Mar 13, 2023
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Well, we have hit the midpoint of the year and the end of Q2. The Product and Engineering teams have made good progress on our 2022 initiatives, but there is more to do. We made a lot of progress in our foundational work in the past three months that is setting up for exciting releases in Q3. In addition, we have released some feature enhancements in the past few weeks as well. Check out the updates for Project Invoicing and the task board beta. Watch this space for updates on the new Sales View Screen, Payments, Timesheet permissions, and Mobile application releases.
In order to deliver on those big releases, we have adopted the theme of focus for this quarter. We have reduced the number of features and enhancements planned for the quarter to deliver higher quality and better user experience in our major initiatives.
The major initiatives the Product Development team will address in the second half of this year include the following:
- Continuing to add improvements to the user experience across the most used areas of the platform–Starting with the Sales View Screen
- A complete redesign of the mobile app to provide an experience targeted to the users who spend their time on the go
- Improvements to the invoicing functionality to ensure that our clients are able to collect payments quickly and effectively
Also, get the latest on
UX and UI Redesign: Sales View Screen
We are putting all hands on deck to drive forward on the UX and UI improvements we started development on in Q2. This major overhaul is a redesign of the UI, but that's not all. As Design works on the new look and feel, Engineering is upgrading the underlying architecture as well. So, not only will users have a clean and fresh new UI, the platform will be more resilient, scalable, and performant. With the focus on the Sales View Screen in Q3, we still need your input to ensure we are on the right track.
The newly redesigned Sales view page Homepage is looking good so far!
We are continuing to iterate on the sub-pages, including the Details tab page, shown below.
The Product Research Team will continue to gather feedback from all of you as we make progress on the UI and UX projects. If you would like to be included in the focus groups, interviews, and eventual beta, sign up here.
Mobile App Redesign
Efforts are continuing in Q3 to completely redesign and re-platform the mobile application. This initiative is dedicated to building the right application for the users who need to use Accelo on the go. This quarter the team will be focused on building out several of the most used and valuable screens. Most of the design work is in the early stages, but here is a sneak peek at one option for the Log Task screen.
The Mobile team has big plans this quarter, including releasing a beta of the new app! If you are a mobile user or have team members who want to be included in this effort, sign up here.
Timesheets and Cost and Profit Permissions Update for Professional Users–Coming Soon!
We have heard from you that there is not enough flexibility in the timesheet viewing permissions.This enhancement will allow managers or other approvers to see a broader range of timesheets. The enhanced permissions functionality will provide those with the appropriate permissions to grant the following permissions
- Allow professional access users to view all timesheets on timesheet overview page
- Allow professional access users to view cost and profit information for all users.
- On the timesheet overview page, a professional access user will now be able to:
- view timesheets for any individual user, not just their direct reports
- see cost and profit information or any user, if they have been granted permission and have financial visibility.
The permissions functionality is located in the Admin dashboard under Permissions: 
This permissions enhancement will allow approvers and managers to have oversight of timesheets for wider groups of teams and manage costs on work more efficiently and effectively.
Invoicing Experience Improvements
Another exciting, and much anticipated, release this quarter is the beta for the payments functionality. We are dedicated to improving the invoicing functionality and we're starting by making the payment process easier for our clients, including automating credit card payments. Some of you may have seen some of these mocks, but I am excited to share more screens with more detail.
We know many of you are eagerly awaiting this release, if you or your team would like to provide feedback on invoicing, sign up here.
Recent Releases
Although most of our focus has been on the major initiatives outlined above, we have had a few feature releases in the past several weeks.
- Redesigned Status Board for Tasks (in beta)
- A permissions update for Timesheets
- The ability to invoice Project line items by their budget type
Beta: Status Board for Tasks
We’re moving to a world where users can seamlessly flip between a list view and a board (or Kanban) view, when looking at tasks, tickets, sales and more. The first phase of this initiative - an all new status board view for Tasks - is now in open beta.
If you'd like to turn on the beta, check out this community post for instructions.
Project Invoicing Update: Filter Line Items by Budget
Budgeting and invoicing can be complex processes, but ones that are critical to get right for the success of your business. We have heard from clients who occasionally build project budgets with a combination of Fixed Price milestones, and Calculated Price ones. This might be because of uncertainty in the scope or resource costs, or the use of 3rd party resources (contractors). In any case, their expectation is that anything not Fixed can be billed for on a “time & materials” basis - aka invoicing for the “work done” (time logs/activities) at intervals of their choosing. Likewise, the ability to easily invoice for just the Fixed portions of a project is also an expected feature.
While Accelo’s project budgeting appears to be quite flexible, when it comes to invoicing, if you’re raising a 25% deposit for the Fixed components of your project, you end up seeing 25% against the Calculated Price milestone line items too. This causes angst for billing users as they have to manually disabled those unwanted line items.
We have introduced a simple “Budget type” filter option on the Create Invoice page. It has three options for users to correctly allocate their work for invoicing and budgeting.
- Any budget type (default)
- ensures that line items are not filtered by budget type (as per previous behavior)
- Fixed Price lines only
- disables any milestones and tasks that have calculated budgets
- Calculated Price lines only
- disables any milestones that have fixed budgets. (tasks are always calculated budget)
This filter option works in conjunction with other filters, like the “Invoice For” and “Invoice Detail” options to update the line items/data in the Services table. Users should find that the “Budget type” filtering is effectively applied last. So Accelo builds up the line items as per the other filters/modifiers, and then turns off the ones whose budget doesn’t match.
Q3 Product Roadmap
These projects are currently in progress or planned for the short-term. It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, things can change when it comes to roadmaps, but we feel confident about what we have planned.
More to Come
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