Product Update: December 6 - 12

With 2017 coming to a close, we're starting to prepare for a big 2018! However, we still have some loose ends to tie up before we enter vacation mode - so that you have an even better system running your business in the New Year. With that said, here's a list of our most recent updates and improvements:

Streams and View Activity UI upgrades: While there are lots of subtle tweaks to be found, such as the improved reply buttons on the right-side of each activity, one of the eye-popping-candy improvements is seeing the email event tracking highlights. These show whether your contacts and users have received, opened and even clicked on a link within email sent from Accelo.

If you click on an activity to view it in full, you'll also spot some significant design changes within the View Activity screen, particularly:

• Improved toolbar to easily access options such as convert activity, relocate thread, create task and privacy/visibility settings for the entire conversation
• Simplified "Additional Details" card on the right-side of each activity. Previously there was a constant details section which was confusing as you could be looking at the 5th email while viewing the extra details of the first activity - confusing! Much better now.
• Better handling of confidential activities, so if you open a thread containing activities in this category, it will be clear which activities you can still interact with and which you'll need to ask your admin or colleagues for access to, if necessary.

User List Export - Cost Rates: If you have full admin access to Accelo then you already have access to user cost rates, and you'll now find these user/ cost rates included in the export of users from the user list.

Attach files to Tasks: You might have noticed that the Attachments tab within the Tasks area was able to display attachments related to activities/emails under the task, but you couldn't upload a file against the task... Well, good news - now you can, quickly and easily!

Ticket Export - Time formatting: Some users requested that the format for billable and non-billable time be set specifically in the Datetime format to allow for easy calculation of the data in Excel. This means the values are now formatted like 30:45 (30 hours, 45 minutes)

PDF generation stability fixes: We received several reports of the invoice and quote PDF generation process producing empty (0 byte) files, and after some solid investigation work we spotted an inconsistency in the process that checks for filename uniqueness. This has been corrected and we're not seeing the occasionally empty PDFs anymore, as it should be!

MailChimp - Minor Fixes: Our team made some changes to ensure pushing a campaign to Mailchimp, and allowing stats to sync back, is more reliable.

Expense Summary on Customer Invoice: We rolled out an improvement request for the Customer PDF Invoice such that expenses included in the invoice can now be grouped/summarised by expense type, with a little less detail, if that's what you prefer.

Retainer Invoice Itemization: Also on invoicing, you might have noticed that when invoicing a project or ticket it was possible to expand (itemize) billable work by the Staff member who logged the time, or by the Billable rate. This means that extra detail goes into your accounting system. This handy feature has now been included for Post-Paid Retainer invoices, which makes a lot of sense since the budget configuration is similar to a Time & Materials project :-)

Signoffs module for Android App - Beta. We're still pushing out a few more features, but you can now list, view and edit your client sign-offs inside the Accelo Android mobile app. This also means the Public API now has a basic endpoint for getting the details of the signoffs inside your Accelo account.

Expense submitted date bugfix: And finally, but importantly, if you thought you were going crazy because your expenses kept changing the date they were submitted for - well, it wasn't you - it was us. Approving, declining or otherwise changing the status of an expense was resetting the submitted date to that day. Fortunately while fixing the bug our team were also able to automate a process to reset the original dates.