Product Updates: Dec 2 - Jan 21

This update rounds out some product improvements from 2020 - what a year... we didn't accomplish everything we wanted, but aren't beating ourselves up, since it's been a challenging 12 months for so many of us! And this post kicks off the first neat features and fixes for 2021. As my high school principal always said: Start the way you aim to finish!

Microsoft 365 Contact syncing goodness: Auto-import feature

Accelo can now automatically import new contacts from your 365 contact list - just enable this feature from your Microsoft 365 setting under the Integrations page in Accelo. Note that we'll only import contacts that have their "Company" field filled in (and they need a name and email address set too).

If you have a slew of contacts like this and are wondering whey they haven't imported, it's because they need to be changed/updated for Accelo to detect them. Right now we're not doing a full historical import - we're only checking for updated and created contacts to sync.

JIRA sync performance improvements

There are times when a high volume of updates in JIRA requires Accelo to respond by pulling down those updates - be they new worklogs, comments, changes to issues dates or similar. We've been monitoring the performance of the sync process and found a way to streamline them a little more, ensuring your JIRA issue updates flow into Accelo more quickly than ever.

Time logged directly on Retainer not being Locked.

When you close a retainer period, all the work associated with that period becomes locked - ensuring that it can't be edited or moved elsewhere - a bit like closing/locking an accounting period when doing your bookkeeping. It turns out that work logged against the retainer directly - while it would be associated with a period for budget tracking purposes - would not be locked properly when the period is closed. This loophole has been fixed.

Handling internal activity replies that include contact recipients

When you reply to an email or note in Accelo, if you're using the inline reply compose area, you can't tell whether your reply will be a note (internal) or email (external). Our own support team noticed a bug with replying to a note, where they were able to add the customer as a recipient and hit "Send - but the customer never got emailed because the system enforced the rule that notes must be internal.

We've solved this by ensuring that when a customer/contact is included as a recipient, the reply will always be an email. This is how some parts of the system were already working - now we have consistency with the in-line reply in the Request and Inbox screens!

Microsoft 365 - Booking events not pushing properly due to timezones

Accelo's Booking tool allows users to schedule a series of events for themselves or their colleagues. This feature integrates nicely with your 365 calendar too, however, if another user is making the bookings for you, and their timezone isn't the same as yours, the integration could fail to push the events. We've implemented a fix for this problem to ensure seamless sync of your events again!

Stripe - Avoid creating duplicate customers

If you're using Stripe with Accelo, you might have run into this problem where subsequent Stripe payments, via Accelo's online invoice, could cause duplicate customer entries for that contact within Stripe. This was our fault, as we weren't checking with Stripe if the supplied name and email already existed before sending them all the transaction information. Note that the transactions were not duplicated - just the customer/contact record.

Fix for Project Comments being deleted

A handful of users noticed some strange behaviour in the projects module: The "comments" field was being cleared out when reassigning the Project Manager via 'Assign Work' tool. We've now fixed this quirk!

Invoice Template - Fix for embedding images in PDF

We reworked the way we handled inline images for Invoice PDF previews. However, as a result of this, the uploading of the attachment(s) only occurs when users hit the "Save" button on the Edit Invoice Template page rather than the PDF Preview page. This would mean that if users happen to revisit the PDF preview page before hitting the "Save" button, they will lose the images which was drag-and-drop adhoc into the PDF preview.

Authorize.net - Ensuring payment reference is pushed to QuickBooks

Your customers can pay invoices online using our Authorize.net payment gateway integration. However, because QuickBooks only allows a small amount of text in their Payment Reference field, when pushing the payment confirmation message from Authorize.net (via the Accelo payment/receipt), the transaction ID/number was being lost. It was still captured in Accelo fine, but we ran out of space in the QuickBooks payment info field to include it when passing the payment info on to them.

To solve this, we've simplified the payment information given to us from Authorize.net and are now prioritizing the transaction ID in the detail we send to QuickBooks to ensure it's included in your QuickBooks payment info too.