August 30, 2026
A short week, and both entries are about scope: doing exactly what you asked for
and nothing beside it.
Importing a spreadsheet of users updates the people it names and leaves everyone
else alone. If you import a roster on a schedule, each run touches only the members
named in that file.
On Build, adding someone to a stage with batch mode switched off puts them on that
stage only. Off means one.
Maintenance
Importing a spreadsheet of users updates the people it names and leaves everyone
else alone. If you import a roster on a schedule, each run touches only the
members named in that file.
Maintenance
On Build, adding someone who is already working to a stage with Batch mode
off puts them on that stage only.
Create batch is unchanged and is still how you put someone on several stages
deliberately.
Maintenance
Add a second shift to a shop and the Shifts list keeps working. Open it, sort it,
archive a row. All of it behaves the way it does everywhere else.
New
Departments can now record a day people work more hours, alongside the
days they work fewer or none at all. It is the same entry either way: name the
days, name the hours, and those hours become the day. A week of doubles is
06:00 to 18:00 with a break in the middle. A ten-hour Friday to make a due date
is one entry on one day.
Availability does the same for one person, a handful of people, or a whole
team. Pick who, pick Extra hours, and the hours you give them replace their
normal day for as long as the entry runs. Somebody can be down for a longer week
and still call in sick on the Wednesday. The sick day is taken off the longer
day, not the one they used to have.
Breaks come along. A person whose regular day is 08:00 to 16:00 with a half hour
for lunch still gets that half hour on a 06:00 to 16:00 day, so the day counts as
nine and a half hours worked rather than ten.
A day nobody normally works needs saying out loud. Tick include days they do
not normally work and a Saturday becomes a working Saturday. Leave it clear and
an entry that happens to span a weekend leaves the weekend alone, which is what
you want when you are shortening a week around a holiday.
Set an entry to repeat and it stays one thing afterwards. Open any occurrence and
you can change or cancel just that day, that day and every one after it, or all of
them at once. Moving a standing Wednesday off school no longer means opening
twenty-six records.
The two department tabs are now Holidays for the whole department and
Availability for one person at a time.
Timesheets and Planning both follow. A longer day expects longer hours,
so somebody who works eight of a ten-hour day reads as short rather than as done.
Planning marks every schedule change on the person's row, whichever way it moves
the day: their time off, a longer or shorter day of their own, and their
department's closures and shortened days. Hover or click a mark to see the
reason. When more than one applies to a day, the person's own record wins over
the department's, and an absence wins over everything.
That same order now decides the hours a day is measured against everywhere,
including the timesheet and the payroll push. Give somebody hours on a day their
department is closed and they are on the schedule for those hours. Before, the
closure won and the day counted as nothing for them.
Improved
Opening Inventory, Pick Lists, an inbound delivery, or a location now
uses the same sidebar and layout as Planning and Build.
The screens and URLs have not changed. Looking up stock, picking material, and
receiving a delivery work the way they already did.
New
A new Materials area tracks the stuff your builds are made of: an item
catalog with on-hand stock by location, bills of materials on routes and
orders, pick lists that stage material to a job, and inbound deliveries that
receive stock in.
Put the material on a route once and every order built from it starts with the
full list, scaled to the order quantity. A line can be per unit or per order, so
one crate per job stays one crate however many units you build.
On an order's Materials & Production tab, every part shows plan against
actual as it moves through stages: Made where it's created, Processed
where it's worked on without being created or consumed (you set the stage
count), and Used where it's consumed. Consumables and tracked-only parts
record counts without moving stock.
Improved
The Planning spreadsheet export has an Assigned column with the names of the
people on each row.
Before this the file gave you a headcount and nothing else, so a plan you
filtered by person came out unable to show who it was for. Each row names the
people assigned to it, so an order with its work assigned further down stays
empty and the names sit on the stages and components that carry them. The
column is read-only, and imports ignore it.
Maintenance
Opening a page from the menu or a link inside the app now brings up that page
every time. When we ship an update while you have the app open, it picks up the
new version on its own, so at most you'll notice one quick automatic refresh.
Before this, right after an update a page could occasionally come up blank or as
plain text until you refreshed the browser.
Maintenance
Open an order panel, a pop-up, or Build's Controls tray, and the round help
bubble in the bottom-right corner gets out of the way. It comes back the moment
you close it, and the ? button in the header opens the same support chat
whenever you need it.
Before this, the bubble could sit on top of those buttons and block them
completely: Send on a new comment, Save on an order panel, or the last
few rows of Build's Controls tray on a laptop or tablet screen.
New
Admins have a new Settings › Company page for settings that apply to the
whole company. You no longer need to contact us to change these.
On it today:
- Company name, as it appears in the organization switcher, exports and
emails.
- Public form link lifetime: how long a public form link stays open before
it expires, from 1 to 30 days, or never. Links you already sent keep their
original lifetime.
- Edit actual dates: whether your team can edit a deliverable's actual
started and completed dates.
- New user notifications: the notification settings new team members start
with. People can still change their own afterwards, and nothing changes for
existing users.
Every change made on this page is recorded in Settings › System Log, so you
can always see who changed what and when. The page is visible to admins, and
you can grant it to other roles from Settings › Roles under Company
settings.
New
Photos added to a form entry now record when they were added and who added
them. With Time and user stamp on form photos turned on in Settings ›
Company › Forms, that shows as a stamp in the bottom-right corner of the photo
when you open it full-size, and as a line of text under the photo on shared
preview links and in PDF exports, where photos are too small to read a stamp
on.
The time shown is the local time on the device that added the photo, wherever
the photo is viewed later. Photos added through a public form link show the
time only, since there is no signed-in user.
The setting is off by default and changes nothing until you turn it on. Your
own admins can switch it on from the Company settings page, so you no longer
need to ask us. Photos added before this release have no recorded time or user,
so they stay exactly as they were. Shops working toward ISO 9001 can use it as
part of the audit trail on quality records.
New
Departments have two new tabs. Out of Office records the days one person is
away, with a reason and an optional note only managers can read, either for a
whole day or for part of one. Holidays records the days a whole department is
closed or working shorter hours, as a single entry covering the whole range, so a
shutdown week is one thing to create and one thing to change your mind about.
Timesheets knows about both. A day somebody is away no longer shows up as
unworked hours, and neither does a day their department was closed.
The cell is marked with the reason, so a reviewer can see why the day is empty
without opening anything. A part day still expects the hours around it. If
somebody is out from 10 until 2, the rest of that shift is still theirs to work.
Planning shows it too. Grouped by People, each person's row shades the
days they are not available, in a lighter tone for a part day than a full one.
Hover a shaded stretch and it names the reason. Assigning somebody to work that
overlaps their time off still asks first, and you can go ahead anyway.
Recording time off does not touch hours anybody actually worked. If somebody
comes in on a day they were down as away, their check in and their sessions
stand, and the day is flagged the way any other unexpected day is.
New
Turn on Processed (rounded) hours in BSWL Labs, then use Round hours to
the shift for each department. Check-ins and check-outs inside your grace
periods are recorded at the scheduled shift start and end.
You can set check-in and check-out rounding separately. Session chaining can
also carry each task's time through to the next task. Once a worker's day has
settled, labor dashboards and order details use those processed hours.
Improved
On Staff Overview and on a person's own Attendance page, their tasks now
name what the work sits in, between the order and the stage: the component, or
the phase where the work is not split into components. Searching that ID finds
whoever is on it.
Someone batched to several components of the same order and stage used to get a
line for each, all reading identically, so neither screen could tell you which
ones they were actually on.
New
Forms > Entries now has a single Export button. It opens a dialog where you
pick what you want out, and each choice states what it will cover before
anything is generated.
Excel workbook is the new one. It carries every entry the current filters
cover, not just the rows on screen. The first sheet lists them all with each
entry's order, stage, form and version, its status, who submitted it, how many
times it passed or failed across rework, and a link back to the entry.
Every form template in the export then gets its own sheet, holding that
template's entries with all of their answers as columns and a count of the
files attached to each question. Table answers also get a sheet of their own,
laid out row by row so they can be pivoted. Exporting a whole order or stage
therefore returns every answer in one file, with no need to filter to a single
form first. Photos, files and signatures are not in the workbook: open an entry
link to view them.
Printable forms and Photos only are the downloads that used to sit
behind the print button, unchanged, including the link that opens the forms in
your browser while the file is being prepared. Both cover the entries the list
has loaded, so scroll further down before exporting to take in more of them.
Maintenance
A role that still has people assigned can't be deleted. The confirmation tells you
how many people hold it, so you can move them to another role in Settings /
Users and then delete the empty one.
Merging two roles into one is a two-step job: reassign the people, then delete the
role they left.
New
Indented rows on a Smartsheet schedule now come into BuildingSwell as a real
tree, and a tree you build in BuildingSwell is written back to the sheet with the
same nesting. Phases and components sit under their order on both sides instead
of arriving as a flat list.
Each row carries its own detail rather than borrowing the order's. A phase or a
component keeps its own name, due date, cost code, assigned people, tags, project
and route, so a nested row on the sheet says the same thing the deliverable says
in Planning.
Whoever has children owns the shape. If a row already has child rows on the
sheet, applying a route in BuildingSwell will not expand a second structure
beside them: the sync leaves the row as it is and says so in the activity log.
The same goes the other way: re-indenting a row in Smartsheet after it has
synced leaves the BuildingSwell tree unchanged, and the run summary lists every
row that moved, so both sides can see where the structures differ.
Connection errors also read like what actually happened. A failing sync used to
report the same sentence whichever call broke; it now names the request, how many
times it was retried, and what the other side answered, so a problem at
Smartsheet is no longer indistinguishable from a problem with your credentials.
Maintenance
You can now add a work session that is still running. Leave the end time empty,
and the session saves as in progress, with a live timer in place of the end time
until someone stops it.
Before, an empty end time turned the field red and kept Save switched off. The
only way to record work in progress was to wait for it to finish and enter both
times afterwards.
This covers the last 24 hours, so an overnight shift counts: a session that
began the evening before can still be saved as running after midnight, when its
start time sits on the previous day. Older sessions are unchanged and still take
both times, since a session that far back is finished, not running.
New
Cargo used to ride one truck or none: adding a phase to a delivery was all or
nothing, and the same phase could never sit on two active deliveries. An order
that takes three trucks had no honest way to say so.
Now a phase with a unit count carries a quantity on each delivery, so
twenty-five units can go on today's truck and the rest on the next one. The
split happens on the delivery itself, with no restructuring work in Planning,
and the quantities across deliveries can never exceed what the phase owes. For
one-of-a-kind cargo that ships in pieces, a partial-shipment mark covers the
same ground without unit counts.
Completing a delivery now advances only what it actually carried, and the
phase completes when the last of its units lands. A short shipment recorded at
completion releases the rest for another trip instead of closing the phase.
Planning shows every delivery a phase rides, including the pieces already
delivered.
New
Being assigned to work now means hearing about it. Assignees automatically get
updates for the things that matter on their orders, phases, and stages:
comments, date changes, status movement, holds, and documents, each scoped to
the item itself, without setting anything up first.
You decide what "hearing about it" means. Settings, under Notifications, holds
your subscription template: which updates turn on when you're assigned to or
follow something, how far down they reach, and which of them also email you.
Every order, phase, and stage also has its own control, so you can follow
something you're not assigned to, or mute an item that's gotten noisy and
silence everything from it in one move.
Notifications themselves got clearer too. Each one names the exact item it's
about and where it sits, so a phase put on hold reads with the phase, its
order, and its project attached. Replies on discussions you've written in keep
reaching you either way.
Your existing choices carry over. Notification types you had turned on stay
on, and ones you had off stay off. A few update types are new in this
release, like date changes, holds, and status changes. Those start on, scoped
to the item itself, and you can turn any of them off in Settings.
Read this online at https://changelog.buildingswell.com/notes/week/2026-w35