Q3 of 2014 was a really big quarter for us - after almost doubling the size of our engineering team in July, we managed to deliver some in-demand and big product improvements, make a serious dent in others which we're looking forward to shipping soon, as well as making internal improvements with our processes, bringing new team members up to speed and some significant infrastructure improvements which are being gradually rolled out every other week.
In terms of Q3 roadmap achievements, here's a quick summary:
Here's an update of what we're working on in Q4, starting with the projects from Q3 that are actually well underway and rounding out the list with the priorities we'll be working on in the back half of the quarter.
Finally, we wanted to also highlight a few areas of work we're prioritizing in Q4, which aren't likely to make it into Accelo before the holidays; we'll be focusing planning and design time on them in Q4, but they're likely to be early 2015 presents instead.
We knew this was going to be big, but we underestimated just how big and hairy getting this right would be. The good news is that we've actually made really strong progress through Q3, but we didn't make our end September target deadline, and it looks like this is going to be something we'll be shipping around the middle of November.
The good news, though, is we've got a fair bit of detail to share with you - as you'd expect for something that has already had a lot of planning and work undertaken.
Firstly, this screen is going to include a list of the schedules of multiple users. You'll be able to select a list of users, and compare how busy they are across time periods of your choosing.
Say you have someone who's a bit too overloaded, and you want to see what they've got going on on a particular day or week to see what you can shuffle off to someone else. From the graph list in the center, you'll be able to click on a bar and see a list load up on the right hand side, ordering the tasks and scheduled activities from biggest block of time to the smallest.
You'll then be able to simply drag and drop that task time onto another person in the list. When you drag it around, you'll have options that include reassigning the whole task to someone else, committing the other person to work on that task for that particular day/week or splitting the task to share the load between multiple people.
In addition to seeing the list of people and all of their tasks from a "top down" perspective, we're also working on making it possible to take a list of projects (or one particular project, which will be great for project managers) and listing the projects, milestones and task down the left hand side, allowing you to drag and drop work across to your team members.
The same will apply for issues/tickets - making it easy to get a list of project or tickets that are in a "scheduling" phase, and possibly unassigned, and then move them around to whoever on your team is best placed to work on them.
We're looking forward to sharing more details in the coming weeks, including a round of dedicated webinars to help introduce the power of this new feature, answer questions and make sure you're able to use it to save precious time in your business from day one.
One of the other priorities in Q3 was a major upgrade to our internal search engine infrastructure and interfaces. As is often the case when a priority then moves into prototype phase, we found a lot of tricky challenges to work through, but the good news is that our amazing engineers have made great progress and we're getting very close to launching a "global" search engine for Accelo which you could think of as being a bit like Google's real-time search with suggestions as you type.
While we could write thousands of words about it, we thought it would be good to show you a prototype of the actual search engine in operation. Note that this prototype is being run across production scale data but in a development environment (so, fully loaded but underpowered) - the team have done a lot of work to make this baby fast.
This is another feature we're looking forward to bringing you in the coming weeks - keep an eye on your inbox and those handy popup notifications in Accelo for more info.
Another important priority for us last quarter was an enhancement to our smartphone functionality across both iOS and Android. When we started diving in in the early part of Q3, we realized we were at a bit of a crossroads - we could continue developing the mobile apps off "Private" APIs (imagine them like special access to Accelo features that only our smartphone apps and engineers can use) or we could instead spend initial time bringing our "Public" APIs (which are open and fully documented here) up to a new level of functionality first. While it takes longer (because you have to think about a more public, and less certain set of users), basing our apps off our Public APIs would ensure they got treated with the highest priority internally rather than being an afterthought as they are for so many technology companies.
With a significant increase in the number of great developers using Accelo as a platform to build their own web and mobile apps, we decided that the right thing to do would be to seriously raise the bar on the Public APIs and create a policy and culture that treated our developer users with the same priority and importance that we treat ourselves. The result has been a significant increase in API functionality over the last couple of months (recent changelog here for the devs out there who are interested), all of it to underpin the work we're doing behind the scenes now on our mobile apps.
Of course, we didn't have the mobile team standing still during this period; here's a couple of samples of their progress and what you can expect to see soon from the Accelo iOS and Android apps.
Our plan with the iOS improvements is to tackle a few of the big things like new navigation, better support for iOS 8 and synchronization with our new Timers feature with a beta in a few weeks. After that point, we'll be building out each of the list and view screens with a new beta release version. Once we've knocked those things over, we'll be upgrading the activity stream and using the new "Search Like a Boss" magic in iOS, these later pieces likely to be in early 2015.
In reality, our mobile apps are going to remain a permanent fixture of our product roadmaps into the future - so we can expect more specific details in roadmap updated in 2015 and beyond once we finish getting the foundation in place for each of the main products in our mobile apps.
The activity stream - the "Facebook-like" news feed on clients, sales, projects, issues and everything else in Accelo - is something we've heard consistently could do with improvement. While its existence is great, there are real problems with quickly scanning, filtering and working with the valuable information contained in the activity stream.
We'll also be applying this design - and unifying the experience - to our "home" activity stream so you can easily get a real-time glance at what's going on across the business.
When we surveyed our user base a while back, we found that 70% of our clients regularly use contractors in their business. Some of our clients even rely almost exclusively on contract professionals to deliver their client work.
As a result, one of our big priorities (after multi-user scheduling) will be the creation of a new "Contractor" module. This module will allow you to create "contractor" users in your Accelo account, which will act differently to regular users, and be priced differently too.
Firstly, contractors will only be able to access the work items (tasks, activities) that they're assigned to work on in Accelo, limiting their visibility into your client database, sales pipeline, work in progress projects and the rest of the things you're probably happier to share with your full time team members than someone who's working temporarily as a contractor.
Secondly, contractors will be priced differently than Professional and Admin users in Accelo. While we're still modelling/finalizing the details, they'll be billed in a way that is linked to the amount of work they do in Accelo, so someone who does no work will be free (or very cheap), if they do some work they'll be billed at a higher tier, and if they do a fair amount of work they'll be billed at the same price as a regular user.
Finally, this module will be the first time we'll be tackling the "costs" side of work in Accelo, and we'll be making it possible for you to designate the "cost" of a contractor as well as a fully loaded hourly cost for your regular team members. The result will be the ability to map profitability on a project, issue and overall company basis - something we know a lot of our users are excited about!
One area we've been getting a lot of constructive feedback from users of late surrounds the detail (or lack thereof) in the invoices that come out of Accelo.
The main reason for these shortcomings goes back to how an "invoice" is seen. At its simplest level, an invoice is made up of one or more line items, with prices, ledger code and taxes, which total together to create a single invoice which can then have one or more payments made against it.
When creating the Accelo invoicing architecture, we were guided or at least constrained by the choices and limitations of accounting software packages - we needed to make sure the invoices that we created could be slotted into the "world" of accounting software, which often has serious limits on the number of characters or length of descriptions that invoices and their line items can support. Often this is because the underlying technology of accounting software is many decades old, but regardless the reason, it wouldn't work at all for us to create invoices that couldn't then be synchronized with products like Xero, QuickBooks and others.
The problem with this more limiting approach is that it doesn't take into account the business needs and differences between an invoice that satisfies your bookkeeper/accountant and one that your client feels is detailed and transparent enough to actually pay you from.
Our plan this quarter is to dramatically boost the depth, detail and transparency of the invoices you send to clients by including not just the "accounting" information (line items titles, ledgers, taxes and totals) but also the details of the work performed that underlies the invoice. To start with, we're going to release a new invoice activity report, which allows you to create a PDF invoice which is focused more on these details - but only to the level of detail you want to share.
Report Preview: Customize the level of activity details to share with clients
Publish to PDF and then email to the client - quick and easy!
The email and PDF Report are stored under the Activity Feed for the invoice.
As a PDF, Invoice Reports can be easily printed, saved or shared!
Once we've gotten these critical reports into your hands, we'll be enhancing the default choices so that you can send these automatically instead of the simple "accounting" focused invoices as you wish. We're also working on simplifying bulk invoicing, such as invoicing for all of the work outstanding for projects as of a certain date, as well as retainer excesses and manual renewals - again, all with this focus on (optionally) more detail and a PDF attachment format.
When we released the Triggers and Notifications module we had a number of things we wanted to improve and enhance on it, and at the top of the list is the inclusion of "calculation" and usage based notifications for the Retainers & Contracts module.
With this enhancement, you'll be able to set up notifications and reminders for staff and/or clients to let them know if the retainer is running low on remaining value or is going over, as well as making it possible to auto invoice/renew retainers that don't have an expiry but which do have a limited number of prepaid hours.
One of our final priorities for Q4, which we don't anticipate shipping to Accelo until Q1, will be the introduction of a flexible way to keep track of various "items" against client accounts. Think of it as a way to create your own simple client database, but having the data live persistently and relationally off a client account.
Examples of how you could use this new feature include:
Be they assets, sites, warranty items, previous prices quotes by vendors (rather than clients) or any number of other one-to-many concepts you want to be able to record, search and report on against a client/company record in Accelo.
For our many IT clients, you'll be able to store all sorts of knowledge against your client accounts, from system access details to asset/warranty information. For our many other professionals, you'll be able to store lots of details that would previously have to be jammed into profile fields, which could only really contain free-form text or simple single-data picklists.
While it isn't as common to talk about features in a Quarterly Roadmap update that we're not planning on releasing (or getting close to releasing that quarter), we wanted to mention this so we could solicit your feedback and ideas. If you've got a use case (or just thought of one when reading this) share it in our ideas forum at https://ideas.accelo.com.
While Accelo has email superpowers, there's still many of us who want/need to talk to our clients on the phone first and foremost (or at least frequently). To make things easier on our phone warriors, this quarter we're working on a new special screen that you can integrate with your digital or VoIP phone system so that you get a "screen pop" whenever you get an incoming call.
Using Caller-ID, when the phone rings a screen will flash up in Accelo showing you the client (or clients) who match that phone number. If it is a new phone number the screen will load up making it easy for you to enter the callers details as a new client, contact and optionally a request, sale, project, issue or contract, making it easier than ever to handle enquiries and take orders. If the call is from a phone number Accelo already knows about, you'll see the client record and have a simple timer driven screen where you can make notes and create tasks.
This feature will depend on your phone system of choice being able to create "screen pops" to a URL when a call comes in, but if you've got that sorted then we'll handle the rest.
Finally, we're talking with a number of phone system and VoIP vendors about integrations; these conversations are still early days, but we're hoping in the future to be able to sync your Accelo contacts with your phone system so outbound calling or inbound caller-id are a lot faster and easier.
Have questions? Email [email protected] or tweet us @Accelo. Want to give Accelo a try in Q4? Sign up for a 7-day free trial (no credit card needed) now!
