Sneak Peek: Expenses Upgrade and More [Webinar Video]

In this week's webinar, our CEO and Co-Founder, Geoff McQueen, gave a special sneak preview of the new Expenses Upgrade (coming soon), and as an added bonus - sneak peeks into the New Storage System + S3, and the MailChimp Integration.

In case you missed it, check out some webinar highlights:

There are three types of "costs" in service businesses: time, materials and expenses

While time is often the biggest, and Materials are chunky, Expenses are often smaller, less planned and as a result are easier to lose. If you're going to know how profitable your client work is, you need to know your revenue and your costs. Even better, if you're able to pass on your Expenses - perhaps even with margin - they need to be connected to where and how you invoice your clients.  

Benefits of the Expenses Upgrade

1. Faster and Easier for users: By choosing a type, most defaults get set.

2. Better settings for managers: Managers can easily set rules, rates and more

3. Better control of accounting: Straight-through links to items, ledgers & taxes.
   

The Upgraded Expenses Model

For example: In those products (Xero and QuickBooks) you have the concept of your Items: the products you sell, sometimes when you keep track of them, it's referred to as the inventory area. Those items generally live in the accounting system. Accelo synchronizes and imports those items from the accounting system, and then enables you to use them in Accelo. The benefit of them coming from the accounting system is that when it comes time to push back invoices and purchases later, you're actually using those items to have a nice, straight through push for things like taxes and ledger codes.

So, we've got our Items, and one of the things that's really important is being able to say that a certain Expense Type: such as mileage, can include a number of different items that originally come from the accounting system. It's important having that flexibility because some items might have a certain tax rate. The idea is you can create this Expense Type, which can control what the user sees on the screen for creating an expense, and you can link multiple items to that Expense Type.

Then, when the user creates an Expense, all they have to do is choose the Expense Type, and everything updates automatically. If we don't want to show units, we don't have to. All the choices you make in the Type area enables intelligently the user to just see what matters to them when filling out the expense form itself.

And because the user is creating an expense in an intelligent and easy to use way, then the act of Invoicing and Purchasing for those expenses, and pushing that back across the accounting side of things is really easy. 

Insight from the Demo Walkthrough

In Xero or QuickBooks, you have a series of Items. You have different products/services that you sell and each can have different rates that apply to them. There are different prices, ledger codes, account codes, tax rates, etc. These all live in the accounting system.

Over in Accelo, we automatically sync what these items are. Think of them as two sides of the same coin. You got a representation of all your different items, their prices, what accounts they go into, all those sorts of things. 

How We Work with Expense Types

Expense Type is designed to be a way that you can set your preferences, user defaults, what is shown/hidden so that the act of them creating an expense is really trivial and accurate.

Under "Edit Expense Type" - inside of the Expense Type you are linked to a number of different Items, that came out of the accounting system. You can set a default or primary one from the interface. You can even grab from an Item that already exists. You also have the option to ask the user to provide a Quantity & Unit for their expense entry - details include - Unit Title, Purchase Vendor (Required, Not Required, Default, or Hidden), Default for Billable, Default Markup, Reimbursable Options (Reimbursable or Non-Reimbursable), and Tax Options (Inclusive or Exclusive).

Under "Add Expense" - It includes: Title, Type, Where does this Expense belong?, Date, Owner, Add Attachment (if you need to include one), and dependent on what type of Expense it requires miles, rate, amount, tax, and there are other sections, 'Is this Expense billable to the client?' and 'Does this need to be reimbursed to the owner?' You can also check to add another if you need it.

Release Schedule & Go-Live: 

• Currently in final QA and polish - there's a lot of changes so a lot to test and get right!
•  Android and iOS upgrades are also underway.
• Aiming to have live in June.

Bonus Sneak Peeks!

Sneak Peek 1: New Storage System + S3

While Accelo isn't a file storage and sharing tool like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive., etc. files are important to how you do great work for your clients. Our auto-attachment capture is unique, too. As we've grown Accelo we've outgrown the way we'd been storing your files on the back-end. Over the last few months, we've been completely replacing our file storage system to move S3.

Benefits include:

• Speed: S3 is a much faster & a true cloud system

• Cost: S3 will allow us to increase your included GBs

• Flexibility: we'll be allowing clients to use own S3

This project is designed to be invisible to our users, but we hope you'll enjoy the benefits!

Release Schedule & Go-Live:

• Migrations will be commencing next week.

• Built to support hybrid-mode will be gradual.

• We have many MANY terabytes of data to move!

• Use of your own S3 account/billing to come later. 

Sneak Peek 2: New MailChimp Integration

What it means, for those who are MailChimp users will actually be able to benefit from Accelo's synchronizing or pushing contacts across from MailChimp on an automatic, ongoing basis. Because as a MailChimp user you're used to having all of the power of being able to do really beautiful emails, lots of different content, A/B tests, great delivery, and open reports, but it's still a hassle to make sure you have all your latest contacts in MailChimp.

With the new MailChimp integration, our users will be able to sync in real-time all of the contacts you want from your Accelo account into MailChimp.

There are several sync options. You can enable the Automatic Contact Sync. You also have a series of Sync Rules - help keep the number of contacts under control by configuring sync rules. Set your fixed field, rules. You can also do a Manual Sync push on a one-off occasion. Every time you add a new contact or edit a contact, the rules will be evaluated, and if they're matched, MailChimp will get updated and the contact will be pushed across.

Release Schedule & Go-Live: 

• Targeting a June launch with the MailChimp team.

• Available in beta now for users who want it - just email: [email protected]

Watch the demo walkthrough, FAQ, and get even more information by checking out the webinar recording below: