One of the biggest reasons our customers come to Accelo is to establish a single source of truth for their organizations. By managing projects and client work in Accelo, you get a holistic view of client data at your fingertips, as well as the details of individual records in the system. The ability to personalize how you monitor, consume and analyze data is paramount to ensure your teams have accurate, understandable data in the right context to empower informed and timely decision making.
Accelo aims to continuously thrive by building an amazing user experience for customers to manage their work. In November last year, we rolled out a beta program of the re-engineered list screens to empower users with more flexibility to customize and configure how they view and use their client data. We were delighted by the enthusiasm from our customers, with over 100 accounts signing up for the beta program. After a year of hard work from our engineering teams, 60+ customer-contributed ideas and improvements, and 30 cases of Red Bull, we are excited to announce that seven newly designed and engineered List Screens (Company, Contact, Sale, Project, Ticket, Retainer and Task) are now out of beta and available to all users. Let’s get into some of the major improvements:
Across all seven List Screens, there are over four times more Columns and twice as many Filters than the previous version, providing greater control and visibility of the data. Users can better leverage Accelo’s information architecture to bring the related details of companies, contacts, or parent records as Columns and Filters across any of the lists.
For example, Project Lists can be filtered by Unpaid Invoices or Overdue Tasks, or the Retainer Title can be added as a column in the Project List. This enhanced flexibility and functionality makes it easier to extract insights from client work without needing to reference multiple Lists or export the data to a spreadsheet, saving hours every month.
Space is limited on your desktop. Fortunately, users now have full control over not just the Columns to include, but their order, in the List Screens. The ability to lock the first Column is a handy feature if you find yourself scrolling horizontally with all your new Columns.
The width of each Column can be customized—just like in a spreadsheet—to your liking. Even the height of the Rows can be adjusted based on your density preferences, giving you ultimate control of how the results are displayed on your screen.
To ensure the transition is seamless for our users, all existing Lists have been "converted" automatically to be new lists as well. The original Lists aren't gone though, and can be accessed as "Classic Lists" via each module navigation in the primary left-hand nav.
The existing "Quick Lists" have also been given an upgrade. They are renamed as "Standard Lists" with additional built-in Columns and their own List group, so you can locate the information you need easily
Because of differences in how data is stored and queried between the Classic and the new List engines, some of the Filters within previously saved Lists, such as multi-select custom profile fields, contributors, sales weighting, and a few others, might not be properly converted to the new Lists. With that said, many of these Filters are (or will soon be) available in the new List Screens and can be applied to the partially converted List.
Offering the ability to control access to your Lists, users can now share a List with the entire team, or keep it to themselves. List owners can be easily identified on shared Lists and administrators have the rights to delete obsolete or unwanted shared Lists. List sharing with specific groups of users will be available in the future.
A top-of-mind feedback from our customers was their wish to have better control over the way their data was exported. With the new Lists, the exported Columns will now match every Column you see on screen (WYSIWYG), shifting away from the old way of exporting a fixed structure. Plus, the days of waiting around for the browser to tell you the export has finished, are over. Now, a secure link to download the exported data will be sent directly to your email instead of exporting to the browser—an improvement that mitigates the issue with large export requests being timed out or lost during the process. Lastly, we've moved away from using XLS format to the more cross-platform CSV format to make it easier to ingest information into places other than Excel.
Users can now sort across Column data such as Dates, Names and Titles on any List by selecting a Column and sorting the values in an ASC or DESC order. Sorting options for more complex data, such as Profile Field values, or calculated data like Profitability percentage, will be available in the future.
As your company scales, the volume of your data also grows, often exponentially. Anticipating the need to support a larger pool of data and better manage them in the List Screens, our engineers devised a whole new backend architecture for fetching and filtering your List data. The new Lists have ten times faster load time even with the additional Column and Filter capabilities.
Like the proverbial iceberg, what you can see above the water is only a fraction of the mass hidden from view. The new engine driving these List Screens represents a massive amount of behind-the-scenes work and completely replatforming how data is queried, accessed, organized, delivered and displayed to our users. This new technology will underpin an accelerated rate of improvement across the Accelo application in coming quarters, and we thank our clients for their continuous patience.
Rome was not built in one day and there is still more work to be done. While the seven most popular Lists have been upgraded, many of you are keen to see other Lists, such as Activity List, Invoice List, Asset List, Expense List, and more, being given the new List treatment. We will be working tirelessly on those views over the coming months.
In additional to bringing the mentioned Lists to parity, we’re closing the gap on some the most requested functionalities:
Stay tuned to learn more about our progress.
The seven redesigned List Screens—Company, Contact, Sale, Project, Ticket, Retainer and Task—are available to all Accelo users today. You can access them by using your main left hand navigation. For users who had participated in the beta program, the beta "Lists" button is still accessible in the top navigation but we'll remove it in the coming days (since we're not in beta anymore!).
No, but we strongly encourage reviewing your Saved Lists to confirm the filters are applied correctly and to customize the Columns as much as you would like.
Yes. All the original Saved Lists, Shared Lists and the built-in "Quick Filters" are still accessible via the "View Classic Lists" link in each module navigation. In fact, some links from other parts of Accelo still direct to the original Lists, such as links from the Dashboard Screens. They will be updated in the near future.
Not at the moment. The Android and iOS mobile apps for Accelo will continue using your old saved lists/filters. We'll be looking to upgrade these apps to tap into your new lists in the coming months.
For assistance on the new List Screens, please reach out to our support team at [email protected].
Customers can login to our Ideas Forum to submit feedback or ideas.
