Projects are how most of our clients make most of their revenue; we’ve put together this FAQ to make it easy for our users to transition to the new version & understand what’s changing (and what isn’t).
The main changes in this update relate to how you plan, budget, track and invoice for your projects. We’ve implemented whole new interfaces for project planning (which include a dynamic gantt chart & more powerful options around budgets, subtotalling and materials), a new way to view a project (including new schedule and budget overviews), a new interface for approving time and a new way to invoice for your project work.
Under the hood, we’ve also made a number of changes to our data structures to support this upgrade, including changing the concept of a “component” to a “milestone”, a new model for budgeting time and materials and a new way of storing/defining dependencies for milestones, tasks and their templates.
We’re anticipating that this upgrade will provide a much easier to use, flexible to configure way to manage your projects in Accelo without any major pieces of functionality being removed.
Your existing projects will be converted to the new format/structure, including the new dependencies model.
We’ve done a lot of work to test the conversion process and we’re really happy with it, but we are anticipating a few teething issues when it comes to using the new planning screen on existing projects.
This is because the old planning process was so rudimentary, we didn’t have a way to distinguish between the originally planned start and end dates and the real start/end dates with components and tasks. While this won’t matter at all for your existing projects, where it could become an issue is if you try and use the new planning screen to update/change a project created before the upgrade, especially if it has dependencies and some components/tasks already active. This is because the more structured nature of the new project planning and scheduling screens isn’t able to handle plans which don’t make sense (like a dependency that says Milestone 2 starts after Milestone 1 finishes, but the reality for the existing project was that Milestone 2 started first).
If you come across a problem like this (you’ll know because the planning screen will throw error alerts), email [email protected] and we’ll reset the dependency rules (by removing them on that specific project) and you’ll be able to use the planning screen again.
Your existing templates will be automatically converted to the new model, which allows for both milestone level templates and whole of project templates (win!).
One feature we’re not quite ready to ship is the ability to edit your project templates; our engineering team are working hard on it, but they couldn’t quite get it done in time for the roll out and we’ve elected to push ahead (and given everyone the benefit of a much better project management experience) and deliver the project template editing interface in the coming weeks.
Yes! You can enter budgets for Materials on a milestone; for the moment you’re just entering the amount you’re charging the client for those materials, but in the next couple of quarters we’ll be expanding our support for handling costs more broadly.
Yes! You can enter a budget for expenses (handy if you’re telling the user there will be a budget of $X for all expenses, and then when you’re invoicing the client you’ll be able to see how much you said you’d have in the project for expenses (and how much you’ve billed so far).
In addition to being a professional or paid user, for a user to access the new planning screen they need to have the following permissions:
To stop your users from being able to edit a project plan, you need to make sure you remove the Process permission for the user (either directly or by taking them out of any groups with Process access granted); for more information, check out our Access Control Help Article.
In addition to being a professional or paid user, for a user to access the new planning screen they need to have the following permissions:
To stop your users from being able to create a project invoice, you need to make sure you remove the Invoice Add, Project Process or Project Admin permission for the user (either directly or by taking them out of any groups with access granted); for more information, check out our Access Control Help Article.
The new Assign Work screen allows you to change who work is assigned to and change the status of all tasks and milestones from a single screen.
Because of the power this screen provides, access is restricted to professional or paid users with the following permissions:
To stop your users from being able to use the Assign Work screen, you need to make sure you remove the Project Process permission for the user (either directly or by taking them out of any groups with access granted); for more information, check out our Access Control Help Article.
The new Approve Work screen allows you to approve the work done against milestones and tasks inside a project. Importantly, this approval process is designed to be a one-way process, so you don’t want people flippantly coming in and changing their hours. For this reason, access is restricted to professional or paid users who also have Financial Access enabled and the following permissions:
To stop your users from being able to use the Approve Work screen, you need to make sure you remove the Project Process permission for the user (either directly or by taking them out of any groups with access granted); for more information, check out our Access Control Help Article.
While they look similar in the Planning screen, there are significant differences between Milestones and Tasks when you’re running a project.
Tasks are designed to be more lightweight than Milestones; here’s a summary of the differences:
FeatureMilestoneTaskTitle & DescriptionBoth Milestones & Tasks have titles and descriptions you can set yourself.BudgetMilestones support time budgets (hours and rates) as well as materials. Additionally, Milestone budgets can be defined or they can be calculated based on the hours and rates allocated to subsidiary tasks.Tasks can be rates and hours assigned, but don't have the ability to have defined financial totals or materials like milestones do.SchedulingMilestones can have a start date & due date defined, or they will automatically calculate their start and due dates based on dependencies and durations. When a milestone is scheduled it will not appear in the scheduling screen for the assigned user - only tasks appear in the schedule screen.Tasks can have a start date & due date defined, or they will automatically calculate their start and due dates based on dependencies and durations. When a task is scheduled it will appear on the scheduling screen for the assigned user automatically.DependenciesMilestones can be dependent on milestones and tasks; rules exist to prevent dependency loops (like B depends on A, C depends on B, and then A depends on C). If you change the dependencies of tasks within a milestone the milestone will grow to accommodate longer task date ranges, but reductions in task durations will not cause the milestone to auto shrink.Tasks can be dependent on milestones and other tasks; rules exist to prevent dependency loops. If you choose to create a dependency on a task or milestone that causes the task to finish later the milestone the task is a part of will be automatically extended to ensure all of the tasks under the milestone fit completely within the milestone.SubtotalsSubtotals provide a way for milestones which have sub-milestones to have the total value for the milestone and its children to be defined and fixed, overriding the calculated value of the sub-milestones.Tasks do not have subtotals.MaterialsMilestones can have materials (the attributes you want to bill a client for that aren't related to time) included as part of their budgets. The material budgets aren't shown onTasks do not have materials.
Unlike our previous version (which didn’t care at all about dates until you activated a project), the new Project Planning screen is very very date conscious; from the creation of the very first task, the system is putting things into the calendar. While this can be really really handy to sketching out a project plan (and telling clients “if you don’t kick off by date X we won’t be able to finish before date Y”), you also don’t really want to be seeing tentative tasks appearing in your user’s task boards or as part of their schedules until the plan goes beyond concept and starts to get firmed up.
The “Commit to Schedule” feature at the bottom of the Planning Screen does exactly this job - it converts the tentative conceptual dates in the project planning screen and turns them into real, scheduled dates that appear on user’s schedules, task boards and more. It doesn’t mean that you can’t change the dates later on as the project evolves, but it does mean that the tasks you’ve assigned to people will start showing up on their scheduling and task screens.
One of the most commonly requested features missing in our old Projects product was the ability to put tasks into your project plans and templates. Through the new planning screen you’re now able to add tasks to specific project plans, and from now you’re also able to save tasks and even materials to the milestone templates.
To see your list of milestone templates (and create more!) go to Configuration under the wrench/spanner icon in the primary navigation, go to Projects down the left hand side (or whatever you’re renamed Projects to), and then click on Milestone Templates.
Yep, you sure can! If you go to “Configuration” under the spanner/wrench icon in the top navigation and choose the “Customize Titles” option from the left hand side you’ll be able to choose a new name for the Milestone object.
When you first create a project plan, the dates selected are just rough dates. You convert these draft or rough dates into scheduled dates by ticking the “Commit to Schedule” checkbox and saving the project plan - once you’ve done this, you’re saying “OK, these dates aren’t completely made up anymore - I want them to appear in my schedule and any tasks I have assigned to people should also appear in their own task boards and schedules”.
There’s still a few things that are missing from this upgrade right now - we decided to push ahead with the release even though there were some loose ends here because we believe the benefits of the new Project product outweigh the negatives of these last pieces being missing.
Our team is working hard to bring these missing bits to life over the coming days - please keep an eye on our blog and Facebook account to get notified of when these features are released.
Budget Smarts on Planning Pop-up
When editing the budget for a task, you’re really only able to choose between a defined budget of hours and no budget of hours at all. For the moment, we’re still showing a “Calculated Hours” option which isn’t relevant - we’ll be removing it soon. Similarly, when editing a Milestone, if it doesn’t have sub-milestones then the whole concept of Subtotal pricing is irrelevant; we haven’t yet got the smarts in place to recognize if a milestone has children milestones in the budget editing popup.
Gantt Chart & Schedule in the Client Portal
One of the features we’re really excited about releasing is the ability for your clients to see the project gantt chart & schedule in the client portal. Because we’ve been pushing so hard to get this complex piece of functionality right for you and your colleagues we haven’t yet had time to implement it (with all the access control dimensions so you can choose to show/hide aspects of the project plan, like tasks); we’re working on bringing this into the client portal shortly.
Manually Toggling between a Milestone & a Task in the Planning Screen
Another feature we’re looking forward to bringing into the planning screen is the ability to manually toggle between a Milestone and a Task. Currently, everything is a task unless you put a child task underneath it; then the parent becomes a milestone. Unfortunately, there’s no way to manually toggle a line item in the project planning screen to be a Task or a Milestone; the “hack” for now if you want to define a milestone (so you can specify fixed prices and/or materials) without defining subsidiary tasks, you can create a sub-task and then delete it - the parent will remain a milestone.
Creating a Project Template or Milestone Template from the Project Plan
Another feature we’ve had to go live without is the ability to take a specific project plan and save it for later re-use as a template. We know how popular this is, particularly when you’re getting started (there’s often no better way to define an awesome template than to pick an existing project that is your “gold standard”), and we’re looking forward to adding this feature back in soon.
Editing a Project Template
While you’re currently able to edit Milestone Templates (with their built in budgets and now tasks too), we don’t have a way right now for you to edit a whole project template; we’ll be introducing this in the near future because we know how important this feature is too!
If you've got more questions, please don't hesitate to contact [email protected] and we'll get back to you as soon as we can with an answer.
