Product Updates: Sep 25 - Oct 8

Our product team are deliciously close to bringing you some big improvements to the Accelo interface for adding/editing contacts as well as creating tasks, but in the mean-time here's a taste of the improvements and fixes released over the past 2 weeks:

Track a budget for Post-Paid Retainers: By popular demand, we've turned on the budget/allowance tracking already found in pre-paid retainers to work for post-paid retainers. This means that while the amount to invoice at the end of the period still depends on the time/value logged, you can opt to enable a budget to track the usage against. This is helpful for clients who want to keep their spend within a certain amount or helpful for managers who want to set an estimate of expected usage for some clients. As with pre-paid retainers, you can configure triggers and alerts based on the budget usage.

Delete Company - Clearer view of things to delete: We've restructured the layout of the delete confirmation screen to list out all the objects within the company that will be deleted. Previously there were tabs across the page for each group of objects (contacts, sales, tickets, etc.) and we found that some users were going ahead with the delete not realizing there were tickets or sales under those other tabs. With this view the user must scroll past all the objects to find the final Delete button - including a new checkbox to confirm they understand the permanence of the deletion!

Updating more fields in Contact Triggers: This change opens up more fields for a contact - specifically their company details, like phone, position, email - to be updated as in the trigger actions for contact triggers. This is especially helpful if you have created "affiliation" profile fields (these are fields specific to each company link for a contact).

Allow closed tickets to be merged: This minor improvement ensures that Accelo does not hide the "Merge ticket" option in the toolbar if the ticket is in a closed status.

Contact names for the Tickets Export: We have added the Ticket Contact's Firstname and Lastname to the Tickets List's export.

Utilization Dashboard permissions fix: Some users noticed a permissions error when trying to export the timesheet data. This was because they were not admin users. We have resolved this bug now.

Hours data for Projects export: To help project managers track how much time in the budget has been broken down into tasks, we have added 2 new columns: "Unallocated Hours" and "Unassigned Hours".

Exporting Retainer List without Periods: Some users noticed that if there aren't any current/previous periods available, the retainer export is missing helpful data about the price, budget, allowance etc. So we have added logic to fallback to the templated budget/price data from the retainer when the periods are unavailable.

Companies API Update: Allow setting the custom_id on company create (in Accelo this appears as the company code).

Subtotal option for Invoice Work Detail: While it was already possibly to group the work detail of an invoice by rate, staff, work(object) or date, those groupings didn't show the subtotal of time/value. We've added an option which makes this possible.

Created date for User List: To track when your users were added to Accelo, there's now a column to see the created date in the List Users screen.

Cc and Bcc notifications fix: When a notification is sent in Accelo for an Activity, we should be checking the medium (email, call, etc.) to determine whether that notification should be sent as a Cc or a Bcc. For notifications which are sent to other staff, all Email, Meeting and Call activities should result in a Bcc, however, they were resulting in a Cc - but our team have fixed this quirk.

Converting retainer to another type: Converting retainer type wasn't updating the pre-paid / post-paid setting even when you chose to have the retainer template overwritten. Fixed now.

Privacy & Confidentiality in the Request queue: We made some improvements to ensure Accelo will hide all secret activities in request inbox including in the snippets of replies shown on the left of the inbox and request screens.

Portal Invitation email - merge fields: There's now additional sender merge fields available when configuring your client portal invitations: sender email, phone, mobile.

ConnectWise integration upgrade - now supports import of more ticket detail including setting the assignee correctly.

JIRA Integration - Set start date on Accelo task using the start date specified in JIRA

Fixes for Project Templates: Non-billable settings are now respected when creating a project from a project template. Additionally, we fixed a problem with service items not passing through when turning an active project into a project template.

Contact list filter fix: A couple of users noticed that trying to filter for contacts with an empty "Position" wasn't working. It should have returned all contacts that have no job/position defined, but we returning nothing. This is resolved now.