The year so far has been a very busy one at Accelo - growth is accelerating and our team is now up to over 60 staff! With more than half of our team working in product and engineering, we have a been making great progress on many of the priorities that are the focus this quarter - we're looking forward to a flurry of new and improved functionality being delivered through to the end of 2017!
While this quarterly update is overdue (we'll be in Q4 before we know it), we wanted to share a quick update on progress and priorities as we look forward.
The Updates to Accelo so far this year fall into three categories: Major Updates, Minor Updates, and our new Best Practices sessions.
So far this year we've released a number of updates, none bigger than our overhaul of the Projects module in Accelo. Here's a list of the highlights in case you missed them:
In addition to these major updates, we also shipped more than 300 minor updates - every week we publish a list of new improvements and fixes to our Updates Blog.
Finally, we've also been running regular best-practices webinars every two weeks. They include a great Q&A section, and they’re led live by our product and implementation experts. Our next session is about “Leadership & Reporting”, and it’s happening September 7th - register for the time that suits you best here. If you can't make the sessions live, the good news is that we record them, so if you've missed a session you can watch the videos below:
The priorities that our product team is focusing on right now are outlined below.
This major project is now available as Preview while our design and engineering teams continue working on it. As of today, you're able to:
In the near future, you'll also be able to assign work from this screen, and we'll be rolling out this new Assignment interface to make it available on almost all of our screens, making Scheduling easy and adaptive.
Once we bring in the ability to assign work to users, we'll be retiring the existing Team Schedule screen.
With these two main phases complete - reporting and then assigning - we'll be moving onto the third part of this major project - extending scheduling to more than Tasks in Accelo. This is where we'll be tackling popular issues like assigning multiple people to a single task, allowing time against Milestones, Tickets and Retainers to be assigned to users without needing a task to be created, and more.
Since our release of Zapier earlier this year, one of the most commonly used integrations enabled has been HubSpot. As one of the world's leading Marketing Automation Platforms, and the one best targeted to small and medium service businesses, it made sense for us to look more closely at partnering with HubSpot and doing a direct, bi-directional integration together.
We're excited to share that this week this new integration went into Beta with around 30 of our clients giving it a try. If you'd like to join the beta, email [email protected] and let us know that you're a HubSpot user and you'd like to give the integration a try.
Accelo will be playing a major part at HubSpot's INBOUND conference in Boston at end of September this year, where we're planning on launching this integration - if you're going to be there, come and say hi!
Accelo's CSV Import functionality is one of our oldest pieces of systems still in production. It is long overdue for an upgrade, and given the growth we've been seeing, it's about time this important feature got the upgrade it needs.
With the new import, you'll be able to bring in CSV files and much more easily map the fields. You'll also be able to choose the merge criteria you want to have the engine apply when we're looking for existing records to merge imported data with, and finally we'll be introducing a new logging and feedback system to tell you row by row what was processed and if there are problems with a row of data, exactly what those problems were.
This is one where we've done most of the hard work and just need a little bit more time to bring it to life!
Accelo currently uses intelligent dates that adapt project plans to the real world and estimate start and end dates for milestones and tasks when things run late - but, it hasn’t been intelligent enough.
When it comes to estimating start and end dates of a project schedule, Accelo currently doesn't make it easy for managers to assert start or due dates for projects and milestones in advance. Instead, we've relied a bit too much on team members to start and complete work accurately, which often doesn’t happen (as we know all too well). Accelo also does currently support those fantastic situations whereby someone finishes work early - in those successful situations, you really want to see those estimated finish dates slide forward!
With this upgrade, we’re going to allow you and your team members to have more control over how Accelo’s intelligent dates work. Here’s how: you’ll be able to assert dates on projects (which will involve milestones and tasks starting on their planned date automatically), making it easier to manage projects that have well defined and scheduled plans. Alternatively, you’ll be able to choose which dates on a project should “slide forward” when work is being done ahead of schedule! On top of that, we’ll also be sending emails to folks whose tasks and milestones are ready to kick-off (because dependencies are satisfied), taking the load off of project managers so they can spend more time managing and less time being a nagging traffic cop (we’ve all been there).
The Task Boards in Accelo were pioneers of our design patterns for filtering, along with our card-based, drag-and-drop interface. Nevertheless, like all pioneers, they're now showing their age and needed a revamp - and a revamp they shall get!
We're making it a priority to upgrade our Task Boards to allow for:
Another thing we've wanted to have for some time is custom types and statuses for Tasks. The Task Boards have been the roadblock on being able to upgrade Tasks since the fixed dimensions of the boards (particularly the status board) held us back. We'll make sure the Task Boards upgrade work is future compatible with custom statuses and making them a future quarterly priority.
We've actually made some good progress on upgrading these Task Boards already, but as we dug in deeper we realized there's a great case to be made for extending the card based (also known as Kanban) design patterns, with customizations, to more of our screens, and in conjunction with our priority to improve reporting in Accelo, we've decided to tackle this upgrade at the same time as the new Custom Reports and Layouts feature, described below.
One of Accelo's limitations that we're acutely aware of is that our users can't customize the columns they see in our list screens. While we put a lot of thought into the columns shown on our list screens, we wish we could look at some different columns and report on data differently.
As a part of our work with upgrading the Task Board, we'll be making a number of changes across the Accelo product to deliver custom layouts and reports for almost all of our listing screens. This means a few important things: custom table columns, a new Kanban or card+column view, and saved Reports.
When it comes to displaying tables of results in Accelo, we'll be allowing users with appropriate permissions to create their own custom screen layouts for list screens in Accelo. When it comes to the list-style views (ie, a table of results that match the filter you've chosen), you'll be able to choose the columns you want to on the screen, and save the specific choice and order of columns for later use as a "Custom Layout".
In addition to choosing the columns to represent in a list-style view, we'll also be introducing a "card" based view with a smaller number of wider columns where every single Client, Sale, Project, Ticket, Retainer, Task, Invoice or other objects in Accelo will be its own card. In addition to being able to see key details grouped together into a card, this layout has the benefit of showing clearly and visually how many objects are in each column - grouped by status, assignee or other distinct criteria. Finally, where possible, you'll be able to drag and drop objects from one column to another - making reassigning as easy as dragging and dropping from one user's column to another in an "Assignee" layout.
Along with the new Layout functionality, we'll also be improving Accelo's Filters interface. While the convenience of having the Filters across the top and their instant effect can be convenient, our users have been telling us that the way the changes in selection take effect immediately, as well as the fact that you have to choose a field in one place and configure it in a different place, makes things a bit frustrating. With the new Filters, you'll have a dedicated interface for choosing fields and setting values, and then running them when you're happy with all of your inputs in one go. This interface will also make it easy to save filters, as well as make copies and delete saved filters you don't need anymore.
Finally, bringing together the custom Layouts and the custom Filters will enable truly customized Reports - you'll be able to choose the criteria, and the layout, of any set of data in Accelo, and save it for one-click access quickly and easily in the future.
This is one where we've done most of the hard work and just need a little bit more time to bring it to life!
Activities (notes, meetings, emails, work logs) are central to Accelo, and there's a few places we want to make the process of interacting with them a lot smoother.
This is another one where the designs have been done for some time - we just need the bandwidth to bring it to life! As we continue to scale our team, this will become that much easier.
This feature is currently available in Beta - we'd love you to join our Android or iOS Betas to share this new functionality with you and get your feedback!
This feature will be really useful for anyone who goes out and about to work with clients, especially where those clients have assets that team members need to know about or work on. Examples include being able to quickly pull up access or username details for servers and workstations in an IT context, the ability to see filing deadlines and registration codes for subsidiaries and entities for lawyers and accounts, or the ability to check on details for equipment in general for other folks using the Assets module.
With powerful automation (especially around recurring work like Retainers) and billing, it makes complete sense for Accelo to not only create invoices, but to also help you get them paid!
Now that we have payment synchronization in place with QuickBooks Online and Xero, we're finally able to prioritize automatic payment processing. When complete, you'll be able to enter the credit card details of your client into Accelo (and when the client portal is upgraded, allow them to enter/update it themselves) and set rules like what cards can be used to process what types of invoices (Retainers only, or Projects and Retainers, or anything at all), set the max payment to charge per day and then (well deserved) sit back, and let the money roll in.
This is one where we've done most of the hard work and just need a little bit more time to bring it to life!
Accelo's Trigger functionality (available in our Premium products) have always been popular, but sometimes the trigger rules firing only every 15 minutes just aren't fast enough. While we accelerated them a lot last quarter, we also want to deliver native support for scenarios like "when a client sends an email containing 'Urgent' and the ticket is 'Resolved', then send a notification and reopen the ticket".
This is one where we've done most of the hard work and just need a little bit more time to bring it to life!
One of Accelo's most popular features is its automatic email tracking - when a client emails you or one of your team, Accelo will automatically import the email and any attachments, and if it is part of a conversation on a sale, project, ticket, retainer or other work in Accelo, it will be put in the right place.
While Activities (emails) sent out of Accelo apply smarts to automatically CC the owners of where the activity is being sent and client account managers, when a reply comes back in from a client (or colleague) the same automatic CC behavior doesn't currently apply - the email just goes to whoever the sender sent it to manually.
Similarly, the new Team feature with its Automatic CC option is designed to allow key people who are part of the work to be kept in the loop, but when the conversation moves out of activities and into regular emails, Accelo doesn't currently try and include other folks.
To help address these shortcomings and make it easier than ever for teams to stay coordinated as they work together to deliver great service to clients, we'll be making it possible - through a configuration preference - to have the same automatic CC rules apply to emails received and tracked by Accelo.
With the Zapier integration earlier this year, our engineering team implemented a lot of back-end magic, including Webhooks. A webhook is a feature for more tech-savvy folks to ask that a platform - in this case, Accelo - send a special message to a remote URL of the user's choice whenever something special happens, making it easier for developers to integrate with Accelo than the more common alternative, polling an API frequently asking if there's been any updates.
With this enhancement, folks will be able to tap into some of the back-end webhook magic powering Accelo and request that the platform send webhooks
