With festive cheer in the air, while the product team at Accelo have been focusing mostly on filling stockings, they've still found some time to deliver a few goodies in the last week. As a reminder, we've got three betas running at the moment - JIRA, Zapier and QuickBooks Payments - if you'd like to know more or get involved, email [email protected].
Smarter use of tax codes for QuickBooks Online
JIRA Beta - Continued Improvements!
Improving the Client Portal Invitation Experience
More details when exporting Expenses
Option to Exclude Material Code from Customer PDF Invoice
Changing a Project’s Type now easier than ever
Remember(berries) in Client Bulk Invoicing
Adding new Send invoice permission
Managing Email Notifications for Expenses and Receipts
Create Activity - Hitting “Enter” key now confirms time
Bugfix: Fallback data for Client & Contact csv import
Bugfix: Filtering the ticket list by specific companies
Improvement: Continuum sync improved for long ticket titles & descriptions
All accounting software uses ledger and tax codes to correctly record transactions, and with our enhancement of the QuickBooks Online integration to support payments, we have started importing not just income but also payment or expense codes into Accelo. One thing we didn't cover initially was making sure that only income tax codes (like sales tax or VAT you collect) were included in the drop down lists when you are creating an invoice, and were including all of the tax codes (including the ones that you pay other people on purchases) in the drop down lists. We've now fixed this.
As an application that has grown a lot since its first release a few years ago, our iOS app needs to know a lot more and be a lot smarter now than it used to be. Our engineers discovered in testing that getting set up with the iOS app involved too many different API calls to get all the necessary info to be up and running - we've now streamlined and compressed this information payload to accelerate the process of logging in and opening the app, so you can start logging work on the go exactly when you need to.
With dozens of you joining the beta this week, we’ve been able to make some important improvements and make the integration run that much smoother. Overall, you can expect a more seamlessly experience, especially people who've upgraded to the new Beta from the old integration - now the JIRA Issues and Accelo Tickets you synchronized the old way will be upgraded to the new Task-focused format whenever the JIRA issue is updated. With the new beta, project managers will benefit from having more accurate timesheeting and utilization across their projects since now, developers can now do even more in JIRA, but with fewer hiccups. If you’d like to join the beta and haven’t yet, you can sign up here.
Our team have been on a consistency “binge” over the last couple of weeks, cleaning up old parts of the product and looking for areas that can be upgraded to use newer technology. Last week we updated the Rich Text Editor in the Quote Settings (within the Admin side of Accelo) and this week we’ve done the same for the Client Portal Invitation features. You’ll notice the old text editor has been replaced with a more modern, feature-rich style, allowing you more flexibility and formatting options when configuring your client portal invitations and when sending one!
After fielding a few support emails on the subject of exporting expenses (from the Expense List screen) our Client Success team noticed a few anomalies with the detail in the export. Most notably, the Unit Charge (Price) and Total Charge amount for the expense were omitted. While restoring these we’ve also added a column to display the Mark-up % as well as adjusting the title of the “Amount” column to be “Total Cost” - to avoid any confusion.
As you would expect, the Cost related detail - including the mark-up - are not visible for regular users with Financial Visibility permission, but only visible for Admin users.
Item codes are great for accounting systems (and accountants!) since they provide extra detail for categorizing your income and expenses, but they aren’t always essential information for a client-facing invoice. So we’ve made your invoices, and invoice templates, even more customizable with a new toggle option for showing or hiding the Material Codes in the line item description.
If you’re managing a variety of services in Accelo which are tracked within the Projects module, chances are you have a few “types” of projects configured - each with a customized status workflow, unique custom fields and possibly special triggers and alerts. After creating a project and realizing you need to change the type, doing so requires a couple of steps to migrate over the fields and status information - so we never felt it was part of a simple “edit” process.. until an overwhelming number of customers kept asking how to change a project’s type! After thinking it over we realized that making the type editable within the edit project screen wasn’t such a troublesome approach - so you’ll now find this option, and when updated you’ll be taken through to the convert screen to finalize the migration.
Bulk invoicing has lots of power, but every time we were loading a standard set of options for content like Company Status, Object Type, Object Status, Object Manager, and Issue Class. Now, you won’t have to turn things on and off each time - you’ll benefit from the platform “remembering” which statuses, types and managers you filtered for last time ;-).
You might want people on your team to create invoices, but perhaps don't want them to send them to clients. This might be because you want the invoices to go out from your accounting system after approval, or because you want to check them before they go to clients (since there's no undo key for an email). This new improvement allows you to specifically restrict access to the sending of invoices, while allowing people to create them. You’ll find the new “Send Invoices” option within the permission set for Billing > Process.
Keeping you in the loop when billing & accounts related activity occurs is an important duty that Accelo upholds - albeit sometimes a little too relentlessly. This improvement ensures you now have control over whether you’re notified as expenses are logged against a project you’re managing, or when a payment is recorded against an invoice where you’re listed as the owner.
To update these new settings, just open your “Preferences” page from the user menu which appears as you mouse across your user/avatar. Look for the Billing Notifications section.
This little improvement means you can simply hit the “Enter” key after typing in timer field within the Create Activity pop-up. Upon hitting Enter, the field will validate your input, converting it to hh:mm:ss if you had entered something like “1.5” - handy if you’re using the number pad on the right of your keyboard to quickly punch in your time using decimals.
When importing client & contact data from a csv file, the import process allows you to map spreadsheet columns to the fields in Accelo. If there’s the possibility of data being across 2 columns you can instruct Accelo to look at a 2nd (or even 3rd) column as a fallback if there is no data found in the first column as each record is being imported. However a bug was recently introduced which caused the data in subsequent columns to take precedence - even when data was available in the 1st (or 2nd) columns. We’ve corrected this issue to ensure the fallback columns work as originally intended.
Filtering the ticket list based on the company/client linked to the ticket is a very handy feature, especially if you've saved the filter so you can quickly open a list of tickets for a specific set of clients you care about. This "Company" filter field was functioning correctly except when you loaded a Saved Filter using that field. Many of the selected companies (inside the filter options) were showing with “No loaded name” because the main query (listing all the matching tickets) was finishing before the filters could load the relevant company titles! We’ve taken care of this little bug now.
Our team stumbled across some Continuum sync'd tickets that weren't able to fully match their titles and descriptions into Accelo, and as it turns out, the problem came down to our database which was set to limit the title of things like tickets to be 255 characters. We've now dramatically increased the limit, so long titles/descriptions can now be synchronized properly.
