Wow, it's been a big few weeks with some significant updates - including improvements to project date automation, a beta feature for pausing projects & tasks, and the ability to relocate activities between clients with ease. Of course, we've been kicking on with some regular updates too:
A little while back we enhanced the Tasks area of Accelo with a simple checklist feature, available when creating or viewing a task. The shortfall was that many places where tasks can be templated - such as in your retainer types, project templates and quotes - didn't yet support checklists.
Well, we've just gotten these all updated! So if you've been wanting to deck out your project templates or retainers with some default task checklists, now you're all set!
If you have set-up some special actions in your Tickets configuration which allows a task to be created as the status of a ticket changes, this task template can now be given a distinct billable rate. Previously, the task would default to the rate set on the ticket, which wasn't ideal if you're trying to track after-hours work within that task and really needed to apply a special billable rate.
Assets can be linked to many types of work in Accelo, but creating an asset directly from that work (e.g. a project) wasn't possible - and there was no good reason why! So we've improved the Assets tab to make it simple to start adding an asset which will then be linked to that project/ticket/retainer.
We wanted to make it easier for users to identify tasks with committed time on their Daily Timesheet screen, and make it really easy for them to turn that into logged time with a click. While making this improvement, we also modernized the card layout and added filter toggles to the card panel, making it easier to focus on the tasks at hand.
We knew the old import process wasn't particularly user friendly. You had to have a csv file set-up with columns in a certain way for the import to work and even then it only created milestones, no tasks! Now the import process takes you through a neat field mapping process so you can ensure the columns in your spreadsheet match the milestone/task fields in Accelo.
Besides allowing tasks to be imported, we'll also respect the parent/child (milestones & sub-milestones) noted in your spreadsheet. More features will be added in the near future too - like being able to specify more budget details.
We know many of you have crafted filters for your user list, which could be saved and applied in the Team Scheduling and Scheduling Dashboard screens, but it was always odd that these saved filters weren't accessible from the standard user list. This omission has been rectified - including a few built-in quick filters to help you identify staff that were recently created, are managed by you or haven't logged in lately ;-)
You can now allow your contractor and collaborator users to have confidential contact relationships in Accelo. This might be important to them to ensure some basic privacy if they have agreed to set-up email capture into Accelo, but need to ensure some conversations default to confidential for particular client contacts which they have a unique relationship with.
When viewing the holiday/leave calendar for one of your users, we weren't showing the national/regional holidays, such as Christmas Day, New Years Day or Independence Day,� which was a bit confusing since these days were otherwise correctly blocked when planning projects or scheduling.
When re-processing an expense report into Accelo, we're now checking if the status of an expensify-linked expense has changed. If so, we'll update it accordingly in Accelo.
A few users noticed that if they logged some work and noted that it occurred from 10am to 11am, if they then moved that work log to a different day, we'd reset the timestamp to 12pm (noon) for that day, which was a little irritating. All fixed now!
To give a little more spice to your invoices, quotes and purchases orders, we have expanded the available fonts to also include Montserrat, Roboslab and Poppins. Enjoy!
This one takes a bit to explain - fortunately we have covered it already in this post on our general blog�- so please take a look and let us know what you think via [email protected]
