As readers of our Q3 priorities post will know, we've been putting a massive amount of work into a major new upgrade of Accelo. After almost 100,000 hours of work, we're getting close to being able to launch Accelo v4 this December — and we can't wait!
Accelo v4 is a major upgrade to our platform, the largest single upgrade in six years. Our teams are working long hours to bring to life the new version in three phases:
The next major piece of Accelo v4 to be released to our users is the Project View screen. As our most used module and, in many ways, our most powerful, we've put a lot of work into the new Project View screen. In addition to releasing it to alpha soon, we're almost ready to release our upgraded Attachments experience, as well as a number of in-line edits to things like ticket assignee and sale value on the view screens already in alpha.
Following the Project View alpha, our next release will be the alpha of our new Activity experience. This is a major upgrade — and change — as we move from having one big "Create Activity" window sitting in the middle of the screen to a new Drawer experience. This will also separate out messages (emails) and events (meetings) to make Accelo easier for casual and new users to use. We're also upgrading the Log Work experience to use a new right-hand-side drawer.
Once we have the Sales, Tickets, Projects and new Activity experiences ready, we'll be making the new version available as a beta. This means you'll be able to turn it on (if your admin allows) and use the new beta version as your "daily driver" — seeing your work, logging work, sending emails and more.
The other big functionality improvement we're bringing into Accelo v4 is a new experience for Tasks. This is the last piece we need to make sure we have to enable the Accelo v4 launch in December.
There are other important view screens that will be getting a visual upgrade with Accelo v4, and which we'll launch brand new versions of in early 2024. The first of these are new Company and Contact view screens, followed by brand new Retainer and Retainer Period view screens. We'll keep you posted with design previews, alphas and release timing in our Community!
As mentioned in our Q3 priorities, we're also working on a brand new version of our Android and iOS mobile applications. In mid-Q3 we released a major update to our existing public beta with support for the Stream (Messages, Events), custom fields on objects, the Related Tab on view screens we already had in the new app and a brand new Contact View screen.
This quarter we're working on the full release of the new mobile app, including support for:
Check out our May blog post for instructions on how to get into the beta and keep an eye on the Community for updates about the release later in Q4.
Last quarter we shipped Accelo Payments to public beta, and we ran a special webinar answering common questions and helping our clients understand how to take advantage of this powerful new way to get paid more quickly and easily! If you missed it, our Community post has the recording and more information.
In addition to going to public beta, we also enabled ACH payments (with a much lower fee profile than credit cards), which have been really well received.
In the quarter ahead, we're working on the first phase of the fee surcharge, which will allow our clients to pass on the fees for payments to their payers. We expect this will result in even more of our client's clients choosing ACH over credit card, and will also allow our clients to adopt Accelo Payments without fear of fees making it worth waiting for a check to arrive in the mail. We'll also be introducing an improved mobile-friendly UI for end customers who are paying on mobile phones to enter their information more easily.
Another priority that fits in the "big behind-the-scenes project" category is a project we're doing to change how emails from Accelo are sent out by our users. The short version is that we'll be switching to using your own Google Workspace, Microsoft365 or other servers to deliver emails from Accelo to your recipients.
This change will provide a number of benefits, including:
We're starting with Google Workspace and Microsoft365 because anyone who's already integrated their Accelo account with those services will be able to cut across to the new technology without doing a thing. We'll then be focusing on support for other services (technically known as SMTP) and, finally, moving to deprecate sending of emails using your own sender address via our own servers.
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