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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
