TBS Commitment, Customer Demand Spur Massive Claritas Q3 Update.

Potomac Falls, Virginia – Technology & Business Solutions LLC has completed the final QC phase for its latest quarterly update for Claritas, its well-received project financial management SaaS for Deltek. The general availability release for the Claritas Q3 update is slated for September 23.

“The Claritas Q3 update is going to be our biggest ever, driven not only by the TBS commitment to an aggressive development roadmap to be the best, but by a groundswell of demand from the Claritas community,” says TBS co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Joe Jezior. “As the circle of users at each Claritas organization grows – from project managers to financial leaders to division heads to the executive team – our customers want more.”

Headlining the massive third-quarter update for Claritas are:

• NEW! My Workforce Module. An accessible and interactive hub for project labor utilization, the Claritas My Workforce Module delivers posted and unposted direct contract hours by employee or subcontracted resource, as well as budgeted hours and indirect labor analysis. Employee labor may also be grouped and viewed by department, division or OBS. Like all Claritas modules, My Workforce provides real-time project information in a fully interactive and panoramic context. So, Team Leaders, PMOs, and other business managers may examine their labor utilization at a grouped or consolidated level, drill directly into individual employee hours by contract, and then even further into specific timesheet entries – all on the same screen, all in real time, anywhere they have an internet connection. “This is proactive information for action,” says Mr. Jezior. “Not static data for head-scratching.”

• NEW! My Budgets Excel Integration. Claritas has always leveraged project budgets directly from Deltek GCS Premier or Costpoint and Deltek Budgeting & Planning. Now, based upon a significant volume of customer requests, Claritas directly uploads and integrates project budgets from Microsoft Excel, the most widely used budgeting tool for PMs and accountants. “We’ve taken a flexible approach to project budgeting,” says TBS Vice President Eric Brown, whose team develops Claritas, the TBS Integrated Cloud Exchange platform (I.C.E.), and the new TBS Deltek Disaster Recovery product called Stratas DR. “So, whether you use Deltek core accounting, or Budgeting & Planning, or Excel, or a combination of all three for your project budgets, Claritas delivers that complete financial picture, in real time.” The Claritas My Budgets module accommodates a 5-year project budget cycle allocated by months and years. Aggregated project budget histories are integrated too. Labor Category and Financial budget integration is slated for the Claritas Q4 release.

• Enhanced Claritas User Interface. Persistent usability testing and user feedback have been integrated into the Claritas design and development process since the product’s initial build and launch. With the release of the Claritas Q3 update, customers will enjoy the first fruits of this systemic process with many new interface enhancements. The new Claritas UI improvements include larger and brighter function buttons for improved readability and IPad and tablet performance, bigger and clearer module and view labeling and titles, and more prominent and intuitive bread-crumb navigation. “Claritas was borne out of a dialogue with our customers who were looking for more from their Deltek systems, particularly when it came to on-screen interactions,” says Mr. Jezior. “TBS worked hand-in-hand with usability and human factors experts to craft the user paradigm and experience that today is Claritas. And, we’re extremely proud to continue this customer-focused approach by delivering an even better user experience less than one year later.”

• A local Claritas synchronization tool for organizations running Deltek GCS on-site and Deltek Time & Expense in the TBS Cloud. Powered by the TBS I.C.E. integration platform, organizations running their own GCS Premier systems may now add a “local agent” to give their project teams, financial managers, and business leaders immediate access to Claritas -- the very same Claritas experience enjoyed by TBS-hosted customers. TBS Support works directly with an organization’s IT staff to install the on-site synchronization tool. The entire process -- from loading to testing to the initial Claritas sync -- averages about 90-minutes. Then, Claritas synchronizes posted, unposted and unprocessed project data from GCS and Time & Expense in real-time, based upon schedules Claritas users set themselves.

The Claritas Q3 update is the most impressive so far for TBS, which launched Claritas in October of 2010. At that time TBS promised not only to empower Deltek customers with a first-of-its-kind cloud-powered project performance management suite, but to enhance Claritas with frequent and consistent product updates.

“If you look at the marketplace, the real leaders in SaaS are always enhancing their products with improved functionality, new features, and better user experiences,” says TBS co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jay Ethridge. “That’s real SaaS, and that’s what we do at TBS. With Claritas, our customers not only increase their Deltek ROI today, but they get an even greater return quarter, by quarter, by quarter.”

Minority-owned TBS is the largest Enterprise Cloud host provider for Deltek® software. More than 480 government contractors and project-based businesses host their Deltek software with TBS, with over 23,000 daily TBS Cloud users.  The TBS Cloud is the most secure (SSL, AES 256-bit data encryption) hosting environment for Deltek products, providing the most robust audit-compliant platform available, SAS 70 Type II, MA201, ITAR, SOX, now SSAE16.

The first SaaS product from Technology & Business Solutions LLC, Claritas aggregates project data from organizations’ TBS-hosted Deltek products, and serves it to users in a suite of connected, customized and interactive dashboards and performance modules for Financial Managers, Project Managers and Business Leaders.

For additional information about TBS Claritas contact Brent Stinar at 703.444.6562, extension 501, or visit the TBS On-Line Resource Center at tbs-llc.com/resource-center/doc/tbs-video-intro-to-Claritas.