September 6, 2026
Four additions landed on the same Tuesday, and two of them are about reading an
answer off the screen instead of asking somebody for it.
Orders have a History tab: every change to the order, newest first, with the
person who made it and the time they made it, and the edits that followed from
one change sitting underneath it. Group Planning by project and each project row
now carries its own progress, hours logged against hours planned, and how far
ahead or behind the schedule it is running, counting every order under the
project rather than only the ones your filters left on screen.
The other two reach outside the app. An organisation that runs its own identity
provider can point Building Swell at it under Settings, Single Sign-On, test the
configuration before turning it on, and turn it back off again. Everyone else
signs in the same way as before, with their email filled in already. And a
drawing, markup or delivery ticket attached to a Smartsheet row now lands on the
matching order, while a file added in Building Swell goes out to that row.
The rest of the week is repair work on Settings and the integrations: a user
import that updates every name in the file, a weekday you can clear from a
repeating schedule change, a second Smartsheet connection under the same login,
and archived orders that no longer hold up a sync. You can also archive a form
template you have stopped using.
New
Orders now have a History tab: every change to that order in one list,
newest first, with the person who made it and the time they made it. Status
moves, ship dates, people added and taken off, comments, documents, work
sessions and form entries all land there.
It opens on everything under the record you are on, so an order shows what
happened on its phases and components too. This record narrows it to that
one row, and a stage starts there already, because a stage's activity is its
own. The chips above the list keep one kind of change and drop the rest, for
when you are chasing a date or a person rather than reading everything.
Where one edit set off others, the entry says which edit did it. Move a ship
date and the dates that moved with it sit underneath it, rather than arriving as
separate lines of their own. When the system makes a change off the back of
somebody's edit, the entry still names that person.
Nothing in the tab can be edited. Reading it takes the new History
permission, which offers Read and nothing else, and the tab is arriving one
organisation at a time rather than all at once. Separately, the Quality
Control tab is now called Forms wherever it appears, which is what history
calls those entries too.
New
Group Planning by project and every project row carries its own numbers: a
progress bar with the percentage done, a tick showing where the schedule says
you should be today, and hours logged against hours planned. Hover it for the
breakdown, how far ahead or behind the project is running in man hours and how
many hours are left in the plan.
The figures cover the whole project, every order under it, including rows your
current filters are hiding. Reading where a project stands is now something you
do from the list rather than by opening its orders one at a time and adding
them up.
This used to be turned on per organisation. It is on for everyone now, so there
is nothing to ask for.
New
Sign-in now starts by asking for your email address, then sends you where that
address signs in. For everyone today that is the same Building Swell login as
before, with your email already filled in.
Organisations that run their own identity provider can now point Building Swell
at it directly, under Settings → Single Sign-On. Enter the issuer URL, client ID
and secret from your provider, run the built-in test to check the configuration,
and turn it on when it passes. Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace, Okta and
any OpenID Connect provider are supported. Turning it back off restores
password sign-in straight away.
Your domains are still registered by Building Swell rather than claimed in the
app, because a domain decides where its logins go. Ask support to add or remove
one.
Under the Continue button there is now one line linking to Building Swell's
Platform Terms and Conditions. Signing in is how you agree to them, and we keep
a record of which version you agreed to and when.
New
A drawing, markup or delivery ticket attached to a Smartsheet row now lands on
the matching order in BuildingSwell, and a file added in BuildingSwell goes out
to that row. Files sit where the row sits: on a flat sheet that is the order, and
on a nested schedule a discipline row's files sit on that component or phase.
Attachments on the sheet itself land on the sheet's project, or in the Documents
Hub unattached when the sheet covers more than one project.
Re-uploading a corrected file under the same name is a normal day's work in the
field, so it is treated as one: the file becomes a new version of the document
that is already there, with the earlier version still in its history. Nothing is
matched by filename.
The sync never deletes a file. When an attachment is removed in Smartsheet,
its document leaves the active list and moves to the archive marked Removed
from Smartsheet, with the time it was noticed, and you can restore it. Removing
a file in BuildingSwell leaves Smartsheet alone, unless the file came from
BuildingSwell in the first place and you have left removal propagation on.
Link attachments (Google Drive, Box, OneDrive, a plain URL) come across as
references. The link is kept, the file is not copied, and opening it still needs
whatever access the original does.
Off until you ask for it. Under Sync documents on the Smartsheet connection
there is Pull files from Smartsheet and Push files to Smartsheet, plus
switches for link attachments and for whether archiving here removes a
BuildingSwell file from Smartsheet. The first run after turning pull on brings in
the sheet's existing attachments; that runs as its own job in the background, so
the usual sync keeps its normal pace while files catch up over one run or
several. Its progress shows in the connection's Activity list, tagged
Documents.
Improved
In Forms → Templates, the menu on a template now offers Archive. An
archived template stops appearing wherever people pick a form: attaching one to
a stage, starting a form, an order's form steps, department form triggers. The
list stays down to what your team actually uses.
Nothing that already uses the template changes. Form steps built on it keep
working and stay fillable, entries recorded with it keep their answers, and a
form link you have already handed out still opens.
Archived templates go to Settings → Bin → Form Templates, alongside every
other archived thing, and Restore there puts one back.
Before this, a template could only be deleted, and deleting was refused as soon
as anything used it. A template you had used once was yours forever.
Maintenance
Export your users from Settings, fix the names in the spreadsheet, and import
the file back. Every row is applied, whatever mix of upper and lower case the
email addresses use.
Before this, the import could stop with a message saying a user already existed,
and no names were changed.
Maintenance
A Smartsheet connection carries one sheet, so a second project needs a second
connection. Adding one used to fail on the way back from the Smartsheet sign-in
with "A resource with these values already exists", because Building Swell
allowed a single connection per Smartsheet account. Anyone with one Smartsheet
login hit that the moment they tried to map their second project.
You can now sign in with the same Smartsheet account as many times as you have
sheets to map. Each connection keeps its own sheet, mappings, schedule and
activity, and syncs on its own.
One sheet still belongs to one connection. Pick a sheet another connection is
already syncing and the mapping will not save: two connections on one sheet
overwrite each other's work every cycle. The sheet list says which connection
has it, so you can see that before you choose.
Maintenance
You can now archive orders that came from a Smartsheet sync and sync the sheet
again. The rows import as new orders, the archived copies stay in Archived, and
this works however many times you repeat it. Before, an archived order kept its
place: the row either updated the archived record or failed with "already
exists with a different type" and took the rest of its batch down with it.
Re-imported orders keep the ID from your sheet. The only exception is an ID
another order in BuildingSwell still carries, in which case the run log says the
ID was not applied and why. This applies to hierarchy sheets and flat sheets
alike.
The sync also saves its links to your rows after every batch. A run that stops
part-way no longer leaves the orders it already created unlinked, and a database
hiccup while saving links is reported per row instead of ending the run.
Maintenance
In Availability, a schedule change set to Recurring lets you turn
weekdays on and off under Repeats on while you work out the pattern. Clear
the last one and the form asks for a day back before it will let you save.
Before this, turning off the last remaining day left the page unresponsive.
Maintenance
On an iPad, tap the views control on Planning or Logistics and a Views sheet
opens. You can switch to a saved view, go back to No view, or
Save as new view.
Maintenance
Work session changes now appear in both Sessions and Check in/out as
soon as the save finishes.
Move between the two views and the latest session details are already there.
You no longer need to refresh the page after an edit.
Maintenance
Comments posted on documents in the Documents Hub keep notifying mentioned
people and reply authors the way they always have under the new
notifications. And notification coverage is easier to read: every followed
update type now shows its scope next to its name, and with Advanced
settings on, the scope picker is available for every update type, not just
the ones already followed. Picking a scope on an unfollowed type follows it
at that scope in one step.
Planned hours notifications also work at every level now. Follow them on a
phase, component, or stage, not just the whole order, and any change below
sends exactly one notification for the item you follow. The description
names the item the change was made on and the before and after values
("Welding · Cycle time: 1h → 2h") instead of one notification per touched
stage.
Maintenance
Type a quantity into Send units ahead and it stays. Send ten units on from a
stage of two hundred by typing ten, and the button confirms the number you
chose. Type more than the stage has left to give and it settles on what is
actually available.
Before this, the field snapped back to the number it opened with as soon as you
clicked away, so the only route to a smaller batch was one press of the minus
button per unit.
Maintenance
Deleting a form template that is still in use now tells you what is holding it:
a form step, a department's form trigger, or a form somebody has already filled
out. Before this it failed with an unexplained error.
Build and Timesheets mark who's out of office and which days are holidays when
you're looking at a department you've archived, the same as they do for any
other department. Before this, those markings were left off the page for an
archived department.
The automatic refresh that picks up a new version of the app while you have it
open now covers more of the ways an update can catch a page mid-action, on every
page.
Pages that remember how you left them - your column layout, filters and sort -
now come up that way on the first paint. Before this they opened with the
default arrangement for a moment and then rearranged once your settings loaded.
Maintenance
The ? in the top right is there whether or not you use the assistant. It
opens the same panel as always, with Help for the help centre, Changelog
for what has shipped, and Messages for the requests you have sent us.
With the assistant turned on, that panel opens from the ? only. The
assistant keeps the bottom right corner to itself, so the two no longer land on
the same spot.
Before this, turning the assistant on took the ? away.
Maintenance
Sign in and you land in the app. When a sign-in cannot be completed, the screen
now says so and offers to sign you out and start over.
Before this, a sign-in that could not be completed left the browser bouncing
between the login screen and the app on a blank page, with nothing to click.
Read this online at https://changelog.buildingswell.com/notes/week/2026-w36