Product Updates: March 26 - April 15

It's been a solid few weeks for our product development team, so leading up to the Easter break (particularly for those of us Down Under) we're happy to highlight some of the notable improvements below, and also want to remind you about the awesome HTML Email Capture improvements that went live a little while back.

Groups now available in Activity Recipients

Sending a note or email to a group of users in Accelo is now 10x simpler as we've introduced groups into the results when searching for recipients. Once you choose a group, this acts as a shortcut so that all staff in the group will be added into the To (or Cc) field accordingly.

Avoiding dual-editing problems with Project plans

It is possible for 2 users to be editing a project plan at the same time, which isn't ideal, as they can stomp each other's changes and cause some data to get muddled up in the project. To help combat this we are now warning the 2nd user when they try to save their changes, as per the image below.

We know this isn't a perfect solution, and are looking at ways to prevent 2 users from starting to edit the same plan (without causing someone to be locked out for hours on end), but as an interim change this will help make users aware that others are also editing and to go and find out why!

User Signature for Signoff notification emails

If you have used the Signoffs module you may have noticed that your email signature was not included in the notification email sent from Accelo (to your client) regarding the signoff. We have corrected this by ensuring your Accelo user signature is properly handled.

Importing Project Templates now support more options

From listening to user feedback, our tool for importing project templates was lacking the ability to do a few things:

• Defining the budget as "Fixed Price" and importing the actual price, e.g. $10,000
• Defining the Service Item (Item Code) for milestones and tasks, which helps make invoicing quicker as your service lines can already have the service codes you prefer.
• Defining Tags and Skills - which helps give your milestones and tasks more detail and line up future work to the staff with the right skills.

So we have updated the import tool to handle these data points from your import file (CSV).

Project Dashboard - Toggle by Billable or Non-billable

Filtering the dashboard data to focus just on billable projects is now projects thanks to a new toggle at the top. Previously all projects were included, but we heard that often internal projects are classed as non-billable and these were polluting many of the dashboard metrics that your client project managers cared about.

Configuring the Submitted Date calculation for Tickets/Issues

If you convert a customer email thread into a ticket, or convert a request, Accelo would register the submitted date of the ticket to be based on the date of their initial email - which could have been days ago. While somewhat intuitive, we've heard mixed things about this feature. So, rather than disable it - meaning go back to always using the created date of the ticket - we have introduce a new setting for Admin > Tickets > Types > Edit Type so you can choose the option you prefer.

Owing filter for Purchase list

This new filter option allow you to quickly find purchases which are yet to be paid by your accounts team.  E.g. you could find any purchase with the outstanding balance more than $0.00, or only look for ones with more than $750 owing.

Sync Expensify Expense directly into Accelo Retainer

Users can now tag an expense in Expensify with the Retainer's ID, and have that expense allocated against the correct Period in Accelo automatically the next time it is sync'd.

Page Breaks for Quote Preview & Publish (PDF)

A feature we added for the Invoicing module a little while back has now been added to Quotes too: Easily insert page breaks into your quotes (and quote templates) to ensure that certain content in the quote starts on a new page - making your PDF quotes even more professional looking.

Filter Tasks by Staff Group

For fans of the Taskboard or Task List screens in Accelo, filtering for tasks assigned to any user in the "Consulting" group (for example) is much easier now that there's a "Group" filter option. This will return all tasks assigned to users associated with that group - which saves you from having to manually select each user.

Seeing who created your Task commitments

A little while back we upgrade the Daily Timesheet screen to help you see tasks that have committed time on them - for you to log against your timesheet with ease. After introducing this a few users noted that often their supervisor, a project manager or other person will set-up the time commitments and it would be nice to know who exactly created each instance - so this information is now captured and visible!

Sales Dashboard Funnel Accuracy

After looking into some discrepancies between the numbers in the sales funnel and the numbers in the sales list, we found that when a sale was re-activated, it was not being included in the funnel data while still showing in the click-thru to the sales list.

Improvements to Claiming a Request

When claiming a customer request from the request queue, it's possible to steal the request from another user who claimed it seconds before your screen had a chance to poll for changes. We've fixed this to check, as you claim, if someone else got there first and ask if you want to steal it from them - rather than just reassigning!

Additionally, if you are converting a request to a ticket, sale or project, we were not marking that request as claimed, which means while you set-up the new ticket (for example), another user may claim and start doing the same. Now we are sure to claim the request for you when you start to convert.

Deleting partially invoiced materials

If you add a material to a project with a quantity of 10, and then decide to invoice only 6 of the 10, the remaining 4 are split off as a separate material row. The bug we've fixed here, is to ensure that the uninvoiced row of 4 materials can be deleted.

Less "Ready to start" task email notifications 

It turns out that the user who completes a task is configured as the sender of the notification to the downstream task assignee. This actually makes sense, but we learnt that having this upstream person be included in the notification was generally unhelpful and just noisy, so we have tweaked the notification to only include the person whose task is now ready.