Product Priorities Update: Q2 of 2018

It is hard to believe we're already well into Q2 of 2018, with a whirlwind first quarter at Accelo now behind us. Last quarter saw both some amazing achievements - ticking off two major and highly-demanded releases with Rich Text Activity creation and Email Initiated Triggers going live - but also some challenges with key enhancements taking longer than expected and a few growing pains on the system's front with a 100-minute outage (our first in years). If you're not on a platform you can start a free trial today to see our new features. 

Looking ahead to Q2, we've got a lot of momentum and in many cases have made great progress on our standing Q1 priorities, so we're hoping that the pace of improvements and enhancements being launched by our talented (and growing) product team will eclipse what we saw in Q1. 

Our priorities for this quarter include:

• Booking Feature & Scheduling Upgrade
• Work Assignment Upgrade
• More Intelligent Project Dates
• Rich Text Email Capture
• More CSV Import Improvements
• Create and Edit Screen Upgrades
• Reporting with PowerBI
• Expenses Product Improvements
• NinjaRMM Integration
• Xero Tracking Categories
• Automatically Processing Client Payments via Credit Card
• Notifications Upgrade
• Task Boards
• Custom Layouts & Reports

Booking Feature & Scheduling Upgrade

While we hoped to get this live in Q1, it turns out that this new feature - the ability to more easily book team members to be scheduled or committed to do work - went live just this week.

Building on this new feature, our team are working hard to extend the ability to predict workloads and time assignments across more than Tasks. We're thinking of this internally as the ability to set a "time budget" on almost anything, and to then allow you and your team to use the new Booking feature to Commit people in Accelo to work on almost anything, without needing the Task to be created first.

We also decided last quarter to share these plans in a lot more detail with clients who wanted to see and participate in the planning and building of this feature. If you haven't had a chance to get involved yet, feel free to email [email protected] and ask to be part of the Feedback group for the Scheduling Upgrade.

Work Assignment Upgrade

As part of our work in Q1 around the Scheduling Upgrade, we realized we needed to make some significant improvements to the way work is assigned. If our sales and success team members had a dollar for every time someone asked them to "Assign a task to multiple people", they'd be rich, and so this quarter (in conjunction, and tightly coupled to) our work with the Scheduling Upgrade, we're also working on a new interface and feature for Assigning work to team members.

With this upgrade, you'll be able to split up the budget of time associated with work in Accelo, and importantly, if you don't take active control the system will still automatically assign time in the scheduling and utilization forecasts based on who's the owner/manager of the work. If you start to dish out a couple of hours here and a couple of hours to there to different folks, Accelo will still be smart enough to make sure the rest of the work is accounted for so you're not in the dark, adapting intelligently.

More Intelligent Project Dates

I'm not going to lie. This new feature turned into a monster. We all know that projects are big and often complicated, made all the more so because of the different types of work that our clients do: one project might be nice and tight and clear from the outset, another might be agile and uncertain the whole way through. Making sure that Accelo can handle these differences, and still give you visibility - in ways we've never been able to before - of planned vs actual dates (not to mention a new model of predicted vs target dates to measure KPIs) turned into a much bigger project than we initially envisaged.

Rather than taking shortcuts, we decided to go deep and make big changes to both the features in Accelo and the interface. With this upgrade, we'll be introducing a brand new interface to the Schedule for any project, making the humble Gantt chart more useful than you've ever seen before.

All of this is on top of the improvements we'd previously shared - like being able to configure smart dates which can accelerate or start work on autopilot - and a lot more. We're hoping to have it available for a sneak peek in the next couple of weeks, and launched not too long after that.

Rich Text Email Capture

With our release in Q1 of the Rich Text feature for creating activities in Accelo, we've understandably had a number of our clients want to see the same kind of visual magic with the emails that Accelo captures from external sources (eg, incoming emails from clients).

This quarter we'll be beta testing the ability to capture rich text (HTML) emails from clients; if you'd like to get in on the beta when we're ready, please email [email protected] and we'll turn it on for your deployment!

More CSV Import Improvements

In Q1 we upgraded the imports for Sales and Tickets as well as building an Assets import. In Q2 we've got a few other imports to upgrade, including Materials & Services, Projects and a few others that are still running the legacy import code.

This will be a gradual process and something that will likely delight new users more than our existing clients, but is an important improvement nonetheless!

Create and Edit Screen Upgrades

What we started out with as enhancements to the screens we use for creating and editing both Companies and Contacts grew in scope in Q1 as well - we realized that all of our core create/edit screens really needed a dramatic upgrade.

Our design phase is now pretty much complete, and we're looking forward to bringing these new interfaces to life through Q2, where they'll be launched gradually and as they're ready!

Reporting with PowerBI

One of the things we hear the most from our clients is around reporting and the desire for more custom reports, and for a while now we've been working on a special Content Pack for Microsoft's PowerBI.

During our beta, we've gotten a lot of invaluable feedback from clients about what they want to see in our PowerBI integration, and to support the number of custom reports and custom fields, we've re-engineered the data layer to PowerBI, and hope to be emerging from the beta period soon. 

In the interim, if you'd like to be involved in the beta for PowerBI, please email [email protected]

Expenses Product Improvements

For many of our users, entering expenses is almost as important as entering time, which is why the current interface for entering expenses is so frustrating. We've been working closely with a number of our clients on making both small improvements to the expenses product as well as a major improvement to how users see and work with expenses.

The major improvement is focused on the user interface and involves the more active use of "Expense Types" to simplify and streamline the inputs that users are expected to provide. An example would be choosing a "Mileage" expense type, which could then lock in place the "rate" per mile (or kilometre) and instead just ask the user to enter a quantity, with the rest of the calculations all done automatically. Similarly, for expenses that require a receipt to be attached, users could be required to supply one or more photos/attachments. 

These two scenarios are just scratching the surface, but the bottom line is that we're committed to making expense tracking a more easy and delightful experience for our users.

NinjaRMM Integration

As a modern cloud platform, it isn't surprising that IT service businesses are some of Accelo's most passionate users. These businesses - often known as Managed Service Providers, or MSPs - are technology experts, with easy access to the best technology in everything except running their business, where the incumbent products are decades old and both cumbersome and ugly.

While these MSPs have flocked to Accelo, they rely on a few other key tools to deliver great client service, including Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) software. Similarly to how these MSPs have also had to put up with clunky and out of date PSA software instead of a modern client work management platform like Accelo, the RMM market is dominated by a lot of cumbersome and ugly tools. 

Last quarter we ran an extensive - and valuable - integration with NinjaRMM, and we're close to launching this integration to clients around the world. If you're a Ninja user and you'd like to get in on the beta, feel free to email [email protected] - we're hoping to open this beta up in the next week or two.

Xero Tracking Categories

Xero, one of our most popular integrations, includes a popular feature known as Tracking Categories, which allows businesses to report on their income and expenses with nuance without needing to create a whole new ledger/account code.

By bringing this feature into Accelo, our users will be able to create invoices and purchases so they can more easily see their financial reports grouped by service area or business unit. This enhancement will allow Expenses, Invoice and Purchases to have tracking categories defined in Accelo and passed through into Xero to streamline reporting.

Automatically Processing Client Payments via Credit Card

With powerful automation (especially around recurring work like Retainers) and billing, it makes complete sense for Accelo to not only create invoices but to also help you get them paid!

Now that we have payment synchronization in place with QuickBooks Online and Xero, we're finally able to prioritize automatic payment processing.

As we leaned into this feature in Q1, we realized that one of the challenges for a company like ours with clients all over the world is finding the right partners to support this feature. We're continuing to progress this feature in Q2, but it is still going to take a bunch of time and work to get right! 

When complete, you'll be able to enter the credit card details of your client into Accelo (and when the client portal is upgraded, allow them to enter/update it themselves) and set rules like what cards can be used to process what types of invoices (Retainers only, or Projects and Retainers, or anything at all), set the max payment to charge per day and then (well deserved) sit back, and let the money roll in.

Notifications Upgrade

Accelo has the ability to provide a lot of useful notifications - from letting you know that a high-value prospect just opened your email through to a notification that the project you're running has just gone over budget. One of the priorities we're working on this quarter is a new notifications product/engine, which will allow you to control what notifications you get when you get them, and also whether you get them in-app, via email, or as a smartphone push notification in real time.

Task Boards

Accelo's task board - including the ability to have custom statuses - have been an ongoing priority for our team, with design work largely complete and the big challenges of engineering remaining. With more amazing developers on board than ever before, this quarter we're excited to move beyond concepts and plans into more concerted development for these improvements and get closer to shipping these brand new and highly configurable task boards.

Custom boards, with layouts of your choosing, and much more

Custom Layouts & Reports

Similarly to our task boards, the custom layouts and reports in Accelo are well planned and designed but are proving to be a lot of work to bring to life.

Turn that list screen into a card view with custom columns with ease