With the holidays right around the corner, last week was a busy one! Our team crushed some long hours and were able to push several awesome improvements out for our Accelo family to enjoy - here they are!
The biggest thing we set live last week was the new and improved Contracts Module! With this module being so powerful and customizable, it was a little intimidating to set up. To make the configuration process easier, we decided to give the screens a well-deserved makeover (hint: it’s got a completely new editing interface). If you’d like to deep dive into its functionality, check out this blog post.
This update is another foundational piece behind our major Projects upgrade! With the way Milestones and Tasks were displayed before, it was hard to tackle smaller tasks like “Project Kickoff” before the heavier stuff under Milestones since these smaller tasks would automatically get reordered below Milestones (which was confusing and frustrating). Many of you requested that we not force the Tasks to be reordered, and so that’s exactly what we did with this update. Now you can set up your project plans with whatever order of Milestones and Tasks that you like.
We shipped a number of small improvements to our List and Filter screens last week, making it easier for folks to use our powerful filter feature on our list screens to find that they want. Improvements include:
We made a bunch of improvements to the iOS app last week - they’re currently available for our iOS Beta testers and we hope to get them released later this week (when Apple finishes their review process).
Here’s a breakdown:
One of the things we wish we'd done differently when we were starting out was use the word "Owner" instead of "Manager" for identifying the user who is responsible for a Project, Milestone or other work in Accelo. As part of our projects upgrade work, this week we rolled out the first editions of what will be custom titles for this role of Owner/Manager.
Now, if you're an Admin on your Accelo account and you go to the Configuration > Module Titles, you can choose whether to call the person who's responsible for a Project or Milestone the "Owner", "Grand Poobah" or leaving it as the previous default, "Manager". We're working on bringing this functionality to our other modules - Sales, Tickets, Retainers, etc - soon too!
Our JIRA Beta continues apace, with a number of improvements over the last week. Highlights include:
For those of you that expressed interest in joining our Zapier beta, last week Zapier made our application available to anyone in the world!
Now you can search “Accelo” in Zapier and find out app - for more details and how it works, check out our beta documentation here.
This was a small but important bug fix. While each Contact can have multiple links or affiliations, if they weren’t active, the invite would break. Now if you try inviting someone to view the client portal, even if they aren’t active, it will work.
The challenge here was that time (hours, minutes, seconds) doesn't convert into decimals very well, but your accounting system needs to work off decimal quantities. If you use lots of decimals you can match things up pretty well, but by the PDF invoices we were sending out rounded the quantity numbers displayed to 2 decimal places.
An example of where this became a problem was if you had 5 hours and 33 minutes logged, it would populate nicely at 5.55 (60x5+33/60), but if you had 5 hours and 32 minutes logged, while the real value is 5.5333333333, we’d cut it off at 5.53 to keep things looking clean.
The trouble there was that even though all was accurate on the back end from a billing perspective (where we store 6 decimal places), your clients couldn’t see that, and so when they analyzed their invoices they might’ve thought you were overcharging them in some cases (i.e. your Rate on the PDF multiplied by the Quantity may not have matched the line item amount).
To fix this, we checked for more decimal places on the line item, Quantity, and Rate and adjusted it to show up on the PDF when necessary so that you don’t have to deal with clients thinking you’re nickel and diming them.
This was a smaller but important UI polish for Materials and Services lists. Previously, the Code column on the Service and Materials Lists wrapped large codes well when there were spaces between the words, however, longer names (without the spaces) didn’t wrap and bled into the next column.
To fix this, we made the Code column automatically truncate the information shown when a single piece of text is longer than the column can handle.
Another small yet important update last week was fixing long text streams stretching the table column on an invoice. Before, the Edit Invoice page got a little messy when the line item description held too much text. Now with some UI polish, you can include descriptions or resolutions on invoice line items.
Last week we had a bug that didn’t let Progression Actions clone on Retainer Types the first time round. Usually, when you create a new type (in this case a new Retainer/Contract Type) you have the option to clone the workflow or business processes (i.e. a Progression) of an existing Type, which saves a lot of time in setup. With last week’s bug, the Progressions would clone but not the individual Actions (i.e. Update a field, Create a task, Send an email, Attach a file).
If you're connected to QuickBooks Online, you might’ve noticed a little “Intuit” icon in the top right corner of the web app. You might wonder why Accelo had such an ugly, poorly placed icon infecting every screen of the application - well, it is because Intuit made it a requirement of synchronizing with them.
Thankfully, Intuit have changed their policies and it is no longer a requirement. As a result, we've now joyfully killed it with fire. Don't worry if you notice it missing - the QuickBooks Sync is still working in the background (and for admins, it is accessible from the Integrations panel). We also have links from the View Invoice screen in Accelo to see the specific invoice directly in QuickBooks Online - so, much more professional and useful now than the floating button.