Product Updates: Product Priorities for Q2 2023

This year, we're working on some exciting new features to help streamline your work and further automate your business processes. With Q3 fast approaching, we're working hard to get these features into your hands to help ensure you can finish out the rest of the year strong. 

Here's what's been released, what’s coming and what we’re working on in Q2 of 2022:

• Mobile App Beta
• Accelo Payments Beta
• Email Sending Service

Mobile App Beta Launch

We recently launched a new mobile app experience in open beta. This release offers a sneak peek at the new app and provides testers a special opportunity to help guide its development by sharing your feedback. This release offers several exciting and highly-anticipated features, including:

• A brand new UI to make it easier to access the tools you need to track your work. This includes a brand new home screen that presents the key details of today's work, from scheduled meetings to task deadlines.
  
• Interactive task checklists, to quickly track your progress from the field or break room.
  
• Task and ticket details to better understand what you should be working on.
  

Home screen	Task checklist	Task view

In addition to these exciting features available in the current beta, we're working to introduce several more features this quarter to help you manage your client work on the go:

• Activity Stream: Whether you're sitting at your computer or checking your phone, a clear line of communication and access to your client interaction history is vital for successful client work. To provide this detailed communication history on the go, we're planning to introduce the Activity Stream to the mobile experience so you can reference important client updates and respond from wherever you are. 

• Create Expense: Expenses are an important and routine step of delivering client services, and it's important that they're recorded accurately so that you can be reimbursed and your client can be billed. To help simplify the process, we're introducing expenses to the mobile app. Simply note the details and snap a picture of the receipt to record your expense and allocate it to the relevant project, ticket or retainer for future billing.
• View Contact: Accelo's client work management platform makes it easy to track all of your clients in one simple platform, from phone numbers to budget numbers. We're planning to bring the View Contact experience to the mobile app to make it easier to access this vital information from anywhere.

Accelo Payments Beta Launch

Accelo Payments is an automated payment service built to deliver an effortless digital payment experience for you and your clients. Last quarter, we offered a sneak peek to a few select organizations, and have been working with them to review and improve this new automated payment process. We've seen some great results, with organizations saving several days each month, and significantly reducing the number and severity of delinquent invoices. We're excited to launch Accelo Payments to all of our US-based users as part of an open beta release later this quarter.

Explore the powerful automation features that will be included in this release below.

Automatic Payment Processing

Accelo Payments will automatically charge your clients for the invoices you raise in Accelo, saving you valuable time following up with clients and providing a more consistent and reliable cash flow.  Payments will support all major credit cards as well as ACH in the United States.

Payment Status Tracking

Accelo Payments makes it easy to stay on top of individual invoices with its detailed payment statuses: Payment Scheduled, Payment Not Scheduled, Payment Declined or Paid. The clear descriptions make it easy to understand how the invoice got to that point and help you quickly determine the date payment is scheduled for, why a payment was declined and more.

Payments Dashboard

In addition to automating the payments themselves, Accelo Payments offers a new dashboard focused entirely on the payments you've received and the fees you've paid and makes it easy to reconcile the two. This dashboard provides a detailed and customizable log of all your transactions and their fees.

We're currently targeting June for the Payments open beta release.

A New Email-Sending Service

When it comes to communicating with your clients, email is king. Through Accelo’s email capture, this popular communication method also offers an automated way to track your team’s time and provides a complete client communication history in the Activity Stream.  

To offer this service, Accelo employs an email-sending network that handles the heavy lifting of delivering the message. This network does a great job of getting the email to its recipient but has some limitations because it is separate from your existing email account.  

The new email-sending service is intended to provide additional security and reliability by plugging your Accelo emails directly into your existing email account. For users who have integrated their Google or Microsoft 365 account, the email-sending service will send outgoing emails directly from that account. By doing so, the message will automatically apply your existing security settings for protocols like SPF, DKIM and DMARC, providing additional security and reliability that your email will be delivered successfully.  

Additionally, because these emails will be sent from your account, they will appear in your Sent Items folder, the same as if you'd sent them directly from Gmail or Microsoft 365. For users who haven't integrated their email, emails from Accelo will continue to function exactly as they have in the past.  

Work on the email-sending service is already underway, and the release is currently targeted for Q3.

More To Come

Get the latest product information and engage with other Accelo users and support in the Accelo Community. Filled with insightful discussions, support Q and As, product updates and blogs, the Community helps you find the best ways to use Accelo to manage your client work. Connect with other professional service providers to share ideas and learn ways that they have successfully managed their client work.