Questions?

We find the accounting contact to be in important part of managing our invoices, however there are also many limitations. I wanted to know of others' thoughts. Here's some of what I've found.

1) Accounting contact at the Client and Invoice level, but not the project level. 

In most cases, a company will have a single accounting contact, and having a client level accounting contact works fine. However, we have many clients with whom we have multiple project contacts, but they all have different invoice contacts. This makes it a challenge to manage the invoices. We could set up "branches" for each, and manage them as separate branches with separate accounting contacts. But that seems like a work around. 

We'd like to be able to determine an accounting contact at the project level so the PM can update or manage this information... Putting this information on the "People" card in the project would be very helpful.

2) No API connection to the accounting contact. You can't add/update the accounting contact through the API. So our work around is to create/update the main client contact information. Again, not ideal, because we will either have inconsistent data or we need to manually add accounting contacts for each new client.

I guess that's my list for the accounting contact so far. Any other thoughts or experiences?

I'm trying to generate a report, of how many quotes we have won or lost in a given time period. However, there is no time stamp for when a quote or opportunity is marked as closed won or lost. Has anyone else wanted this feature?

I guess the work around is to have the PM update the expected close date when the status is updated, but that feels like a workaround rather than something that should be pretty straight forward. 

Any thoughts?

I have a question and want to know how others deal with this.

Before XTRF, when we had a project that had a project minimum AND a discount/surcharge, we did the math in this order:

  1) Apply Project Minimum 2) Apply the discount/surcharge 3) Get total

That would lead to this type of fee (number are just to show an example):

  * Project with $10 receivables. 1) Apply $50 minimum. 2) Apply 25% rush fee 3) Total is $50+25%=$62.50

However XTRF does the math like this:

  1) Apply discount/surcharge 2) Apply the project minimum 3) Get total

That leads to this fee structure for the same receivables:

  * Project with $10 receivables. 1) Apply 25% rush fee. 2) Apply project minimum. 3) Total is $50 applied to ($10 + 25%) = $50.00

Our concern is we already have agreements with our clients on how we charge them and we don't want to negotiate changes.

Does anyone else deal with this? Our work around is for projects with project minimums AND discount/surcharges, we end up adding fees and project minimums as positive or negative receivables. However, that is a work around and a bit challenging for our PMs. Any other thoughts on this?

XTRF, is there a way to have an option on how discounts/surcharges are applied?

Many of our translators will leave comments/notes relating to projects , via their vendor portal. Because of the large amount of projects we have daily, it's not possible to be checking all the projects to see if anyone has left a note. It will be much faster, easier and more convenient, if the PMs were to receive a notification when someone leaves a note.

One of the things the customer can see on their portal are the resources (TM/TB) belonging to the client. However, they can't download them and we are wondering if there is some way how to make this possible and let clients download these resources if they specifically ask for it?

Is anyone using 3rd party/custom built SRM to enhance the Vendor Management features of XTRF?
Would love to hear about your solutions

We're looking at using time zones in a sensible way. I have seen a couple of very old topics on time zones here already, but it's not clear if they were resolved eventually or not.

My questions, both for all you brilliant users and for @XTRF:

- Can vendors set their time zones in the Vendor Portal? I couldn't really see that option, but maybe I didn't look in the right place.

- Are deadlines and other specified dates/times automatically 'recalculated' and displayed in the recipient's time zone (VP jobs, Client Portal, POs, quotes, other documents)?

- Is there a way to take time zones into account when automatically sending availability requests (Classic Projects)?

- There is the default setting of working hours for vendors - does that take different time zones into account, or is it based on system time zone?

Greatly appreciate all your insights and experiences.

I am trying to connect to a database to call data from it using java syntax and it works fine on my machine but gives me " Invalid database address " when I try to use the same code in my macro in XTRF , what possibly could be the problem ? the code seems fine as it works on my machine but gives me errors on XTRF, does XTRF have special syntax I will have to follow in order to connect to a database ?

Thanks in advance

When we start a new project via API, is it possible to select a vendor at that point? Or even an ordered list of vendors as a pre-defined vendor selection rule? 

A little background:

We connect Google Sheets to XTRF via API and we use it to automatically start complex projects for a particular client. We’re now thinking we need to take it the next step and automatically assign vendors and get the vendor assignments sent immediately. Our challenge is that the current vendor selection rules don’t work for us. We can select from a pool of vendors (via categories, or preferred vendors) but it doesn’t get us the level of detail based on projects assigned, new vs. experienced vendors, quality rating, nor does it give us the ability to ensure an equitable rotation of vendors to this client.

So, we are hoping we can somehow select the vendor outside of XTRF.

Is anyone doing something like this? Or am I thinking of this entirely wrong?

We have a few clients that seem to be moving to a model of continuous localization where we are getting frequent content with lots of small updates. We haven't really thought much about that until we saw this article on slator - https://slator.com/whys-and-hows-of-continuous-localization/?mc_cid=a38cf914b9&mc_eid=0282270890 - where we started to think that if clients are moving toward more frequent small updates, XTRF isn't well optimized. Or at least we're not using XTRF is a way that is optimized for this type of work.

I just want to know if @XTRF or any users out there have given a thought to client work that is more focused on high frequency, high touch, low volume work and how to best use XTRF in these cases?

Thanks so much!