Accelo - Sneak Peek features in May

More Time Reports

After the release of our new Timesheet report a couple of weeks ago, we've been amazed by how much our users loved it. Of course, this is a double-edged sword - the more something is loved, the more ideas and new features people suggest!

Our first improvement is the ability to see a breakdown of the time not just by staff member, but also depending on the type of work being done. Later this month, when you go to the timesheet report screen, you'll have the option to change from looking at a staff timesheet to looking at a timesheet broken down by Company (so you can see all the work you're doing for a client), by Project (pictured) or by Issue. 

Automated contact sharing

One of the most popular features, particularly for new users, is our ability to synchronize between address books of different Accelo users. This way, you can create a contact in Accelo, and then a bunch of your users could push it to your Google or Outlook contact list/address book, and whenever changes are made in one address book they'd be reflected back in Accelo and sync'ed to the other address books too.

While this functionality is awesome, it depends on each user personally choosing to push a contact to their address book from Accelo for the first time. We've had a number of users tell us they'd much rather have it so that contacts are automatically synchronized with both their own address book, as well as a defined list of other users. The way this will work is:

• Auto push to own address book: a new contact added by Tom is automatically pushed to his address book, and will appear in his Google Contacts or Outlook Contacts, as well as his linked smartphone, within a few minutes. Then, if Tom makes a change to the email address of the contact in Outlook, for example, the change will be imported back into Accelo, automatically.
• Auto push to multiple users: Tom could choose that all contacts he creates should also be pushed to not only his address book, but those of colleagues Sally and Richard. In this way, when Tom creates a contact, Sally and Richard would also have it pushed automatically to their address books (including their mobile phones), and any changes made by Sally, for example, would be imported back into Accelo and then synchronized to Tom and Richard's address books within minutes.

Fetching existing emails on contact creation (Gmail only)

One of the other our users have been asking for is the ability to import historical emails from their inbox whenever they add a new contact. Where this is useful is a situation where you've traded a bunch of emails with a contact before you added them to Accelo, and then really wish you had all of that email history.

Until now, you had no way of filling in this history (emails are either captured or ignored at the time they come in depending on whether the customer's address is in Accelo at the time), but we're working on an enhancement which will make this easy for users of Gmail/Google Apps.

Dashboards, Dashboards and more Dashboards

When we released the redesign of Accelo, we were missing a few features, and perhaps the most missed was our dashboards. While we've since implemented a new User Dashboard, and we've released a new version of the Company Dashboard, there's still a few missing screens.

We're also working hard on introducing a number of new dashboards over the next few weeks - and we hope you'll find they've been worth the wait!

The dashboards we're working on include:

• Executive Dashboard
• Prospects & Sales Dashboard (pictured above)
• Jobs & Projects Dashboard
• Issues & Service Dashboard
• Contracts & Retainers Dashboard

For more information on these new features - and more than we're not quite ready to share with you just yet - keep an eye on this blog and we'll also send you an update email when they're ready to use.