Product Update: Aug 29 - Sep 11

We've had a pretty productive couple of weeks on the product front: Edit Bookings on Schedule Dashboard was one tidy improvement, along with our new Create & Edit Company screens! Plus, our new Gmail Add-on is now available in beta. Here's a shortlist of the minor updates:j

Customize Table Headings for Quotes: With this improvement, you can now customize your quote templates even further by renaming the table & column headings for Services and Materials. E.g. you could change the "Rate" column to be called "Price per unit" or "PPU" - you've got the power now.

Easily spot Confidential conversations in the Accelo Inbox: Secret and Confidential threads are now noted on your Inbox with handy little pad-lock icons. Purple for confidential and red for secret!

Handing Utilization history in Accelo: A few customers rightly pointed out that for new staff, their utilization and scheduling data should only exist from when their account was created in Accelo. So, to ensure Utilization Reports and Schedule Dashboard views are more accurate, we're now using the created date of your staff when calculating their availability.

Backdating Staff Cost Rates: If you've revised your business costs but forgot to update staff costs rates in Accelo at the time - no worries - as we have enhanced the "Refresh Staff Costs" feature (found on the toolbar when viewing a user profile) to include a date range selector. This means you could have their new cost rate applied to work/activities logged since July 1, for example. 

Staff on Utilization Dashboard: Fixed a bug whereby users/staff could be added twice, which was a little confusing and could lead to errors on the interface.

Invoice PDF Totals format: Our team set about improving the UI of the totals area in the PDF invoice template, so each totals field width will expand to accommodate extra text such as "Service & Materials Sub-total"

Meeting creator fallback user: We are now being smarter at choosing a fallback user if the meeting creator isn't attendee. We'll not try harder to use the first staff attendee who has their calendar integration enabled to help ensure the appointment/event can sync to Google or Exchange.

Choosing the right retainer period: By including the dates of each retainer period in the search results, it will hopefully be a lot easier to pick the correct period when using Search!

My Schedule screen - bugfix: We addressed a small quirk here; the yellow block of scheduled time didn't always hide if you had selected "Did not attend" for the meeting, but it will now.

Invoicing a non-billable project: We had disabled this feature to simplify the interface and avoid confusion - since the invoice screen won't have much to say when there's no service budget for a project.. however.. if there are materials on the project that you need to invoice, then it was not easy to get them billed! - this is why we've opened it up again.

Merging Companies & Contacts: These 2 features are quite powerful but there was a limitation in searching (for the other company/contact to merge with) with results limited to the top 5.. which in most cases would be sufficient, but for contacts with very common names, wasn't! So we're now returning 15 results to make it a bit easier to pick the correct one.

Sales Progress & Status changes: When using triggers or just editing the sale and changing the status, Accelo would not update the progress percentage (a simpler % metric to give an idea of how close this sale is to closing). This is because it normally only happens via a status progression. Now we'll infer the appropriate percentage based on the progressions available for that type of sale. More automation!

Pushing more activities to JIRA: This improvement allows activities created by contacts, and activities with no user mapping, to be pushed to JIRA from Accelo.