As our product team prepares to ship a few bigger updates around profitability & insights for our Retainers module (stay tuned on our general blog), we've been chipping away at some handy fixes and improvements too:
We've updated the Activity Templates feature to now support merging in data for tasks too. To make this possible, you'll want to build a new activity template with an "Against Type" of "Task", and then insert the merge fields you need as you write out the template.
So the next time you are creating a note or email related to a task, give that new template a try! And rest assured that if you are creating an activity against a task within a project, you're project-type activity template will still work.
This trivial change actually makes your billable retainer-based work more powerful and flexible, as it ensures that the rates set on each task in a period are no longer overridden by the retainer rate when the "Apply retainer rate" checkbox was enabled - since this checkbox was intended for work being allocated to the retainer from projects or tickets.
As promised a couple of weeks ago, we've given expenses the same treatment as materials when it comes to editing invoices and quickly inserting more things to be billed. Now when editing an invoice for a project, ticket or retainer period, if there's any billable expenses waiting to be invoiced, these will automatically appear in the invoice in a disabled state. So it's a simple click to enable them, ensuring the customer then gets an updated invoice (on save) without the need for multiple invoices on your end.
Professional users without the Financial Visibility permission are now able to edit the quantity and title of materials if given the Edit Material permission. Previously we were blocking these changes which was a little misleading. They still wont be able to adjust the cost or price, as that requires Financial Visibility.
You might have noticed that after choosing a company (or project, or any work object) for your activity, the contacts related to that company were not being populated when clicking on the "To" label to see all possible recipients. This quirk has been fixed up now!
This improvement allows your client contacts to have increased visibility of work in the Client Portal when they are added as a team member to another client's ticket or retainer. The feature is an extension of the behaviour already available for Projects in the portal.
Now, Accelo's Client Portal will treat the contact as if they were a contact under that other customer as well - but with very limited access - just to the records they are a team-member of, and only if that record is already made visible to the actual/original client in the portal.
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