This edition of product updates dives into some exciting enhancements around our Xero integration, plus improvements to invoicing. We also have some good news for our Android mobile users - we have rolled out the improved Expense entry features!
Since the release of our Activity Templates features almost a year ago, we've heard from some users that they've built so many awesome templates, but it has become a little difficult to manage them. While we made it easier to find ones that have been used recently, it made sense to introduce a "Favorites" feature, so you now have the ability to mark other preferred templates.�
Once you mark a template as a favorite, the new favorites section will appear in the templates menu. Easy!
From time to time, you'll find that you need to make changes to an invoice. Maybe you forgot to set a due date or the price was wrong. Errors happen, and sometimes you need to update the invoice. Previously, updates like these would only sync when they were made in Accelo. This could be inconvenient for those of you who spend more time in your accounting system. It also meant that simple updates like changing a line item's tracking category wouldn't be synced.
We're happy to announce that we've expanded the Xero integration to simplify this process!
The Xero integration will now sync updates, which are made to your invoices and purchases from within Xero. This includes:
When these updates sync with Accelo, they'll be reflected in the invoice or purchase the same as if the update had been made in Accelo. This will be especially helpful for companies who manage all or some of their purchasing process through Xero. By automatically syncing updates made to your bills in Xero, changes to important details like your vendor's pricing or the number of items purchased will be reflected in your projects and retainers in Accelo. This information will ensure that your team can easily track the profitability of their work.
For more information on exactly what data is synced,�check out our Xero guide.
For our QuickBooks Online users, work is already underway to introduce this enhanced syncing automation to our QuickBooks Online integration. Stay tuned!
Accelo offers a simple menu for managing the sync of your invoice with Xero, which can be found when viewing individual invoices.
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We've now added this same menu to your purchases. This will make it easy to do things like manually pull in new details added to the bill in Xero, or open the corresponding bill.
Please note that Accelo will continue to sync updates made to your invoices and purchases automatically. The Xero menu's Sync From Xero and Push To Xero tools should only be necessary when another issue has prevented updates from syncing automatically. Don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.
For those rare occasions that you might be creating a retainer directly against a contact, you might have hit a snag during the Create Retainer page - with the company field populating with a different company than the one linked to the contact. This quirk has been fixed.
With the portal permissions, you can let clients view details about their retainer, including the work done across each period, plus any projects or tickets that are linked to the retainer. This last piece of functionality wasn't behaving correctly previously. Even with permission, users weren't able to drill into the project or ticket to see the detail. This has been corrected.
Our team was notified of several fonts not working effectively when used in the quote content areas. In particular, the bold tags were not functioning by the rich text output. We battled with the custom styling, so the text mark-up is now working much better!
Our invoice templates include a special field in the services table to display the budget, or "Agree fee," for a project, milestone or task. It turns out that some users were also looking to use this information when invoicing for Retainers, particularly if they were splitting the fee across two invoices. So we've optimized this field to be supported when billing for pre-paid retainers.
Previously, when manually creating an invoice for a retainer, Accelo wouldn't allow you to add a material on-the-fly because the invoicing process wasn't positive in regard to which period the material(s) should be associated with if any. Based on user feedback, we decided that the best course of action is to allow these on-the-fly materials if there is only one period to be invoiced, and to link the new materials against that period.
As per our previous product update - where the improved expense entry features were shipped for iOS users - our Android app has been given the same treatment. This makes expense entry more intuitive using customizable expense types and more accounting detail to automate purchasing and invoicing of expenses.
