As a part of the process of letting users know how the product will be updated and changed in the next coming months, Accelo gives you a sneak peek into the development priorities for the platform in Q4. This priorities list extends from the Q3 Product Roadmap, and the following are the tentative focus areas in Q4:
Second, only to mobile apps in popularity/demand, we know this is something that a lot of our users are waiting for. In Q4 we’ll be working on a built-in quoting and estimate feature as part of our broader sales module upgrade - it will make it easy for you to create milestone, task, and subscription oriented quotes/estimates which you’ll be able to turn into projects and/or retainers with a single click.
In addition to quotes and estimates, we’ll also be working on features like configurable lead scoring and streamlining the sales to close to project process.
Wouldn’t it be nice to harness Accelo’s powerful business processes and custom fields to make sure you don’t forget a deadline, let a project stagnate or forget to follow up on a sale?
This is what we envision with a new automatic notifications/reminders feature. These notifications will allow you to specify specific rules based on progression statuses, dates and custom field values to remind users that they need to take action if certain conditions are met.
An example would be to send an automatic email 24 hours before an issue’s deadline occurs, particularly useful for situations like hitting client SLAs. You could also have a notification get triggered to a salesperson if there hasn’t been a note made in three days if the status on the deal if “quote sent” - that way they’re reminded to keep following up.
The uses and benefits are almost endless - we’re excited to see what you come up with!
Once we’ve completed the projects upgrade, we’ll be moving onto a new interface that makes it easy to see the schedules of multiple staff, across multiple projects, and to forecast not just how busy they are also reassign work and tasks - all from one screen.
While we’ve been working towards this point for the last 6 months [https://www.accelo.com/company/blog/accelo-product-roadmap-q2-2013/#multiuserschedule] with the recent upgrades to tasks, activities and then projects we’ll be in a much better position going into Q4 to deliver on the promise of a way to see what’s going on across everyone in your organization (and to move things around accordingly).
Documents and files are still an important part of doing work for your clients. While Accelo has had its own attachment and file system since the beginning, the online editing and collaboration tools now available are much better suited for creating, sharing and working with documents, spreadsheets, presentations and more.
That’s why in we’ll be working integrations between Accelo and leading online document and file-sharing platforms in Q4. We’re still finalizing the details, but our plan is to introduce integrations with Google Drive, Dropbox and Box.
These integrations will in-effect hand over the responsibility for storage, search and access of the resources and attachments in Accelo to these third party products, and will be totally optional. There are still a few tricky things to work out - mainly because these platforms are built on a user-centric, access restricted model rather than a organization-centric, collaborative model like Accelo - but we wanted to let you know we had improvements and integrations like this on the horizon as a priority project even if we don’t know all the details right now
More than three-quarters of businesses using Accelo engage contractors on a regular basis and with technology improving all the time our clients have told us they intend to work with contractors more frequently in the future.
Currently, however, Accelo is more well suited to working with colleagues and team members who are more permanent and "inside the tent" so to speak - sharing of information, client lists and visibility of projects, issues and work done are designed to foster collaboration and openness in a way that isn’t always appropriate, especially if you’re working with people on a temporary or transactional basis where you might not trust them as much as a traditional employee.
The new client portal and projects module we’re focusing on in Q3 will set the foundation for a new user class - that of the contractor - who is a hybrid external/internal user.
This new module will enable you to create a new tier or classification for these types of users which will only give them access to the specific work they’re assigned to do. They’ll be able to make notes, log time, upload files and of course see the budgets and deadlines they’re working towards.
Easy to access reports will let you see how much you owe contractors for approved time, making it easy to then pay them (and we're looking at automating this further in future). While we're still working out the specifics around subscription costs for these users, our plan is to introduce a variable monthly rate that moves in line with the work the contractor does (so you’ll pay less for someone who logs 2 hours of work a month than someone who does 20 for example).
If you work with contractors and would like to talk to our product team about the sorts of things that drive you crazy, we’d love to hear from you - just email [email protected] and we'll line up a time for a call.
