New: Admin Dashboard, Staff Rates and more!

This (a little overdue) post highlights some recent features and improvements in Accelo.

Make A Suggestion - feedback system

As more businesses sign up to Accelo and begin to engage all of the features, we're seeing a good flow of feedback, suggestions and the occasional bug report. It was getting a little tough to manage, so to be fair on our support & product staff - and to those users submitting great feedback - we've setup a UserVoice forum to track ideas for improving Accelo.

Just click the "Make a suggestion" link from the top-right corner of the screen to load our new ideas forum. You should be automatically logged in via Google Apps, otherwise you can quickly create an account.

New Dashboard screen - Administrator

If you're an admin user, you might have noticed a new "Admin" button across the top toolbar. It's a new dashboard screen to give you a quick overview of user activity and setup progress. There will be more panels added to this soon, but if you have any suggestions, feel free to send them in via the "Questions or Feedback?" link in Accelo.

• Panels to see the types of Job, Issue and Prospect available, their usage and configuration progress.

• Activity chart to see the number of diaries (work & communication) tracked in Accelo over time.

• User Sync table to see which staff are logging in regularly and whether they have setup calendar, contact and email sync.

• Accelo Account panel to see version, licence and payment details.

Coming soon: The Manager Dashboard!

Simple Job Budgeting - Fixed Budget

When you create a job you'll find a new budget option called "Fixed Amount". This allows you to set the budget for the job without requiring components. Of course, you can still add components to help you break the work into pieces, but the component budgets don't affect the overall job budget. What you'll see when editing the workflow is a comparison between the job budget and the estimated budget from the components:

This is especially handy if you like to change around the components/tasks in a project without changing the overall budget!

Staff Rates

If you edit your user in Accelo, you can now select a default billable rate based on the rates configured in your system. However, not all records support the use of staff rates - yet. If you create a fixed budget job (as introduced above), you can specify a component to use staff rates instead of a single/specific rate. Additionally, any time logged against the job itself will use that staff members rate.

  Other Changes

• Quick link to add a "New Job" from the jobs navigation.

• Added a filter to the "Issue Invoice" screen so you can exclude uncompleted issues.
• Phone number fields in exports (spreadsheets) are now formatted as text - fixing an issue with some numbers have the "+" removed.
• Added a "Company" column to the Task export so you can easily sort tasks by company.
• Reverted a change on diary notifications which turned the diary note into a diary email (and removed the handy links back to Accelo).
• Added "Rate ID" to the list of fields you can update in a progression action for the Issues module.