Product Updates: Jan 22 - Mar 08

As we march further into 2021, our team have made serious progress on building out 7 all-new customizable list screens. There's been a slew of new columns & filters added for the Beta preview of these new lists - too many to mention here - but a few of the highlights are below, along with more general product updates & fixes.

Oh, and if you're wondering when these lists go from beta to replacing the current list screens, we're shooting for late April!

Lists Beta Updates

Firstly, we have streamlined the UX for configuring the filters and columns of your list. There's now just one "Configure" button in the top right which opens a single modal where you can quickly switch between adjusting the Filters or the Columns. You'll also note it's easier to add fields from the middle panel with a single click, and the green check/tick makes it easy to track what has and hasn't been added.

Give the new column & filter config modal a try and let us know what you think; just login to our Ideas forum (ideas.accelo.com) and then submit your thoughts via a special forum we set-up for the Custom Lists Beta. Beyond the usability improvements, there's a smorgasbord of new filters and columns to try. A few noteworthy ones include:

• Retainer List has several more filters available, such as "Open Periods?", "Billing type" (pre-paid or postpaid), and "Unapproved Time?" - to help you find retainers with time that needs reviewing & approving. There's also columns for "Count of Open Periods" and "Total Billable Time Logged".
• Tickets List has a filter to find tickets that have (or don't have) an invoice against them; "Ticket Invoiced?"
• Project List has more columns to help you track revenue (Total Invoiced Revenue) and profitability as well as info like the Latest Invoice ID and Invoice Due Date.
• Contact List now has columns for your custom profile fields, the linked company name and company managers
• Company List now has all the Address columns available.
• Sale List now has the Primary Contact Name column available.

Performance Improvements for Projects and Timesheets

Our team have continued to monitor the performance of key pages across Accelo and found some improvements were achievable for the Overview tab within the View Project page - by speeding up the fetching of dates and date-related calculations, some project pages are loading 3-5x faster.

We've also seen some optimization to the Weekly Timesheet load time by fetching the "breadcrumb" data (e.g. the name of the project or company related to a task) using a newly architected pathway.

New CSV Export: Purchase transaction list

We've added a new Export option to the Purchase List screen which outputs the line items included in each purchase - not just the overall purchase price and tax amounts. With this extra line item detail, you could do additional reporting or import the purchase data into another system if necessary.

Milestone Export: Show correct Price for Fixed budgets

If you've used the Milestones export within a project, you might have come across an issue with the Price column sometimes reflecting an incorrect value for milestones that had a Fixed price including materials. If materials were added against the milestone, the price of the milestone was being reduced. We've changed this behaviour to ensure the Fixed price continues to reflect the total price of the milestone.

Expensify integration - fix to allow new connections

The team at Expensify recently made some minor changes to their API responses which broke the checks we used when attempting a new integration/connection. This meant that for a few days, new users were unable to integrate with Expensify. All sorted now!

Xero Integration: Better support for 2nd connection

Although very much a beta feature, it is possible to connect your Accelo system with a 2nd instance of Xero. Some customers experienced a problem with tax codes from the 2nd instance being linked to materials/items from their 1st instance, which made it difficult to invoice from Accelo. We've added some logic to ensure tax and account code imports pay more attention to the particular Xero instance they originated from.