Feb 12, 2024
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We're trying something new here at Accelo to give a bit more insight into the work our product team is doing each week. We'll be publishing relatively short blog posts outlining the major work completed and our priorities for the week ahead - if you've got questions or feedback, please leave them in the comments below or email [email protected].
Templates control Filters on bulk Company Billing: this is a big one! Now, when you use the Company Billing screen you'll be asked first to choose an Invoice Template. This will then pre-select the filter criteria in the left hand side to include the right preferences for Work Done, Budget Remaining and so on.
Supporting 0 Quantity Line Items: while it might seem strange to include line items with 0 as the quantity, there's cases where folks want to have a placeholder (such as in complex projects) to use a line item like a heading in the Services table. This is now supported.
Additional line-item information in bulk Company Billing: when you create an invoice using the new bulk Company Billing feature, you can now click on the arrow beside a row and see the budget, the amount already invoiced for, as well as the ledger and tax codes.
Quickbooks Web Connector Fixes: the Quickbooks Web Connector, which is used by Quickbooks Desktop users to talk to their Accelo account, had some problems bringing together the new Item codes with the existing Tax and Ledger codes, and meant that ledger codes were sometimes being pulled back in incorrectly. Because of the variety of ways people have QB set up, combined with the backwards way that QBWC works, this one took a bunch more work to sort out than planned; now all QBWC invoices should be pushed properly, imports now create line items properly and the PDF files are being generated properly.
Service & Material Items when re-importing from Xero: when users re-hit the "Import" button from Xero we weren't correctly matching up previously imported Service and Material item codes, which meant if there was a change in price, code or title we were ending up with duplicates or flat out missed items. This is fixed now.
Invoicing for Remaining Budget adjusts quantity/hours, not rate: when you invoice for the remaining budget on a Project (in particular) we were previously changing the rate rather than the quantity. This is fixed to be quantity specific now, but we've also seen some examples where we need to have more decimal places and hope to have those few cases (where the rounding to the fourth decimal place is incorrect) fixed soon.
Custom fields on Invoice Create: those of you with Custom Profile Fields for things like Purchase orders - rejoice! Now you can enter values for your custom fields when you create an invoice, and after the work we're doing this week use the values in merge fields on the PDF file too. We're still handling a few issues with invoice editing and bulk Company Billing screens this week.
Invoicing Materials on Contracts/Retainers: we had a bug where we weren't handling the default tax and ledger codes from the Contract/Retainers invoices for Materials. This is fixed now - sorry for missing that one in the core of the invoicing upgrade.
Bulk Company Billing was finding already-invoiced expenses: this one was annoying because it would bring up projects, tickets or retainer periods that had already been fully billed before in the search (because the filter/search wasn't taking into account if an expense had already been invoiced for). We're taking these into account in the search/filter process now so you'll get less red herrings.
Ability to un-assign work from a user in bulk: if you've had someone leave, fall ill or otherwise need to have their workload reassigned, we've had the Bulk Reassign Work screen (accessible to admins off the User view screen) for a while. With last week's improvement, we're now able to set work to be Unassigned, so instead of just loading one poor person up with all of the tasks, tickets and more when someone can't work on them, you can now put them in the unassigned pile and dish them out more deliberately.
Retainer Invoice Work Detail now includes Task activities: the team found a bug where the time logged on tasks wasn't being picked up properly in the PDF output for the Work Detail. This has now been fixed.
Service Itemization was dropping tax-code information: we had a bug last week where the act of itemizing service work done - breaking it down by staff member, for example - was dropping the tax/ledger default codes. This is fixed now.
Unable to re-invoice materials after deleting Retainer period invoice: this was a bit more of an edge case, but if you had materials on a ticket (for example) that were tied to a retainer period, and then you deleted the retainer period, the materials weren't freed up again for independent billing. This is now handled.
Improvements for Next Week
This week we've got a number of improvements the team is working on, including:
- Adding a Billable/Non-Billable toggle in the Contract/Retainer Approval tool
- Including a new Work Summary table for invoices on Contracts/Retainers or through bulk Company Billing processes, making it a lot easier for your users to see at a glance the work that comes together in their bigger invoices.
- Status selector for Expenses in Invoice Templates and Create Invoice flows; we currently only show you "Approved" expenses, but with this enhancement we'll let you bill for any unbilled expenses.
- Invoice template improvements, including changes for default owners, titles and notes (including, for the title and notes, the ability to use merge fields).
- As mentioned above, the custom profile fields are in place, but we need to make them displayable through the Template Editing interface.
- Adjusting the "Page Size" of PDFs generated by the invoicing system; right now, for some locations printing them causes the tiniest bit of vertical squeezing and blurriness.
- Fixing the permissions on the Client Portal screen for viewing a Retainer/Contract.
- Showing the amounts "Invoiced" through a Contract/Retainer on the Project view screen.
- Improving the "budget" summary information for fixed-price projects in the Services area (complex because a fixed-price project includes materials information, but they get billed separately because of their use of codes, etc).
- Making sure the Contract/Retainer Period view shows the correct usage values when work that was linked has been unlinked from a Period.
Thanks for your support, and looking forward to bringing you another update next week!