Mar 13, 2023
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There's been some sizeable goodies - like our upgraded Create Task UI and new, more efficient Create/Edit Contact Flow - plus a bunch of smaller polishes and improvements over the past couple of weeks:
Turn your Project Plan into a PDF: We've struggled with the concept of printing a project plan (gantt chart) due to the potentially massive print area - horizontal and vertical - which could require a lot of printer paper and of course configuration to get the right zoom level and detail.. And then comes the fun of to sticky-taping all the pieces onto a wall to visualize. Not fun! Still, we've always recognized the need to share the project plan with customers and stakeholders, which is why it's been available in the Client Portal since a while back, but now we've taken the extra (and somewhat overdue) step of making it PDF-able.
Our answer is to let you generate a single PDF which captures the entire project plan, and of course you can choose to hide some details - like budget, hours and tasks - from the PDF version. From there you can print from your PDF reader which will give you more flexibility regarding the print area, page size etc.
Ensuring Retainer Types respect their order: This minor bugfix is to ensure that types listed when creating a retainer are shown in the order you have configured them in the admin side of Accelo.
Showing Task duration in Quotes: Accelo's quoting module is very much oriented toward quoting for project work, so much so that you can quickly convert the estimate into a project as the milestones and tasks carry from quote to project. Since the work planned out in the quote can have a duration (e.g. the project has a budget of 200 hours, but the expected duration from project commencement to delivery is 60 business days) this duration information is now available in the client-facing quote PDF. You can choose to include the duration for tasks and milestones too.
Recording Expense Budget in Quotes: Another item which exists in the projects world but wasn't possible in quotes, is the concept of an expense estimate. Now when editing the quote plan, you can define the expense budget (or threshold) too, which can even be copied into the Quote PDF if you want to let the client know that as part of the project you estimate a certain value of expenses to be incurred on top of the project budget. And of course this value will then flow into the project if you convert the quote into one.
Retainer Invoice - Line Item description field now supports textarea: A few users noticed that the Service Description field in a Retainer appeared to allow multiple lines of text to be added, but when this text was used in the services line item description when you invoice each period of the retainer, the newlines were not being respected. The result was that the text would wrap at unexpected places in the invoice line item field which wasn't very professional. Apologies. We've corrected this now.
Purchase Templates can be clone: Yep, like other templates (invoices, quotes, etc.) templates for the Purchases module can also be cloned (or duplicated) to save time when defining new templates.
Start and End Dates for Staff/Users: To ensure that the data in the Utilization and Profitability Reports are more accurate, we're now paying attention to the Starting Date and End Date set for your users. These are 2 new date fields which you can fill in for your staff to indicate the date they started with your company (or when they started using Accelo) and when they finished. Without this, Accelo was appearing to penalize users for being under-utilized or unprofitable before they had even started their job!
Public API: New endpoint for create material - this allows users of Accelo's public API to create new materials using a special new endpoint. See our API docs for more.
Gmail Addon: Show contextual info before email has sync'd. This refers to the fact that our new Gmail Addon was waiting for the email to be sync'd into Accelo before showing data/context about the client. This was a bit odd since we can simply use the contact email address to surfact more context about the client even if the specific email/conversation is not known to Accelo yet. All improved now!
Expensify Integration Improvements:
- We will now relocate the Accelo expense when the tagged project/issue/retainer changes in Expensify
- Update reimbursed date and reimbursed by in Accelo when the reimbursed details change in Expensify.
Finding the List Receipts screen: It has been next to impossible for users to access the list screen for receipts, which was a bit of an oversight from an upgrade we made a while ago. To address this we have added a link on the Invoices List which will pass you into the Receipts List screen where you can search and filter all the payments/receipts known to Accelo.