Product Updates: March 21- 27

The team pushed hard this past week with exciting Project module updates for you with things like better handling on Non-Billable work, Permissions for the new Team feature, a new Important Dates feature, and continued work on JIRA! Aside from that and the regular troubleshooting, here’s a very brief summary of some other highlights:

UI fixes & consistency improvements:

• We improved some minor aesthetics like the positioning of the trash can icon by moving it down a few pixels on list screens or restyling/resizing certain icons.
• We also updated some places where the visibility of activities/emails were still showing as "private" rather than the updated "secret" terminology.
• Some users noticed their tax codes in the admin area were all displayed as coming from Xero (or linked to Xero) when they were using other accounting systems - or no accounting system! This was a bug with the wrong icon showing, fortunately not a sync/integration problem!
• When an activity or time log is created, the green confirmation bubble (aka "toast") that appears has a link to view that activity, but oddly the link couldn't be middle-clicked (opened in a new browser tab). We've tracked down this quirk and made it work how you'd expect!
  
  

Improved Stream views: now you can see exactly when an activity occurred in your stream with the time next to the date. Previously, the timestamp of an activity was only included for activities that happened today.

Materials Unit Charge terminology: It seems we adopted both Unit Price and Unit Charge as ways of describing the amount (per unit) that you will charge to the customer for a material. While we really liked "Unit Price" it seemed that "Unit Charge" gave more clarity as to the amount you will charge the client - so we've updated all the references to use this from now on :-)

Hiding inactive Contributor/Team types: When improving the interface for adding/editing & viewing team members (contributors) for a project, it seems that inactive contributor types began to appear for selection. This shouldn't have been the case - since you typically don't want your staff to be using inactive types! We've tidied up the situation now.

Key Date column for Project List: Many of you would have noticed this new column as part of the Important Dates feature release mentioned earlier. We've now added some extra logic so that if you don't have any Key Dates configured yet, we have some fallback ones appearing to help your team get a feel for how they can be used. E.g. if a project status equates to "Pending" we're showing the Planned Start date as the Key Date for that project in the list.

PDF Invoice Generation - More stability: After seeing a couple more reports of PDF invoices failing to generate properly, we've made the process more robust. E.g. previously if the staff member assigned as the invoice owner happened to become inactive, and then someone tried to generate the PDF invoice, it would fail due to the inactive owner. This situation is now handled more gracefully.

Invoicing for Parent Milestones: When budgeting for a project, Accelo allows you to set a Fixed (or "defined") price for the "overall" milestone if it is a "parent" milestone - meaning it has sub-milestones. This overall price is designed to override the sub-total from sub-milestones, as well as overriding any normal price set on the parent milestone. The problem was that this overall price wasn't being respected when invoicing - we were continuing to use just the normal milestone price for the milestone in question, as well as showing the price for the sub-milestones. We've worked through this problem so that now the overall price will take precedence, causing the price of all sub-milestones to be ignored when invoicing - much like the way a Fixed Price project is handled!

Client Portal Attachments: We looked into some reports of attachments not appearing consistently for users within the Client Portal. It turns out that there was a missing set of permissions for managing these attachments for certain objects, and rather than use the permission set at the parent level, we were outright blocking the attachments from showing. This situation has now been improved to look to the parent object portal permission to decide if the attachments should be visible.

Pre-paid Retainer Overview Detail: It was pointed out that the overview detail when looking at at pre-paid Retainer/Contract wasn't quite showing the correct value of the retainer if materials were included in the pre-paid value. We were still showing the material value as added on-top. This has now been corrected.