While many of our users were celebrating Thanksgiving, our product team managed to make the most of a "short" week with a number of improvements, including a new Beta for our JIRA integration, an upgrade to our Project List screen and a whole lot more!
Project Schedule/Gantt Chart available in the Client Portal
Beta for JIRA Upgrade Now Open!
Showing when a request is submitted by a staff member
Bugfix: Requests in Client Portal sometimes showing internal activity
QuickBooks Online Payments Sync (Beta)
Changing the way Accelo uses account codes from QuickBooks
Filtering Projects by work allocated to Retainer
Mobile App bugfix: Always seeing expenses you’ve submitted
GFI Max integration - checking API keys correctly
This time yesterday we released an upgrade to our Project List screen. The first of a number of improvements to Accelo's Projects Module that we're working on this quarter, this enhancement includes new ways to log time, create activities, create tasks and more.
For more information, check out our special blog post.
Due to popular demand, we’ve opened up the ability to share the schedule of a project with your client in the Accelo Client Portal. As you’d expect, it’s read-only, but gives clients a much closer view of your project plan in terms of the structure, duration of milestones and tasks, dependencies and comparing the planned timeline with the forecasted one. To enable the schedule view, when editing the Client Portal permissions (either globally for Projects, or for a specific project) just look for the new “Schedule” section and then tick the “Show Schedule” option. Your clients will then find the new Schedule tab available on the View Project page in the Portal:
Accelo has long allowed clients to connect their Accelo Tickets to JIRA Issues. Our users have told us for some time that they'd really like to have the ability to connect JIRA issues with Projects, Milestones, Tickets and Retainers, and as much as possible have their developers live inside of JIRA while allowing project teams and clients to work out a system that is a bit more business friendly like Accelo.
Our engineering team have completely rebuilt our JIRA integration, and we're looking for beta testers - if you'd like to sync JIRA Issues with Accelo Projects, Tickets and Retainers, we'd love to give you the inside running - apply to join our Beta on our blog.
This week we’ve made this clearer to see when a request was created by a colleague. The key to this is the activity/notification part of the request, which now comes from the staff member who created the request - whether submitted within the Accelo mobile app or the normal web interface.
This makes it easier to reply to the staff member when you need to clarify some of the request details with them, but you also have the ability to email the client contact using the top reply option for the request itself.
After investigating this bug report, we found that activities under a request (in the Client Portal) were listening to the Activities permission if there was a specific permission set for the Client/Company, but in the absence of this set, we were not falling back to any global portal permissions - which meant that all activities under the request were visible.
While request activities typically are back and forth between the client and your support team, for those cases where you do start some internal dialogue we know it’s essential for these messages to stay internal - so we’ve fixed this loophole by ensuring that Requests will fallback to the global portal permissions for the Company module.
When users enter payments manually or clients make payments via credit card using our Stripe or Authorize.net integrations, our QuickBooks Online users have had a blind spot - Accelo hasn't been able to create payments in QuickBooks Online automatically.
This week we released an upgrade where payments from Accelo - be they via online mechanisms or manually - can be synchronized with QuickBooks Online accounts. If you'd like to have this enabled for your account, email [email protected] and we'll turn it on for you!
The concept of “Items” was only recently introduced to Accelo, though we’ve been integrated with QuickBooks for many years now. So for a long time we’ve handled items from QB as account codes in Accelo - effectively eliminating the need to store proper account codes. While a little unconventional, this approach has served us well - until now - as we’ve introduced Service and Materials items in Accelo in a more structured way.
To continue improving our integration with QuickBooks - including pushing payments - we need to import and use proper account codes from QuickBooks, and deactivate the old codes since these are in-fact item codes. This also means invoices imported from QuickBooks will also start using real account codes. If you’ve created any Material or Service Items manually, we suggest reviewing these and updating the account codes to ensure they continue working correctly. Items imported from QuickBooks have been automatically updated with the correct account codes.
This improvement addresses a problem where projects linked to retainers were being excluded if the “Work Approved” filter was used in the Project List screen. To solve this problem properly, we’ve introduced 2 more filter options: Unapproved work inside a retainer/period, and approved work inside a retainer/period. Super-flexible, and it also means that when drilling down on the values of “Unapproved work” from the Project Dashboard, you now have a very accurate list of the projects attributed to that metric.
If you didn’t have permission to view expenses, it’s possible that in the Accelo Mobile App, you weren’t able to view your own expense after submitting it - a little confusing if you needed to quickly edit or review it! We’ve patched this quirk to ensure the submitter of an expense is always able to keep track of it.
Our authentication process wasn’t giving clear feedback if the integration was configured with invalid API keys, which made it hard to know if the integration was working correctly or not. We’ve fixed this to ensure users get correct feedback when the wrong API key (required to connect to your GFIMax account) is supplied to Accelo.
