Product Updates: April 30 - May 27

Over the last month or so our product team have pushed forward with some timely improvements to our Holidays Calendar feature, not to mention the Improved Gantt Chart Experience when planning a project. Here's a run down of the smaller updates:

Task Boards: Filter work by Client

A simple but powerful addition to help you drill-down on the status of tasks across a particular client: Now you can filter the work on your Task Board to focus on tasks related to a single client - or multiple clients if you wish:

Expense Creator had incorrect permissions

We identified a problem whereby the creator of an expense was automatically given permission to approve that expense. This loophole has been tidied up, including the removal of any Approve/Decline links in the email notifications they might see. The creator will still be able to delete their expense.

Leave Calendar: Create Holidays for Groups of Users

Yep, finally you can create a custom leave/holiday entry for multiple users in a single hit by selecting a Group - rather than a single user OR the whole user base. This is useful for handling lesser-known holidays, training days, half-day events etc., which only apply to a specific set of users in Accelo. Once added, the hours/days of leave will block out that time in Accelo's scheduling areas.

Fixes to Cloning Quotes and Tasks

• When cloning a quote, the dependency (pre-requisites) in the quote's project plan were not being copied across.
• When creating a new type of project, ticket, retainer or sale, it's possible to copy status progressions and triggers from an existing type. This process wasn't properly copying the Task Checklists.

Being smarter about creating Requests from email

Our team was facing some scenarios where a request was being created despite the client just replying (or following up to their own email) to a support ticket. This could happen if the email alias used on the support ticket matched the request capture alias. Using the same alias is great for continuity and consistency with your customers (so they only ever have to email support@xyz..) but our request capture system was struggling to tell when to create a request and when to just capture the reply on the existing thread.

In a nutshell, we'll avoid creating requests when the parent email involves an alias that is the same as the alias of the request that is trying to be processed. If we find a match, then we'll air on the side of not creating a new request. This should help keep those double replies against the ticket where they typically belong. Of course, if the client was trying to escalate the matter, they'd need to start a fresh email to support@xyz.. !!

Performance fix for pushing Tasks to Google

Our team identified some poor logic, which meant some users were seeing lots of copies of the "Accelo Task List" in Google, which in turn slowed down the sync process as we iterated over all these lists. This has now been cleaned up and optimized.

Company (bulk) Invoicing - Billing Contact behaviour

A little while back we introduced the concept of a "billing contact" for a project, and while this was observed when directly invoicing the project, it wasn't regarded in the Company Billing Tool. While fixing this, we've also improved the logic so that, if the billing contact on the project or retainer is not set, we'll fall back to the billing contact preference on the Company.

Company Export includes Primary Address

Since recently updating the Company List screen to focus on the Company Primary Address (rather than the address of the primary contact) we needed to update the Company Export to do the same, and now we have.

Xero Integration: Items with bad accounts

Our team spotted a flaw with the process that synchronizes material and service items from Xero into Accelo. We were, in some cases, choosing a duplicate inactive account to set on the materials & services in Accelo. This caused problems when trying to create invoices, which used those materials/services and Xero won't accept the old/inactive accounts.

Google Calendar: Disable import of external events

For quite some time, it turns out the toggle to disable the import of events from Google into Accelo has not been working correctly. Accelo was continuing to pull in these external events into your Accelo schedule despite the option not being enabled. Fortunately, these external events remain private until converted into a real meeting activity. This setting has been fixed.

Auto-setting custom fields for Retainer Invoicing

Accelo has a feature whereby a custom profile field configured for a project and an invoice (or a retainer and an invoice) can pass the value along from project to invoice, as the invoice is created. This is handy if you need to stamp your invoices with a field like "Purchase Order Number" as that number is already known to the project.

While this feature has been working perfectly when an invoice is created inside the app, if you have configured some Retainers to automatically renew and invoice, this "passing" of the custom field value from retainer > invoice was not working. Now our auto-renewal process can handle them!

Deleting Categories which are in use

To maintain data integrity, we need to prevent category fields from being deleted when they are being used in triggers and status progressions - so now you will be advised that the associated areas of usage will need to be addressed prior to deletion.