Product Updates: April 11 - 17

This past week was a busy one, despite the Easter break for many of us, with continued updates and new features getting pushed across the line. Our new JIRA integration is coming along nicely, with improvements like better handling of comments and worklogs (thanks again to our beta testers!). We also rolled out improvements for the Sign-off tool to better track your client’s approval as you work through projects and tickets. Aside from the usual troubleshooting, here’s a short list of some of the other highlights from the team:

More flexibility with your contracts and retainers: Last week we rolled out our new defined task rates feature, which lets you specify different rates for different types of work under a single contract or retainer. For example, if you have different tasks you’re working on for a single client or contract, that by nature have different billable rates (i.e. SEM campaigns VS. website maintenance) now you can define different rates for those tasks in a single retainer. For details, have a look at our help page.

Configuring Team/Contributor Permissions:  Since upgrading our Contributors feature to handle staff contributors (aka Team Members) against a project, ticket or sale, we have been working on a way for you to automatically give those team members permissions for that project (or ticket, or sale) based on the type of contributor chosen for each team member. This improvement is now available, so the next time you're configuring permissions for a user or group of staff, scroll through the select-list and you will also find each contributor type available for permission editing too!

Edit Milestone Budget - Improved layout: With the recent improvements to our project module we enhanced the budget set-up screens to be easier to use, as well as introducing new Fixed-price options. These feature and UI changes have now been applied to the handy "Edit Budget" pop-up within the View Milestone page. This pop-up makes it quick and easy to adjust the rate, hours and budget settings for a milestone without having to open the entire project plan.

UI improvement for Retainer periods: This update includes better alignment of your “billable time” header with the allotted column in the Usage view, a useful cosmetic change :-).

New fields for expenses export: Now when you export your list expenses, you’ll notice a unit charge column for better expense details.

Project dashboard charts using new Earned Vaue: The pie chart value graph now reflects the new earned value budget in your project dashboard, for better visibility and accuracy with regards to the earned value for your projects.