We’re building Accelo to help make running your business easier so that you can get back to doing the work you love - and our Projects enhancements are a result of our continued effort to deliver on this promise. The Projects is so central to how you manage your work and revenue, so we set out to make it simpler for managers to see how projects are tracking and easier for team members to get work done.
This upgrade will enable you to accomplish more in less time with its improved loading time and speed between changes made. If you’ve got a project with ten milestones and each has five tasks, you need your people to be able to come in quickly and activate and complete things quickly, and you need time reflected quickly in terms of budget usage. Before this upgrade, every time any changes were made a full screen reload was needed, which took more time than it should.
It also wasn’t optimized for people doing their day to day job. While we had reporting and dials across the top, which worked well for project managers, it was hard for the people actually working on the project on a day-to-day basis to be able to come in and quickly see where projects were at in relation to their own milestones, tasks, and what they needed to tackle.
We also wanted to make Projects more team focused. Given the fact that projects are usually tackled by teams and not individuals, we wanted to make it easier to demonstrate who’s a part of your team (be it a colleague or a contractor) instead of just inferring that someone is assigned and responsible for a particular milestone or task within a project. With everyone’s time automatically logged and all the moving parts of your business connected in one simple place, working better as a team has never been simpler.
We wanted to give you the flexibility to see your budget usage in a way that makes sense for your business, and that meant adjusting some of the incorrect assumptions we made around materials, expenses, and budgets. For example, instead of tracking taxi fare on your way to a client meeting, some of you were using the Expenses for key parts of your project delivery such as contracting a chunk of work out to another company or agency - and you needed to track that as a part of your consumed budget rather than something that would be added on top of your project from a billing perspective.
We’re excited about this first release, but we’re not stopping here. We have more work to do around the Project Planning screen, Non-Billable and Fixed Price Projects, Milestones and Tasks to make getting work done even simpler, and we’ll continue to build out more functionality around these deliverables over the coming weeks. We hope this upgrade helps you focus on the work that matters, so that you can accomplish your goals more effectively, and with less effort.
To see how you can get the most out of our new Projects, check out our Help Guide. Or, if you happened to stumble across this post and would like to see how Accelo can help you run more profitable client projects, sign-up for a trial - it's free!