Knowing what a day of work costs
On the same task, an excavator operator and a labourer do not cost the same thing. Until now, Sentinel counted hours — all alike, all priceless. The real figure was rebuilt at the end of the season, in a spreadsheet, from memory, at the exact moment it had to go into a grant application.
Sentinel 3.1.0 brings work roles. You describe your trades and their hourly rate once, and every hour logged on a task arrives with its cost.
One rate per trade, not per person — The rate lives on the role rather than on the individual: a revision happens in one place, and nobody has to know what a colleague is paid. A role can also carry no rate at all — that is the case for volunteers, whose hours you want without wanting an amount.
The role follows the member, not the entry — You give each member their role once, and it applies everywhere after that. Nothing to pick when logging hours: the role name simply shows next to each participant. The rate that sticks is the one from the day of the entry — revising your rates in July does not rewrite the cost of the work done in May.
Hours without an account count too — A subcontractor, a day labourer, an excavator rented by the week: a "Without an account" line carries a role and a duration, with nobody behind it. The cost still lands, because the rate lives on the role.
Each person's own duration, in one entry — In the field, a single entry can hold different durations: six hours for the three who put in the day, two for the one who turned up late in the afternoon. You set a default duration, you tick everybody, you fix the exceptions. And an entry can be corrected or deleted, which was not possible before.
Seeing amounts is a separate right — A crew can log its hours without ever seeing a rate: the roles still show, the prices do not.
The task then hands you its hours and its cost broken down by role — how many machine hours, how many hours of manual work. And a role that is no longer used steps aside without erasing the past: the hours already recorded keep their name and their amount.
The dashboard now reads in two columns
The home page stacked thirteen cards of equal weight on a grid, four doughnuts with no legend, and pushed the trail table all the way to the bottom. Everything was there, nothing stood out — and two different questions were being read in the same block: where the network stands today, and what got done this week.
Sentinel 3.1.0 pulls the two apart.
On the left, where you stand — Four balances — critical tasks, open tasks, structures at risk, overdue reports —, each with its line and its gap against the previous period, spelled out instead of implied. Below them, the breakdown by status, priority and risk moves from doughnuts to bars with a legend: the name and the count read without hovering.
On the right, what the period produced — A column of totals: tasks completed per day, hours worked and their eight-week trend, labour cost broken down by role, and the reports received. That is where work roles show up as money.
Trails move up — The "Where it happens" table is sorted by load, with a column that shows at a glance where the work is piling up.
When a block has nothing to show, it keeps its shape, in grey, instead of printing a message: on a small place, eight aligned "No data" said nothing more than an empty page. Along the way, the left-hand navigation is grouped into universes — General, Organization, Configuration — behind a rail of icons: nothing disappeared, everything is one step closer.
Exports move out of the dialog
Exporting meant opening a window that started from an empty filter, redoing the sorting you had just done in the list, then waiting in front of it with nothing else to do.
The panel starts from what you are looking at — The export opens on the section's own filter and states its result in numbers: "12 tasks out of 318 · Filtered on: Status, Trail". The scope options are gone — there is only one setting, the filter — and a preview shows the first three rows of the workbook, with its real columns.
The file arrives on its own — Preparation is tracked in a card at the bottom right and the download starts as soon as it is done. You can close the panel, switch section, keep working: an export is no longer interrupted.
Your recent exports stay within reach — The last five files are listed with their time and their contents, and download again in one click. The file name is suggested and then editable, instead of the same name for everyone every time.
The structure list comes out in Excel too — The full inventory leaves as a workbook, not just the inspection reports. The reports PDF moves to the same panel, with the same tracking and the same history — an export launched from the tasks shows up in the structures list.
Editing tasks without flying blind
"Edit Tasks" opened a window where half the width was spent listing the tasks concerned. You could see which ones were going to move, never what was going to happen to them — and you had to open the confirmation dialog to find out.
Before → after, line by line — Each property states the batch's current breakdown: "8 New · 4 In progress → Ready", "33 unassigned · 3 Group 2 · 1 Group 1". The useful question before clicking is not "which tasks", it is "what is going to move".
See the tasks before you commit — A button widens the panel and lists the batch; one click opens the task in full, its map and its photos, without leaving the screen or losing the settings in progress.
The folder joins the editable properties: a whole batch is filed in one go, or taken out of the folder it was in. An important fix comes with the redesign — a batch edit launched from the web unassigned the task and detached it from its project, even when only the status was being changed. What is not switched on no longer moves. And the guard stays the same: with no filter, nothing goes, so a whole place cannot be edited by accident.