Product Updates: Feb 26 - Mar 11

The last couple of weeks has seen our product teams continue to plan out some bigger features & improvements - stay tuned for more news on that front - while also shipping some essential updates and fixes:

Configure your projects with Fixed Due Dates

From listening to users on how they manage projects in Accelo, we learnt that it was reasonably common to plan out a project where the start dates weren't critical- meaning they could shift based on dependencies - but the planned due dates were more like deadlines that shouldn't shift. While possible, setting this up required copying the planned due dates into the Deadline field for every milestone & task - a lot of manual effort!

Now, we've rolled out a "Fixed Deadlines" mode to automate this scenario, and we've improved the descriptions of the existing scheduling modes to clarify their behavior.

Convert quote to project now observes all business rules

For a long time, converting a quote into a project was a simple procedure which took the milestones, tasks and budget from the quote and moved it onto the new project, without any fuss. But if you were putting the new project into a status which had some special actions associated with it - like composing an email, updating a custom field or even creating an invoice - those actions were ignored.

The good news is that we've update the convert quote process to now direct you into the full Create Project screen so you can proceed with setting up a project as normal - including any special status actions - without compromising the project template/budget details which come from the quote.

Expense submitted date fix

When viewing an expense submitted by a user in another timezone, the date of the expense may have appeared incorrectly due to a hiccup in the way we were storing the expense submitted datetime. This has been corrected.

Improvement to merge fields in Invoices

A few users noted that it wasn't possible to merge some invoice details into the title of the invoice. This was largely due to the fact that the invoice data doesn't truly exist until the invoice is saved - and merge fields need to fetch the saved data, not data that is still being drafted into a form, to be able to merge it in. However, our team found a way to get this to work, which means if you were trying to merge a custom field like "Purchase Order #" from the invoice into the invoice title - so that this information is visible on the invoice in your accounting system - it will now work!

Credit Card Payment Screen - Logo fix

If you'd set-up divisions in Accelo, with custom branding/logos, and were allowing your clients to pay invoices using Accelo's online credit card payment screen, you might have found that your special logo for a division wasn't being shown to your customers - instead they were seeing your standard business logo when paying an invoice, which might have confused them. This has been corrected now.

Public API: "Referrals" data now available

But what is a referral? In Accelo, when a project is created from a sale, or a ticket is created from a project, we store this origin information as a referral. This relationship wasn't exposed in the API, until now. So, it might be better to think of this as the "source" or "origin" object.

Retainer invoicing - Service Item bugfix

While troubleshooting some quirks with invoicing within the Retainers module, we noticed a problem whereby a retainer invoice may try to use an inactive service item when building the invoice line items. This is because the inactive service item was still associated with the retainer. This leads to invoices using out-dated service items which might not sync with your accounting system. We've patched this logic to ensure the inactive service item is ignored, instead falling back to the item set in your invoice template. Of course, editing your retainer(s) and updating the Service Item also fixes the issue.

Tasks with committed time in Daily Timesheet

As our team were making improvements to the tasks shown on the right-side of your Daily Timesheet screen, we noticed that if you were allocated some committed time for another user's task, this wouldn't show in the list. While this situation is uncommon, it is absolutely supported in other areas of Accelo so we've updated this task listing to ensure those will appear as well.

Project Dashboard - Approved & Uninvoiced Work:

Accelo's Project Dashboard screen offers some metrics helpful for tracking projects that might need time approved or invoiced. This particular metric is clickable, taking you through to a list of matching projects. The trouble was, the projects shown on the list screen weren't quite consistent with those included in the dashboard metric calculation, as the filters being applied in the list didn't match what the project dashboard was using. We've taken care of that difference now.

Updated Rich Text Editor for Billing admin

The invoicing and payment settings in Accelo offers some areas for customizing the text content used in the Invoice reminder emails and the Invoice Payment instructions. These were using a very old text editor interface which was limited in the text formatting you could apply, so we've updated them to match the editors used across most of Accelo.

My Schedule screen - Week starts on Monday

After hearing from a bunch of users, we've adjusted the This/Last Week filter option to start the week on Monday rather than Sunday, which is also consistent with the rest of the weekly filters and views in Accelo.

Link Tickets to Retainers using Triggers

Some time ago we made it possible to automatically link tickets to client's retainers via a special action when a ticket was created or progressed (status change). Now we've added this functionality into the Triggers module so the ability to auto-link a ticket to a retainer can occur from there too. 

Saved Filters also remember column ordering

When you're filtering a list of tickets, sales, projects, etc., we keep track of all the fields you were filtering by when you choose to save the filters, but if you had also re-ordered the results by selecting a column heading, this ordering detail wasn't saved with the filter. Fortunately adding this information into the saved filters wasn't complicated, so from now on we'll remember your column ordering preference when you save a filtered list.

Task Creator available in filters

 Another improvement in the area of filtering, this change makes it possible to filter tasks by the creator when using the Taskboard screen or the Task List screen.