Vision 7.0 was released 3 years ago and in that time there have been 6 releases of Deltek Vision.
During this time Deltek has continued to innovate Vision and make it more accessible to everyone within your organization, and not just the back office staff who live every day in the system. iAccess (formerly Navigator) was introduced with a slick web-based, browser-agnostic interface to help project managers, principals, and business development team enter and extract the information they need without ever having to login to Vision. Deltek also release mobile apps for people working in the field like Tough Time and Expense and Touch CRM. Kona was developed and integrated with Vision to improve team collaboration.
Vision Performance Management (VPM) has been a game changer to the product offering incredibly robust business intelligence tools. Deltek Vision also received a huge infrastructure upgrade with Deltek First Vision Essentials. Since its release, hundreds of Vision customers have migrated from on-premise to the cloud. Within a couple of years, a majority of Vision users will be in the cloud.
Since the release of Vision 7.0, Deltek has blazed a trail of constant, consistent improvement. Change is being driven by feedback and enhancement requests, Vision user groups, industry trends, and the evolution of technology. As you can see, a lot has changed over the past few years. In this post we’ll provide a quick overview of what you may have missed and what to expect going forward.
Deltek Vision 7.0-7.3
Vision 7.x saw plenty of big improvements in the first few releases. We already wrote about Vision 7.3, but some of the highlights include:
- Contract Management
- User Defined Info Centers
- Security Refinements
- InDesign Proposals
- VPM
- Invoice Approvals
- Transaction document management (TDM)
- Credit Card Reconciliation
- Internationalization
- And much, much more!
Deltek Vision 7.x also brought us iAccess and Deltek Touch mobile apps. iAccess of course was designed for project managers, business development, and enter timesheets and expense reports. The mobile functionality of Deltek Touch literally delivery Time & Expense and the power of CRM to your fingertips.
Deltek Vision 7.4
Vision 7.4 was released just over a year ago in January, 2015. This was actually a big release that included a number of large features, including:
- Fee Estimating
- Approval Workflows
- Task Dependencies
- Purchasing Enhancements
- Invoice Template Editor Improvements
- More Internationalization
- Translation
Deltek Vision 7.5
Vision 7.5 was another big release with a number of requested enhancements. You can read more about preparing for Vision 7.5 here.
New Asset Management Module
The new Vision Asset Management module give you the ability to easily create, track, manage, depreciate and dispose of fixed assets. It integrates with Vision purchasing and accounting. You can import/export asset records, customize depreciation, and assign assets to employees. This is a big deal because it gives you an accurate, complete view of all assets that can quickly and easily be managed leading to more informed decision-making.
Multi-Company Employees
This new feature allows you to associate employees to more than one company. You can still identify the “Home” company for each employee (primary activity). There are plenty of company-specific and non-company specific fields, tabs and options available. You can also report on company-specific info like time accrued. This feature improves employee data integrity with a single employee record and reduces manual data entry.
Absence Requests and AP Invoice Approvals
Employees can now easily request time off with color coding built in so that you can easily track requests. You can also review capacity before approval to check deadlines. With the AP invoice enhancements, you can upload, submit and approve vendor invoices. You can even review progress and history of approvals. Vision easily handles simple or complex approvals with delegations and/or conditions. All of these leads to fewer phone calls and emails chasing down approvals.
General Ledger Budgeting & Bank Reconciliation
The new GL budgeting and bank rec features give you the ability to create, manage, and edit multiple GL budgets for reviews and approvers from a single view. The new abilities to import bank statements, automate common entries, automatically match records, and manually match remaining records improve accuracy and transparency while saving time for accounting teams.
Talent Management Integration
Last year Deltek acquired HR Smart and rebranded it Deltek Talent Management. Since then they’ve been interacting the entire product into Vision. Phase 1 focused on sharing employee data. Initiation of a new hire creates an employee record in Vision and the employee master data is still maintained in Vision. The main benefit right now is seamless integration for employee creation as well as no duplicate data entry and improved data accuracy. We’re really looking forward to seeing this product get flushed out over time and we’ll be writing more about it as more information comes out later this year.
Project Planning Enhancements
We’ve seen more intuitive and consistent task dependencies behaviors that are easier to use and understand with expanded right-click functionality and a shortcut to insert unplanned employees with JTD in plan. We’ve also see more visibility into iAccess plans with plan links that are now automatically updated in the project record and an indicator when the plan is unpublished.
iAccess – PM & EM Enhancements
The new PM & EM enhancements make iAccess more intuitive. They make it much easier to accommodate multi-company core features as well as find the projects you need more quickly. The employee space has a find field in labor code lookup and multi-company employees can enter timesheets for their home company. The PM space now supports custom project search and allows you to edit ETC hours for tasks already underway as well as spread ETC proportionally.
Touch – Timesheet Auditing
New enhancements allow you to enter time with auditing enabled and view changes in the timesheet summary screen. You can also review audited changes before approving them, meaning no more calls into the office for details. Enhanced mobile features let you to get more details when needed from mobile device, letting you get more done from anywhere the project takes you.
CRM & Proposal Enhancements
The new Client Touch Report makes it easier to stay in front of clients when it matters most. Proposals are streamlined with easier selection of projects and employees for said proposals. You can also find Service Estimate totals in merge templates as well as merge several InDesign projects or resumes into a single page. There’s no reason you shouldn’t leverage valuable content for proposals.
iAccess – BD Enhancements
The new business development enhancements in iAccess allow your BD teams to create customer searches and saved reports, all easily accessed via a new and improved dashboard. BD now has key information at their fingertips. Quickly and easily find the data you need when you need it and save time getting the information you need regularly.
More Learning Opportunities
If you haven’t taken a look at Vision lately we encourage you to check out some of the upcoming Deltek events. Deltek holds monthly live demos on Resource Planning, CRM and VPM. Throughout this year they’ll also be holding a number Deltek Clarity Tour events all over the country. Be sure to sign up for our email list if you’re located in Honolulu or Baton Rouge. Lastly you might be interested in attending one of the following webinars:
- Security, Disaster Recovery and Clarity of Deltek ERP in the Cloud
- 9 Places Your Firm is Losing Profit and How to Find It
Be sure to sign up for your local Deltek Vision user group and feel free to give us a call if you’d like to have a conversation about upgrading Deltek Vision or migrating to the cloud.
