Product Roadmap - Q2 2015

April 17, 2015
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After a massive Q1 - Team Scheduling, Contractors Module, Global Search, Permissions Module, Email Sending Enhancements, Costs & Profitability, Triggers on Contracts/Retainers, our Android App and new Approval feature for Tickets/Issues - we've lined up another massive quarter of both improvements and new features to keep making Accelo more useful and valuable for our thousands and thousands of users.

This quarter, our team will be working on the following priorities:

  • Desktop Timer: Keep track of the work you’re doing without having the Accelo window open to make it easier for you and your team to accurately log time.
  • Timesheet Updates & Enhancements: A day view so that you can focus on logging time for just today (without getting overwhelmed for your week’s work).
  • Mobile Apps - Activities: Send emails, create notes, and view what’s going on in real time with your clients so that you can better stay on top of your client work.
  • Team Scheduling - Staff Lists & Skill Categorization: Giving traffic and project managers the tools to find the right people to work on that project with grouping by skill, team, or location.
  • Knowledge Base & Asset Tracking: Store more details on your clients such as computer codes, media channel costings, and tax identifiers so that you don’t have to track it in Excel.
  • Activity Feeds Redesign: A fresh (Facebook-like) face for our activity feed so that you can find information faster.
  • Approval & Invoicing Upgrade: Global timesheet approvals; client-wide, batch invoicing; and PDF invoices to get paid faster for the work you do.
  • Mobile Apps - Notifications: Get real-time notifications when a client opens an email you sent them or when the marketing manager approves a signoff.
roadmap 2015 q2 public

Desktop Timer

Our team has been working for the last month or so on a brand new way to track and log time in Accelo - through a cross-platform desktop timer.

The timer leverages the strides we've taken with our mobile app timers over the last few months, and will allow users to use either a Chrome extension or a desktop app to keep track of what they're working on, starting, pausing and completing work.

 

1

The benefits of the Desktop and Extension timers are pretty obvious - now you can keep track of the work you're doing without having a dedicated Accelo browser window open (or remembering where in the mountain of tabs you put it). For those times when the phone rings (or you're on your way out to lunch) and you need to quickly pause your current timer, the extension and desktop app will make it easy to hit pause, and when you're juggling between a bunch of tasks you'll also be able to easily switch the clock to follow what you're working on. Finally, if you're someone like me who sets a timer running and then forgets it, the new extension interface will change the icon to remind you it is running.

2

Timesheet Updates & Enhancements

While we were hoping to get this live by the end of Q1, it just missed out (Contractors and Permissions were bigger than we'd anticipated), but the good news is that this feature is just around the corner!

Right now, our teams are finalizing a few important enhancements for the Timesheet screen, including:

  • A "Day" view to make it easy to see just the things you worked on in a single day; ideal for folks who want more detail on the day in question, and less load time and clutter from the things happening in other parts of the week.
  • A "Relocate" option for work rows; ideal for the many times when an email is what triggers the reminder that you did work against a sale, project, ticket or retainer but where the email has been linked to the general client record by default. Now you'll be able to move the work where it belongs with a simple in-line search - without having to leave the timesheet screen.
  • A "Required" details option (configurable); ideal for those organizations that require their people to provide more detail than just "work was done on this day", this will follow up the creation of work with a small pop-up to prompt the user to enter a subject and description for the work they did.
  • A "Re-estimation" option on providing more detail; ideal for any work done on tasks (which have the ability to re-estimate time remaining to complete the task), this feature will allow users to take control of the time remaining estimates and give project managers real-time feedback on forecasts for project budgets from the people who are doing the work.

These enhancements are being worked on currently, but don't be surprised if they land a bit out of order and when they're ready - the "Day" view screen, in particular, is a pretty big design and functionality change and we don't want to let extra work there hold up the other improvements listed above.

Mobile Apps - Activities

One of the hearts of Accelo is our activity feature and stream, and we're acutely aware that one of the benefits of having every client interaction automatically captured and indexed is that ability to glance quickly at what's been happening on an account before you walk into a meeting with them. And, yeah, not having this in the mobile app when that is what you're able to review on your way to the meeting (or while in their lobby) is a real hole - one that is soon to be filled.

Blog Post 2

The new Activities feature in our mobile apps (Android and iOS) will support two types of activity stream, viewing an activity thread and the ability to create an activity properly (currently there is a more curtailed "log time" feature in both mobile apps).

While viewing the activity thread and creating a new activity are going to be welcome enhancements, we’re possibly most excited about the ability to view a global activity stream of all activities your account has access to just like a Facebook news feed - you'll be able to see what's going on in real time, encouraging collaboration and making it easy for you to comment and share advice/insights (or at very least keep up with what's happening across the organization).

Team Scheduling - Staff Lists & Skill Categorization

One of the most common requests we get from users of our team scheduling feature is the ability to create (and save/reuse) lists of team members to bring in as a group when they're doing scheduling. Whether it is selecting people based on their skills (showing all designers at once, or all techs, or all junior accountants), their office/location or other criteria, this enhancement will make it easier for you to add any custom profile fields on Accelo user account and then filter, list, save and reuse user lists in any way you want.

Knowledge Base & Asset Tracking

As the top vote-getter in our Ideas forum, this is one of the few completely new pieces of work in Q2 (as opposed to enhancements and improvements to existing features like our mobile apps, team scheduling and timesheets).

The Knowledge Base / Asset Tracking feature in Accelo will allow our clients to create a sort of database within the Accelo database, storing any structured data against any client, quickly and easily. While the most obvious uses are for our IT consulting clients (storing details of the computers, servers, routers and other assets they manage for their clients), we're also hearing great use-cases for clients in the advertising industry (making notes about which media channels/platforms support which ad formats, what their CPMs are and what their traffic/exposure numbers are like) and in other fields as diverse as architecture and engineering (supplier info) and even accounting (recording the business entities, tax identifier and other meta-information).

This module will allow Accelo users to query/filter their client database by these attributes (ie, making it easy to find all the clients who are running a certain operating system if it needs a patch or finding suppliers who have a certain type of advertising inventory), as well as making it easy to link to the relevant assets of a client (or contributor) if they're working on a project or issue/ticket related to that asset/object.

Of course, this new module will be able to have fully configurable asset criteria/fields, and Premium Accelo account holders will be able to have multiple asset types - oh, and of course you won't have to call them assets: you can name them whatever you want!

Activity Feeds Redesign

Fitting in the category of improvement, towards the end of the quarter we'll be turning our eye towards the current Activity Stream in Accelo. Introduced a couple of years ago, this Facebook-style news feed of all the emails, notes, meetings and other activity with a client has always been one of Accelo's most popular features, but now it is looking pretty tired (and text heavy).

The new design of the Activity Feed (both for the home page Activity Stream and on a per-object basis) will include more types of information (such as changed in status on objects) and will be much easier to parse through and see.

Approval & Invoicing Upgrade

In what promises to be on the same level of importance and breadth as our Contractors Module and Permissions re-write, in the back half of Q2 we're going to be focusing our expanded engineering resources on a major re-development of our time approval and invoicing functionality.

 The focal areas in this major upgrade include:

  • Enhancing time approval. While the current object-based time approval process is great for project and service managers who want to review and approve time in the context of their projects or issues, it doesn't work so well for people who need to approve the timesheets of their direct reports. As part of this upgrade, we'll be addressing the needs of these users to approve time by team member over the course of a week, saving a lot of time drilling down into individual projects.
  • Enhancing invoice creation. In a similar vein to the time approval piece, we're also planning enhancements to the way invoices are created as a batch process in Accelo. Improvements slated include an interface to create invoices for groups of projects (without having to go into every project), grouping multiple projects together in one invoice per client (without the need for contracts/retainers) and generally making it faster/easier to do your weekly/monthly billing for work done across the Accelo platform.
  • Enhancing invoice presentation & delivery. Another popular request from our users, this enhancement will build on some work we've been doing with Invoice Activity Reports (if you would like to beta test now, let us know), we'll be introducing a new set of invoice preferences (to share/provide a lot more information for clients) as well as generating all invoices in PDF format. Finally, we'll be introducing quantity and rate information into our accounting invoices so you'll be able to see this volume information pushed across into your accounting system.

 Given the scale/scope of these improvements it is likely that the delivery of all of these elements will stretch into Q3 (see Gantt chart above for reference), but we'll be introducing them in phases as soon as we can to get these important and time saving enhancements into your hands as soon as possible.

Mobile Apps - Push Notifications

Rounding out the quarter, our mobile team will be working on another major enhancement - push notifications. While we're still finalizing the details, the plan is that users will be able to subscribe to push notifications for various events in Accelo and get near real-time notification when events occur.

 Examples of events we're working to support this quarter include:

  • Getting a notification when a client you're in the middle of a sales process with opens an email you've sent them via Accelo - that way, you can quickly give them a call when you know they've opened your email for the first time.
  • Getting a notification when a client you're delivering a project for clicks on a link in an email you sent them for the first time (such as a link to a staging website or draft report) so you can also get straight back to them and get their instant feedback.
  • Getting a notification when a (prospective) client opens, approves or comments on a Quote you've sent them via Accelo's quote module.
  • Getting a notification whenever a client opens, approves or comments on a Signoff you send them as part of a project you're working on for them.

The plan is that these notification preferences will be configurable (such as "only show me sales where I'm the salesperson", or "only show me activity opens/clicks where I sent the activity", or "show me when a client opens an activity on a project I'm managing") and when the notification comes through you'll have easy access to view the activity, sale, project or client information when you click on it.

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