Product Updates: March 12-25

We've had some nifty updates shipped out in the past 2 weeks, with a focus on inviting clients to use the Accelo portal and making dates in your Projects easier to understand. Enjoy!

Bulk Invite Clients to the Portal

When working with a client that has several contacts that need access to your Accelo Client Portal, adding them one by one was a bit of a chore. We've overhauled the screen where you manage the portal users for a client, so now you can:

• Easily see which contacts don't have access, and invite them in bulk
• Easily see which contacts have been invited but never logged in, and remind them or reset their password in bulk
• Easily see those that have access, with the ability to revoke access in bulk

To handle inviting users in bulk, we've upgraded the invite template to be more customizable including extra merge fields and a more obvious button for your contacts to get started in the portal.

New "Billable" filter for the Task List

Reporting on your tasks in Accelo just got a little easier with the addition of a "Billable" filter field in the list task screen. Simply put, this filter lets you search for tasks based on their billable or non-billable budget setting.

Clarity on the Scheduled Dates within Projects

Wait! What are these dates and why are we only just hearing about them now?! - Fair question, but don't panic - these are not another set of possible dates to be configured by your team - they're simply the "best-fit" dates, based on all the data Accelo has, to tell you how the project is tracking.

We have made this more visible since users were often wondering why the dates shown in the Project Overview didn't always match the dates shown when viewing a task or milestone. By illuminating these dates as the default option, now they'll match!

Tell me more, please, this is tricksy stuff: Sure! So say a user overrides the due date on their task. They leave the start date based on the original project plan. We've now got a Planned Start and a User-Estimated Due as the most accurate Start and Due dates with which to use for populating the task time into their schedule, and when viewing the task all throughout Accelo, it's those 2 dates we show.

Unfortunately, this consistency was lost in the Project Overview - and it was hard for project managers to know that toggling the Dates columns to Planned Start and User-Estimated Due was the answer, and only the answer for that particular task!

Now, there's no more guesswork - the new "Scheduled Start" and "Scheduled Due" options will reveal which dates are in play for each milestone and task in the project - no more having to open each task to double-check what dates are there.

Delete Sign-offs

Yep, simple but obvious - we didn't have a way for you to completely remove a sign-off - including its attachments, from Accelo. Easy done now.

Activity List - Filter by status, e.g. "Invoiced"

If you're searching for activities and want to focus on just those that have been invoiced, or are still unapproved, this new filter will make life much easier. Of course it's only relevant for activities created by your staff, but powerful nonetheless as you can even filter on work that's part of a closed (Locked) retainer period.

Search across contacts when relocating activities

If being able to relocate notes, work logs, emails and meetings between clients with ease wasn't enough, if you prefer to search by contact, this is now supported too. Also, if the contact doesn't have a company associated with it, we'll let you relocate to work directly under that individual contact.

Actions being ignored during request conversion - Fixed

If you had configured any conversions on your request types with the Override set to "No" and the Auto-convert set to "Yes" it was possible that some of the special actions for the new Issue/Ticket were being skipped. This includes actions like linking a retainer, and auto-adding team members.

API - Allow filtering staff by Group

When requesting staff (user) details via the API, it is now possible to filter by the group_id.

Expensify - sync deletion of expenses

This small update ensures that expenses deleted in Expensify will now be deleted in Accelo automatically too.

Invoice for 33.33% of a project budget

Yep, we've added support for 2 decimal places in the % invoicing option, so instead of being limited to invoicing for 33% of a budget (for example), you can now invoice for 33.33% - and this can be configured into your invoice template settings too.

Control table headers in Invoices & Quotes

To help combat a problem with content in tables spilling across to the next page of a quote or invoice PDF and causing text overlap, we've introduced an option to disable the table headings from appearing at the top of every page when a table continues across multiple pages, as this appears to alleviate the text overlapping problem. 

Ordering invoiced Expenses in List Screen

Some users noticed that ordering expenses by status was not working perfectly when expenses were invoiced. We've fixed this behaviour so that invoiced expenses are treated as a proper status for the list ordering/sorting feature.

Sending meeting invites when connected to Office365

We had a bug whereby meetings & bookings created in Accelo, whilst connected with Office365, were not allowing you to enable the Send Invites flag, making it difficult for other attendees to get notified by the meeting event.

Primary address shown in Company List

In the company list screen, we were showing the postal address of the primary contact linked to that company, which wasn't the best source of address for the company now that in the create & edit company flow, we allow you to indicate a single primary address for a company. This is what the list screen will now use!

Allow portal users to view previous quotes

If not included as the quote approver or an observer, your client contacts were not able to view quotes in the portal. This new permission ensures contacts can be given access to view any published quotes within their portal.

Simpler Time inputs in Project Plan

By condensing the time inputs from 2 fields down to 1 simple hh:mm style field, the interface is faster to work with and we'll gracefully handle an input like "3d 2h", converting it to "26:00" since 1d is interpreted as 8 hours.