We’ve been steadily working away on an awesome new feature for the project details page, we’ve mentioned it previously on the blog here but I thought I’d take some time to explain it in a little more detail.
Inline Editing
This new feature we’re releasing to customers soon (once it’s out of Beta testing) will give you the ability to change information on a project without any page reloading.
It’s currently in beta testing while we work out all the kinks, but basically any field you can edit using live editing turns green and your curser changes when hovering over it…
When you double click it brings up the edit options…
When you’re done you click “Update!”, if you didn’t want to make any changes then click “Cancel”.
All of this happens without a page refresh, which should speed up the time it takes to get things done, in some cases where inline editing wouldn’t work we now just refresh that section, so for example if you add a new task we just refresh the tasks section of the page, not the whole page.
We’ll keep you updated on our progress, we plan to try this out on the project details page then slowly roll it out across the whole program, what section would you like to see it added to next?
I’d like to take this chance to introduce myself to the ProWorkflow world.
Being a recent addition to the ProWorkflow team it has been a real pleasure to talk to so many interesting clients in my first few weeks. It’s quite exciting for me to see that our project management tool is used by such diverse industries; the creatives, the technos, the health sector and some great community organizations.
I’ve recently been working with a payroll software company and prior to that with a company producing point of sale software for the hospitality and retail industries. I’ve long been impressed with the ease of use of the ProWorkflow software, the job tracking and, importantly, the time tracking. It will be exciting to see some of the new innovations appearing soon, I’ll let you in on those in the next few days.
I’m really keen to get to know our clients and learn more about your wants and desires (in a totally professional manner of course). I’m sure the boys have been doing a grand job but I’m even surer that I will be an outstanding champion for ProWorkflow and our eclectic mix of clients.
Feel free to drop me a line at http://proworkflow.com/PWF_support_gotaQuestion.cfm (attention: Lara), I’d love the chance to say Hi and hear your thoughts.
We’ve made two changes to the audit log recently you may not be aware of.
Project Filter
The audit log is a great tool for tracking usage, it’s great for seeing what users have been up to as well as reverse anything that could have happened as a result of a particular users activity.
Quite a while ago we added the ability to display the audit log for just one project, by going into the Project Details Page for that project and clicking the “View Log” link top right of the page.
The Audit Log link on the Project Details Page
This would load up an audit log filtered for just that project, the problem was if you changed any other filters (like date range for example) and clicked update it would lose the project filtering (because that didn’t exist as a filter you could select).
This has now been fixed as a result of us adding a project filter in the audit log, it is available if you go into the normal audit log (for the whole account) as well as getting pre-selected to a project if you happen to use the audit log link on the project details page for that project, it lists active, completed & deleted projects sorted by project number.
Timezone Selector
The audit log has always shown you the date & time a particular action occurred alongisde its information in the audit log, this date/time was the time on the server that particular action took place which is great for administrative staff but not very helpful for the average user (where the time could be off by hours).
To make it easier for everyone involved we have now added in the option to display all the items with the User’s Date/Time so you can see when items occurred relative to yourself instead of the server, though server time is still there as an option should you wish to use that instead.
Misc
We’ve actually changed how the audit log is stored on the server as well, we now store it in your database which means it loads quicker and is included when you download a full copy of your database from the Developer Settings page. (it was previously in XML)
We’re constantly added new actions to the audit log (29 and counting), let us know if there are any specific items you want us to track before others.
We’ve mentioned in the past we are working on Quickbooks & Xero Integration, as of a little while ago Xero integration was made available to all customers but we’re still testing Quickbooks internally with some beta testers.
I thought I should take a little time out to explain exactly what level of integration you should expect when it comes to ProWorkflow and these two offerings, while we don’t currently have plans to integrate with other accounting applications, we welcome any suggestions on what package you would like integration with next.
Turning on integration
In both cases you turn on integration in the “INVOICE Manager”, simply go into the Settings page then scroll down to “Integration Settings” and select either XERO or Quickbooks then click the UPDATE button.
This adds a new section in “ADMINISTRATION” called “integration” with either XERO settings or Quickbooks settings, in the future we will probably make this a little easier by adding it all into an integration section or something similar, this is just a temporary measure.
Xero Settings
The XERO Settings section
To set up the link between your XERO & your ProWorkflow account you will need a Key from the XERO Network, you can generate one by going to the Xero Network page in the Settings tab after going into your company in Xero.
Find ProWorkflow in the list of external services then click the Generate Key button, the page will reload with a key unique to your account.
Quickbooks Settings
To set up the link between your Quickbooks company file & your ProWorkflow account you need to install the “Quickbooks Web Connector” on the machine that has your Quickbooks company file.
You then download the two files in Quickbooks Settings and add them to the Quickbooks Web Connector, entering your ProWorkflow password when prompted. Whenever you want to sync your invoices/contacts between ProWorkflow & Quickbooks you will need to have the web connector running and either manually force it to synch, or you can make it run on a schedule (e.g. every 30 minutes).
Send to Quickbooks/Xero
When it comes to getting invoices into your accounting package (be it Quickbooks or Xero) you have to manually “send” the invoice from ProWorkflow before it can be imported, this is because importing can only be done once per invoice, once it is in your accounting package if you change the invoice it won’t be reflected in ProWorkflow and vica versa.
All you have to do is tick the invoices you want to send then click “send to {accountingpackagename}”
An example send to Quickbooks Link
This will either send the invoice straight to your accounting package (XERO – it will appear in draft invoices) or allow it to be imported through a manual/auto synch (Quickbooks)
Line Items
When an invoice is imported into your accounting package it will contain two line items, the total of all taxable items on the invoice and the total of all non-taxable items on the invoice, with the option for “taxable” or “non-taxable” already pre-selected per the line items in your accounting program.
Example Invoice to Line Items in Quickbooks
Contacts
When synching invoices from ProWorkflow to your accounting program, we also synch your list of contacts to ensure they are linked between our program and the exernal program correctly. Whenever a new contact is synched to ProWorkflow from the external program we try to link it to an existing contact in the system where possible (through simple name matching), when a contact is synched from ProWorkflow to the external program the contact is created in that program and linked to the contact in ProWorkflow.
You can see the links that already exist and create new contacts (if neccesary) on the Quickbooks/Xero settings page in Administration.
Company Matching on the settings page
Status
The status of the invoice is different per accounting application, listed below are the possible status’s and their effects on what you can do with an invoice at any given moment.
Quickbooks
- Unsent – This means the invoice hasn’t been made available for synching with Quickbooks yet.
- Awaiting Synch – This means the invoice has been made available for synching but has not yet been synched with Quickbooks. Any edits you make to the invoice at this point will be reflected upon being imported in Quickbooks.
- Sent – This means the invoice has been synched with Quickbooks, any changes you make to the invoice won’t be reflected in Quickbooks (we warn you when trying to edit or delete the invoice)
- Unsent – This means the invoice hasn’t been sent to Xero yet
- Sending… – The invoice is currently being sent to Xero
- Draft – The invoice is in Xero in “Draft Invoices”, the invoice cannot be edited or deleted in ProWorkflow
- Submitted – The invoice is in Xero in “Awaiting Approval”, the invoice cannot be edited or deleted in ProWorkflow
- Awaiting Payment – The invoice is in Xero in “Awaiting Payment”, the invoice cannot be edited or deleted in ProWorkflow
- Voided – The invoice has been voided in Xero and can now be deleted in ProWorkflow but not edited
- Paid – The invoice has been marked as paid in Xero and can now be marked as paid in ProWorkflow
- Deleted – The invoice has been deleted in Xero and can now be deleted in ProWorkflow but not edited
- Try testing the QuickBooks integration on a duplicate company file to ensure your invoices are coming in as expected.
- Don’t try importing more than say 20 invoices at once into either Xero or Quickbooks, any more and you may experience corruption issues with that much XML
- Make sure your companies are linked correctly in settings to ensure there aren’t any duplicates
- If you make any changes to invoices in ProWorkflow, match that change in Quickbooks to ensure consistency across systems
- Make sure your tax rate in ProWorkflow matches your tax rate in Xero/Quickbooks to ensure figures are consistent.
On the ProWorkflow.com homepage you will notice we have some basic stats, this is computed in a daily process that gets the number of projects, tasks & time from each account across all our servers then lumps the figure together for our homepage.
The stats from the homepage
Well we recently updated all of our servers to ColdFusion 8, and along with giving us a great speed increase we had to reconfigure some of our back-end services, it means these figures weren’t being calculated for a number of days.
We’ve now rectified it so they are calculating correctly again both on a per-account level as well as the totals per server and the totals on the homepage, we actually also use these figures in our back end to alert us to customers that aren’t using the system yet (so we can get in touch and give them a hand).
The project/task/time stats we see per account.
I’m eagerly awaiting us getting to one million projects in the system, it took us about five months to get from two million hours to three (with that rate ever increasing), It will be interesting to see how long it takes to get to one million projects.
We’ve had our top JQuery (AJAX) developer working on the Project Details page to improve the usability. He’s getting there and will have an awesome update ready in the next 1-2 weeks.
What we’re doing is allowing nearly all fields (about 30+ fields) on the Project Details page to be edited inline or live on screen. In addition, we’re eliminating page refreshes when any or all tasks are updated, or when the ‘Sortby’ column headers are click to resort the list.
We’ve found that the Tasks section of this page is one of the most heavily used section of the application for most project managers, so getting this sped up will please project managers everywhere! So how does it work?
So basically, Here’s the tasks from the project details page:
As an example, see below, if you hilight any cell, it’ll change to a green (active) color. Wherever you see this colour, you’ll be able to double click to edit this info live, onscreen. (the same process applies to any of the task fields, ie: dates, priority, order etc.
After double clicking, the edit dialogue appears directly below so you an update the info.
You can also click ‘More Details’ to edit other info.
Click ‘Update!’ and the tasks info will be updated live! Awesome! no full page refreshes!
So whilst the original functionality will still be available to add and edit task info, over time, this method will be a great time saver if only needing to edit a small amount of info.
This will be released in the next 2-3 weeks through a regular maintenance update and will be available on all accounts. If it proves successful, we’ll then push this method onto many other areas of the application.
We have recently deployed ZipEnable to all our trial and subscription servers and have seen a dramatic increase in response and page loading times as a result.
ZipEnable, developed by San Diego company Port80 Software, harnesses the native power of HTTP compression already build into IIS 6 and provides an easy management interface which allows you to granularly manage compression at the global, site, directory, and file levels — all without writing a single line of code or editing the IIS metabase.
ZipEnable also provides vital, real-time, updated browser compatibility checking to make sure that browsers that can handle decompression, and CPU roll-off to keep compression CPU cycles within your comfort zone.
The chart below shows the average savings ZipEnable has made to the size of data getting sent back to the browser and the subsequent impact the compression has on page delivery times.
Thanks to Craig Walker, Chief Technology Officer at Xero, for the knowledge he shared in his presentation: Client Side Performance Sucks… it gave us the inspiration to make this happen.
Our development team have recently completed an integration module between our ProWorkflow application (www.proworkflow.com) and XERO (www.xero.com). ProWorkflow is web based project management software and XERO is web based accounting software. Both operate under a Software As A Service (SaaS) model. The aim is to transfer invoices from ProWorkflow to XERO and update the invoice status from XERO back into ProWorkflow.
I’ve had regular discussions with Alex at Spin Advertising and Design about how it’s working for them. He’s absolutely thrilled that he can save so much time through eliminating double handling. They’re also working with us closely to refine the integration.
Here’s some comments sent through by Alex Mann at Spin.
Julian,
The link between ProWorkflow and Xero has concluded our search for the sort of application we have been seeking for many years, we have now eliminated our data entry to virtually nothing (no joke) along with the benefit of two extremely good applications(rather than one app that does a half hearted job)
Firstly our time tracking and project management for our team, or what we term as our “Virtual Job Bag”, this runs online, has massive flexibility and functionality at an affordable rate, and now that Pro-Work-Flow has integrated with Xero we now have another great application for accounting and measuring the success of our business on a financial level.
We now have a truly paperless office, can access/track/communicate/share info with our entire organisation from anywhere on the planet, and have a powerful system to have our organisation run globally.
Cheers, Alex – Spin
