have inadvertently created dependence on these empty attributes.   For example, perhaps some of these empty attributes were included in reports or custom processes, or perhaps an integration explicitly filtering out certain attributes. The removal of these attributes may cause some hiccups to these peripheral processes.

'Kahua for X' Cost Applications

Contract SOV (Schedule of Values) Breakdown

The new Contract SOV Breakdown application is now available!

The Contract SOV Breakdown application allows you separate the approval of the contract from developing the contract’s breakdown for payment application processes.  

This is available for the Kahua supplied Kahua for Owner, Kahua for GC, and Kahua for K-12 packages.   It is currently only available for expense applications. SOV Breakdown for funding contracts will be available in a future release.

First off, if you choose not to use the SOV Breakdown, you can continue to use your existing expense processes as-is.  You can even completely disable the SOV Breakdown on projects via configuration and settings.

The SOV Breakdown injects itself between the commitment documents, ie: the contract and the change order, and the pay request. It allows you to:

• Breakdown the contract line items into as much detail as required
• Approve some or all of the line items for inclusion onto the pay request
• Control line-item numbering as you need on your pay request.
• Control which contract change orders are included in the pay request
• Incorporate updates from contracts and change orders into the SOV Breakdown and pay request, if your processes allow it
• Help support contingency and allowance processes via controlled changes to the SOV Breakdown.

Multi Currency Updates

The first release of multicurrency in the Kahua for Owner package came out in May 2021, our 2021.3 release. In our 2021.4 release, we completed the multicurrency updates to Kahau for GC and Kahua for K-12.  

We also released the multicurrency section on payment requests and payment applications, allowing you to track exchange rate gains and losses due to exchange rates differences between planned and actual spending on payment documents.

Expense Pay Requests - Manual Retainage Option

Retainage on Expense Pay Requests can now be set manually per line item on the pay request. This enhances the existing line-item Retainage % rules to support the precise retainage values required during the life of contract.

Subcontractor Cost Applications