Hello, everyone! Welcome to ActiveCollab’s latest updates! In March, we worked on ActiveCollab 8 Rollout, Time Reports, Client Invoices, and Recurring Events in Calendar.
During April and May, we worked on things that were more time-consuming, so we’re making this blog post two months’ worth of updates.
From a brand new Time Dashboard, an upgraded QuickBooks integration, and better Workload, to the polished Cost Summary Report and Calendar Event Filtering: we’re bringing lots to you this time!
Let’s cover each bit in more detail.
Time Dashboard
Time tracking is important if you want to increase productivity, improve work quality, and ensure accurate billing.
The new Time Dashboard helps you keep tabs on all billable and non-billable hours you and your team tracked.
In the histogram showing the total of tracked hours for a given period with a set of filters, you can monitor and analyze seasonality, trends, clients’ requests, most sought-after services, ratios between billable and non-billable work, and more.
Get a full breakdown of tracked hours, so you know how much time you spend on admin work and operational activities, and how much on revenue-bringing tasks. Stay profitable using insights gained from these widgets, as they show you the number of hours you should charge for, and the number of hours that you’ve been paid for.
To see who ranks the highest in terms of performance and value created, who your top clients and services are or which projects take the most of your time, use the Leaderboard.
These insights will definitely help you improve in many areas of your business: workflows, time management, team morale, pricing models, and client management.
QuickBooks integration
We improved the QuickBooks integration! You can now:
enjoy a better experience thanks to a neater interface,
set default list item types upon configuration,
add custom list item types while creating the invoice,
create free-form invoices,
Create QuickBooks invoices based on ActiveCollab Estimates,
enable credit card payments if you have set them up in QuickBooks.
Workload
Workload is running up to five times faster now, which means you can visualize and manage your data more quickly.
We also added a new feature for better workload and time management: if one of your team members has a task scheduled across multiple days, and the person’s away for some of them, the working hours will be split between the remaining working days.
For example, a 15-hour task starting Monday and due Friday. The person’s off on Wednesday and Thursday (-2 days). Instead of having 15 hours distributed across 5 days (3 hours per day), Workload will only take 3 days into account: Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, meaning 5 hours per day for the person to work on that task.
The improved way of calculating your team’s daily and weekly capacity while considering their availability and workload will help you structure your projects, so that tasks are properly distributed and completed on time, without overloading a single member of your team.
Cost Summary Report
To stay within the project budget, you need to monitor expenses carefully.
The Cost Summary reports gives you a comprehensive overview of your project costs, broken down by job types and internal hourly rates. You’ll see all billable and non-billable expenses, along with total billable, non-billable, and internal costs.
A red flag icon will mark missing internal hourly rates, which you need to define to get the most accurate report data.
You can also get cost summaries for individual tasks.
This information lets you assess your team’s productivity, time management, and all associated costs, so that you can refine your skills, optimize your workflows, and adjust pricing.
Calendar Event Filtering
A minor, yet important update to Calendar: event visibility. Use this filter to visualize events based on who’s subscribed to or taking part (or not) in them. If you’re looking for something specific, you can combine this one with other filters (Calendar, Members, Projects).
Check out the video summary of the April and May updates for a walkthrough:
Uptime
During this period, ActiveCollab’s uptime was 99.99%. If you notice that the app is down or slower than usual, feel free to contact our Customer Care Team via email or chat to us in the app.
Coming up
We’ll be working on Workload and user permissions. Stay tuned!