Product Update: September 26 - October 2

Wow, what a week it’s been! We had a bunch of staff attend HubSpot's Inbound Conference in the US where they rubbed shoulders with some of the best marketers from around the globe. In the land Down Under, it’s been a shorter week, but that hasn't stopped us from pushing out some amazing upgrades and improvements. So, here’s what you can look forward to in the first few days of Q4:

CSV import upgrade: This greatly simplifies and streamlines the process for importing client & contact data into Accelo using a CSV file format. We've built a whole new interface for stepping through the import wizard, we've added more duplicate detection options, and we've re-engineered the import utility to be faster, more robust and to provide more feedback on what was imported - and what wasn't.

View Activity screen re-design: For a long time our team have wanted to overhaul the layout and style of viewing an activity - especially a thread of activities - to make it easier to access the meta-information, easier to reply, and easier to see details like who has received, opened, or clicked on your emails sent from Accelo. You'll find this new style applies to the activities in the Inbox screen too!

Login using a Microsoft account: That's right - whether you're using Office365 or just have a plain Outlook account - as long as it's managed by Microsoft you can now login to Accelo using those credentials, if you wish. You'll see this new login option provided your account isn't already linked up with Google Apps.

Utilization Dashboard permission: This new permission makes it possible for non-admins to be granted access to the Staff Utilization Dashboard.

Android update: so that you can pin your favorite projects and/or companies to your home screen.

Purchases Improvement: When pushing a purchase to Xero, we're now able to put the ID and Title of the purchase from Accelo into the "Reference" field for the bill that is created in Xero. We also fixed a problem whereby users were unable to add custom/profile fields post purchase order creation.

Project Expense Threshold: The concept of an expense budget was introduced some time ago but we'd done a poor job at communicating that this isn't a budget which can be explicitly billed for (like the Service budget) - rather it was for recording the acceptable limit for all expenses throughout the life of the project. The Financials table of the Project Insights tab (when viewing a project) now shows this Expense Threshold so users can see how much of the threshold remains as expenses are logged.

PDF Invoice Layout: A few users pointed out that the Payments and Related Invoices section should be after the Sub-total/Amounts block when viewing a PDF Invoice. We dutifully agreed and have completed this change.

Group Permissions Fix: It was discovered that granting object-specific permissions to a group wasn't granting the permission to the members of the group. This problem has now been addressed.