Week of August 24, 2026
Three things arrived at once this week. Materials is a new area of its own: an item catalog with 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. Notifications now follow the work you are assigned to, with one subscription template in Settings deciding what you hear about and how far it reaches. And an indented Smartsheet schedule comes in as a real tree, so phases and components sit under their order on both sides instead of arriving flat.
The schedule also learned what a real week looks like. A department can record a longer day as well as a shorter one, a ten-hour Friday or a week of doubles, and an entry can repeat without becoming twenty-six separate records. Time off and department shutdowns are recorded in the same place, and both Timesheets and Planning stop reading a day somebody was away as unworked hours.
Elsewhere: the Planning export names who is assigned, tasks say which part somebody is working on, a session can be saved while it is still running, and deleting a role asks you to move its people first.
Know what material a job needs and what you have
New · Orders · Routes · Delivery
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.
Notifications that follow your work
New · Settings · Orders
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.
Your Smartsheet schedule and BuildingSwell now share a hierarchy
New · Integrations · Planning
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.
Put a longer working day on the schedule
New · Timesheets · Planning · Settings
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.
Plan around time off and department shutdowns
New · Timesheets · Planning · Settings
Departments have two new tabs. Availability 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.
The Planning export names who is assigned
Improved · Planning
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.
Tasks say which part someone is working on
Improved · Attendance
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.
The Shifts list stays up once a shop has more than one shift
Maintenance · Settings
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.
Moving between pages always loads the page
Maintenance · Build
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.
The help bubble steps aside while a panel is open
Maintenance · Build · Orders
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 over 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.
Deleting a role asks you to move its people first
Maintenance · Settings
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.
A session can be saved while it is still running
Maintenance · Timesheets
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.
Assigning with batch mode off assigns one stage
Maintenance · Build
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.
Importing users changes only the people in the file
Maintenance · Settings
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.