No announcements covered in full this week, but then no press releases were received from the vendors below.
News in the PSA, PPM and Work Management space came from Accelo, BigTime, Kantata, Replicon, and Scoro.
Accelo
Accelo has published its priorities for product development in Q1 2023 and beyond. A key focus is Accelo V4 which will include a UI redesign to improve the user experience with new view screens and changes to the underlying architecture to improve performance.
It will also launch a new payments service. Initially, this will launch as a closed beta for US customers, and the module will enable organisations to process payments automatically with no extra tools and minimal manual work. What isn’t clear is whom Accelo will partner with for this.
There is also a Mobile App redesign which is already in closed beta. And will be available in an open beta during the year.
Other planned improvements include ACH functionality and a Google authentification migration.
BigTime
BigTime has announced the product improvements it has rolled out in the first month of the year. The blog, by Jami Klotz, SVP Product, briefly outlines what has been released. For organisations working internationally, it has now added foreign expense data into reports, including currency and exchange rate information.
Approvals now enable approvers to add cost centres to the approvals, ensuring that timesheets and expenses are allocated correctly. Users no longer need to recreate invoices from scratch when expenses or timesheets related to an invoice are updated. Instead, they can refresh the invoice, and it will pull the relevant data through and update the invoice and invoice amounts, saving time. In addition, invoice payment terms are now drawn from the project default.
Is this a more open approach from BigTime in 2023? Will it reveal updates continually throughout the year?
Kantata
Kantata announced updates to Kantata OX. It reveals five updates to the solution once known as Mavenlink that are now available:
- New Insights Dynamic Dashboards. These new dashboards are available alongside the classic dashboards but offer a more flexible and intuitive experience. There are eight basic dashboards, and administrators can use a combination of facts, attributes and metrics to further personalise them.
- It is now easier to change the rate card for a project with access to the Summary Bar to change the rate card during the estimating phases.
- External Project participants can now switch projects faster using the Account selector dropdown. There are some limitations to the availability of this feature.
- Users can remove scheduled hours from tasks within the Resource Centre using the Clear Hours option. They can clear hours for a resource or only for a specific period.
- Users now have access to Saved Views in recent history and Project History. It will allow users to save filters and reuse them. It is also possible to export all recent and project history events based on the filter to a CSV file.
Replicon
Replicon has revealed details of a new feature for Polaris PSA, SmartBudget. SmartBudgets enables managers to simulate project cost, price, margin, and profitability to ensure that the project is set up for profitability and hits revenue goals.
The new feature enables users to create competitive and profitable bids by factoring in every cost that is part of any project. It includes project, non-project, direct, and indirect costs to calculate the most profitable billing rates.
The solution removes much of the manual work in conducting these estimates drawing the latest information from a project as it is carried out. SmartBudget will track performance against budget and identify if a project is veering away from optimal profitability.
Scoro
Scoro revealed how NCompass, a women-owned full-service brand engagement and marketing solutions agency, has been leveraging Scoro to manage its business over the last 2 years. It evaluated the market and deployed Scoro. It now has better data insights, collaboration, efficiency and quotation processes.
Samantha Stormo, Head of Production, NCompass, commented, “With tools like Scoro, effective efficiency and collaboration allow the team a greater work-life balance and time to focus on things that truly matter and move the needle – in their professional and personal lives. As a whole, our agency is excited about the opportunities arising from using such an integrated platform and what that means for us going, and growing, forward.”
Scoro has also revealed details of its first update in 2023. The updates include:
- Role prices on the project level: This allows users to adjust role prices at a project level, enabling pricing to vary by project.
- Order time entries: Users can change the sort order of time entries based on date, duration or billable time.
- Users can also expand list and board views, ensuring that users can use the full width of screens. It works across task and project lists, task boards, timesheets, planner, and reports at the press of a button.
- Scoro has also improved the Search response time by enabling users to select which modules they wish the search function to work across. The reduction in data ensures responses are much faster. They can exclude projects, people, invoices, companies, expenses, orders, quotes and users.
Scoro has also created several short videos focused on time management and project management to help new users onboard Scoro effectively and faster.
PSA PPM and Work Management news from the week beginning 9th January 2022
