Product Updates: Feb 28 - Mar 6

Another week of updates and improvements for you! Apart from the continued work on pushing out more updates on our Projects Module and JIRA integration, here are some of the highlights from this past week:

Updated Icons in Notification Emails: Minor improvement that’ll make sure any emails sent out of Accelo have the most up to date icons to ensure consistency with the web app.

Option to Clone an Asset Type: Some of you brought to our attention the need for the ability to clone (or duplicate) an asset type. This avoids having to re-create all the custom fields for the new (cloned) type - which is especially helpful if you have several types of assets with a similar base set of custom fields. For more info, click here.

Improvement to Task Cards on Team Scheduling: Team Scheduling’s task cards were displaying the task’s due date, but not its start date. Since that’s an important piece of info, we added it :-)

Utilization Report + Dashboard Export: A couple of report hungry users were looking for a simple Utilization Report to export into Excel. This was important to convey staff utilization to executives who weren’t using Accelo (and needed something simple and clean to show them). So, we built a new feature whereby you can do a simple export option for the Utilization Dashboard - we hope this saves you some time! Get a deeper dive here.

Improved functionality with Zapier: We added an option to our public api that doesn’t allow you to overwrite existing values on an object unless explicitly said so. So, while we made no direct improvements to Zapier itself, now when you add segmentation values from Zapier, they won’t delete existing ones.

Forecasting of Project Costs: We've improved the ability to forecast the cost of a project when tasks or milestones are unassigned. Now we'll look up to the parent object and use that manager/assignee cost rate to get an estimate of the staff costs involved in completing any child milestones/tasks which aren't yet assigned. This helps ensure the forecasted costs have a value that is more meaningful than $0!

Splitting Tasks in a Project: The behaviour for splitting tasks has improved such that the new task will now appear directly below the one it was split from. Previously the new task was being appended to the end of the milestone/level, whereas now it is given a more sensible ordering/position within the project. 

Retainer Usage in Client Portal: Our team looked into a problem with Post-Paid Retainers not showing their usage (billable value) in the Client Portal, despite permissions being applied to allow this. After a little digging around we found the problem and have addressed the missing data for the Retainer screen and Period screens.

Ticket Resolution Configuration Bug: While trying to re-configure the Ticket Resolution options in the admin side of Accelo, some users noticed that the list of existing resolution options wasn't appearing. We looked into this and corrected some UI changes which were causing the list or resolutions to be hidden.

Invoice Title Merge Field Improvements: Accelo allows you to configure "merge" fields in many places which lets you automate the insertion of client-specific details when creating emails, quotes, invoices are more. In this case the invoice.reference.title merge field - used to describe the project, issue or retainer that an invoice pertains to - wasn't behaving sensibly when used in the Company Billing Tool. This was because this tool allows you to combine multiple projects, tickets etc. into 1 invoice, which means there are multiple objects to reference in the invoice title! To work-around this the merge field will now cleverly fall-back to the company name when it needs to.

Retainer Auto-Renew Invoice Fixes: Some QuickBooks users reported that their Retainer invoices were appearing in QuickBooks without the expected Item Codes on the invoice line items. After looking into this we discovered a bug with the Retainer auto-renewal process in that the Service Item code configured in the retainer was not being applied to the automatically built invoices. This issue has now been corrected - so all future renewals should have invoices with the proper Item Code details set.

Permission for Project Overview: The new overview of milestones & tasks within a milestone provides some handy shortcuts for logging time, creating activities and creating/splitting tasks. The improvement we've made is to ensure these shortcut buttons only appear when the user actually has permission to view the details of those milestones/tasks. This way, they'll be guided to log time and create tasks on the things that are most relevant to them.