Product Updates: Jan 28 - Feb 10

Over the last 2 weeks our product crew have worked on some solid improvements - whether you spend most of your time in the Projects module, the Scheduling features, or just with invoicing, there's something for everyone: 

Budget for Project Tasks created On-the-fly

Sometimes you just want to throw a task onto an existing project without having to update the entire project plan. That's totally reasonable and has always been possible, unless you also need this task to affect the project $ budget - or perhaps eat into an existing milestone budget.. That wasn't possible for these on-the-fly tasks - until now!

For any user that has permission to update the project plan (and see rates/budgets), they'll now have the option to set the task budget when creating tasks against a project or milestone that's billable. This estimated time on the task is also set as the budgeted hours, which is multiplied by the rate to give you the budget price.

Task Assignment Board - Remember previous staff

To drag unassigned tasks across to a user column, you need to firstly select those users from the "Search for assignees" field. This is pretty normal, except that if you leave the page and return, the assignee columns were lost. Now we're pre-loading the last set of assignees/users you viewed, so you can get back to assigning tasks to your team more quickly.

Disable Editing of Paid Purchases

When a purchase in your accounting system (such as Xero, or QuickBooks) has been paid, the amount owing in Accelo will be updated accordingly. Editing the purchase after it has been paid is typically not advised, since the accounting system will likely not allow any edits after the payment was recorded. So to follow suit, we're disabling the "Edit" feature on the Purchase in Accelo once we know it's paid.

Custom IDs for Project Timesheet Export

Anyone using the "Export" option from the Timesheet Report screen when filtered by projects may have noticed that Custom Project IDs were not correctly showing in the exported spreadsheet. This has been fixed.

Public Holidays included in "Leave" for Utilization Dashboard

Accelo's Utilization Dashboard gives you a complete view of the way your team use their time: From billable work to non-billable, scheduled meetings, external calendar events and more. It can also be toggled to show when they have leave entered for a day/week. This update ensures that Public Holidays (such as New Year's Day) are included in the block of leave shown in the graph.

Custom headings for Quote Template Editing

When editing a Quote Template, you might have noticed that some of the heading titles you customized for "Introduction", "Conclusion" and "Terms of Service" were not using the custom titles. This small bug has been corrected.

Schedule Dashboard - Clearer display for Non-work Days.

Non-working days are typically weekends, but could also be a weekday if you only work 4 days in the week. These were displayed as a blank cell, but if time was allocated, they appeared over-utilized and could easily blend in with real work days that were also over-utilized.

So to make them more unique, we've given them a gray background with a white dot, and if there is time allocated, the cell won't change to appear over-utilized - instead it will maintain the non-work day coloring.

Xero Integration - Payments on Locked Invoices

Xero allows you "Lock" a period of time in the past so that no sources are able to modify the invoices in that date range. However, Xero still allow payments to be recorded against those invoices. Accelo wasn't fully aware of this exception, meaning that a payment recorded in Accelo wasn't successfully pushing to Xero if the invoice was in a locked period. We've now updated our Xero integration to push the payment even if Xero says the invoice can't be modified (as their business logic will allow the payment to go through!).

Company & Contact CSV Import Stabilization

For anyone importing complex company & contact datasets, you might have some contacts that are associated with more than one company. Accelo fully supports this (allowing one contact which has links to each company as required), but the import mechanism was occasionally processing the data so quickly that it processed both copies of the contact at the same time, causing a duplicate. We've adjusted the import processing system to be more reliable in this regard.

Automatic Session Expiry - Changed

To increase the security of your Accelo account, we have adjusted the session expiry time from 10 hours down to 6 hours - so after 6hrs of inactivity, you'll be logged out. We've also adjusted the behaviour with 2-factor authentication users to ensure this session expiry rule applies to their login too.

Fix for Rich-text in Division Email Signatures

Our Divisions feature allows you to communicate with certain clients under a different brand, if required. Part of this means applying a different email signature when contacting those customers in Accelo. Recently the Email Signature area for a division ran into a problem whereby any rich-text was not being saved/displayed correctly. This is now resolved.