Costpoint Delivers Powerful AI Capabilities & Optimized Workflows for Smarter Projects

With Deltek Costpoint moving to quarterly releases we continue to bring innovative new features and AI-powered capabilities that help you make data-driven business decisions and deliver smarter more successful projects.

With our 2024 Summer release, you can have smarter conversations with Ask Dela, your Digital Assistant in Costpoint, increase productivity with our new Quick Entry Expense Report, and gain deeper visibility and more control over projects thanks to highly requested user experience improvements that speed up task completion for everyday users.

Learn more about our latest release and how to get the most out of your Costpoint solution below!

Your Digital Assistant Gets Smarter

In our last quarterly release, we introduced your new digital assistant Ask Dela. This Digital Assistant in Costpoint allows everyday users to ask questions about your contracts and projects and receive data-driven answers that help you quickly check a project's status conduct a risk assessment or complete a follow-up task.

With this latest release we are evolving our digital assistant capabilities and making it even smarter! The expanded functionality allows Ask Dela to access and comprehend additional data points within Costpoint broadening the types of questions users can ask and improving the quality of responses you receive. This includes the ability for you to have a conversation with your digital assistant inquire about specific projects and ask follow-up questions to dig deeper into the responses. You will now also have access to your chat history for quick reference to the questions you’ve already asked as well as related responses. And an added bonus: Ask Dela has a new look with additional fonts and a dark mode option so you have more control over how the assistant looks to align with your individual user preferences.

You also have the ability to access and utilize Ask Dela directly from Microsoft Teams an exciting new option that's discussed in detail below.

Receive Notifications and Submit Your Time from MS Teams

This release provides more ways to be notified and interact with Costpoint with our new Costpoint MS Teams App! With this new capability you can receive all your typical notifications directly from within Microsoft Teams including alerts about project changes or if your timesheet is due—right from an application that you always have open.

This addition means you now have several options in addition to your desktop for being notified or completing the time entry process: be notified on your mobile device and utilize our mobile app for time entry receive email notifications and utilize Interactive Emails for time entry or directly from Microsoft Teams where you can receive notifications and enter submit and approve your time from an app where you already spend the majority of your time!

By speeding up this workflow and bringing more options to enter time easily and conveniently—and being one of the first in the industry to do so—we are helping government contractors speed up everyday tasks so they can get back to what’s most important: delivering successful projects.

This release also brings you the additional option to access and utilize Ask Dela from within Teams. This means you can ask questions about your people and projects and receive a data-informed reply without having to navigate to Costpoint. Or while you’re working in Teams you can request that Ask Dela complete a task for you such as bringing up your timesheet and entering a certain number of hours at whatever time is most convenient for you.

As with all our AI capabilities we continue to the safe and responsible use of AI top of mind while offering companies the ability to opt-in to AI-powered features.

Quick Entry Expense Reports to Speed Up Expense Tracking

Our reimagined time entry for government contractors is bringing real value for companies everywhere—and now we’re doing the same for expenses!

Our new Quick-Entry Expense Report provides a simpler expense entry experience for users who don’t need a complex setup. With this new option employees can quickly enter their expenses and attach receipts all from one screen—with all the accounting jargon removed—so your everyday users know exactly what’s expected.

This reimagined experience means your employees can finalize their expense reports faster and get reimbursed quicker while allowing you to maintain an up-to-date view of expenses so you budget correctly.

Optimized Processes to Increase Productivity

Costpoint users are also gaining expanded control over designated workforce start and end dates for specific projects. This highly requested feature allows customers to assign a consultant to a project for a specified period. If that individual moves to another project an end date will be automatically applied so you can maintain appropriate records and validate against time and budget information to reduce timesheet corrections which will ultimately improve the time and expense submission experience for your billable resources.

Customers with international operations who utilize our multicurrency functionality will also be able to streamline their reconciliation process thanks to a new capability that allows you to finalize items and create a Settlement Journal for remaining Functional values that should be cleared and posted a final time. This offers a better view of the impact of currency exchanges each period while allowing you to finalize the gain/loss on relevant transactions and not carry them over to future revaluation periods—streamlining your records and reconciliation process!

User Experience Improvements for Increased Project Visibility

Users of our Supplier Portal will also have a more comprehensive view within their Supplier Self-Service Portal. This allows for more visibility into historical invoices EFT info Invoice and payment status via the Supplier Portal so you gain a complete view of your invoice and outstanding payments and can make more informed decisions that lead to better cycle times.

We’re also bringing the ability to set up different furnished material types and separate Customer Furnished Material from Government Furnished Material in our Costpoint Materials domain – a highly requested change that you all voted on in Aha!

All uses of “Government Furnished Materia throughout Costpoint Materials will be renamed to “Furnished Material” and a “Furnished Material Type” subcategory will be added in the Inventory Abbreviation so users can denote Customer Government or another user-defined Furnished Material type. This enhancement will help eliminate vendor confusion and support audit preparation for manufacturing businesses.

We are also expanding our use of In-App Guidance powered by Gainsight PX which we launched in Costpoint 8.2. In-App Guidance allows us to offer interactive walkthroughs and communications that appear throughout the Costpoint application as users navigate through various screens and perform different tasks. These embedded communications allow us to introduce new features to users while providing quick tips videos and links to learning materials to help you understand and adopt the latest capabilities.

These walkthroughs are carefully crafted to deliver relevant information and guidance while allowing us to understand usage statistics that will help us continuously improve our users' experience.

Continued Innovation at a Faster Pace

Deltek is now delivering new Costpoint features and enhancements quarterly allowing us to deliver the latest innovations to our customers more quickly.

Quarterly releases mean you will now receive more consumable upgrades in a predictable cadence so you can plan accordingly. In addition to offering new features more quickly these releases are also intended to offer a more seamless upgrade experience with the ability to opt-in to and test new features for a designated period before they are deployed in your production environment. With this approach we hope to ease required change management while increasing time to value.

We believe this change will significantly benefit our customers and we are committed to delivering the best possible experience with Costpoint.

To learn more about these features and other new enhancements check out our detailed release notes.