Q&A Webinar : October 12th

[Music] welcome everyone hello and welcome this is mike i'll be your host today for the SuiteDash q a webinar podcast succeed with software is what we call this let's get started today as we always do let's get you guys to jump into the chat say hi say hello let us know where you're from maybe your niche so that we can sort of tailor the business or the discussion to your business possibly if that works let me turn on the chat so everyone can see all right so where are you guys joining us from today i see um see a few familiar face faces

Mike from the uk mike kelly from the uk yes well that's a very irish name i have family i think i have two family members named mike kelly uh from uh cincinnati area yeah hey mike is a great name mike if everyone was named mike i would never forget anyone's name i always love me meeting a mic really makes things easy for me and another mic unless and sir uk yeah great uh hey ellis from philly how are you digital marketing excellent and ted from the netherlands how are you sir sean from atlanta jeremy romania hi jeremy and anna from toronto

Beautiful city most international city in the world i think or at least the one most international city i've been to and zach from ohio where did we say zack i don't remember uh from ohio which part just curious i'm in columbus seabus yeah been there been there i was telling somebody the other day about the my columbus or my ohio state michigan football game experience that was when i realized that acc football is basically nothing compared to two big ten or what at that time was big ten yeah exactly i thought we were like oh yeah yeah we don't know anything we don't know anything okay uh let's move on all right guys

Welcome it's tuesday 1pm thanks for joining us let's go ahead and go through the initial for those of you here for the first time i'd like to just start off by saying welcome and please do if you haven't already start a free trial that's your best way to get a look at SuiteDash along your journey go ahead and check out the help documentation here at help.sweetdesk.com the academy is also is a great resource if you're in the visual learning video training and then the how-to series is our most recent type of help documentation uh you can just come in here and go one step at a time here's a picture here's the description here's a picture here's the description and it's

Quite easy to step yourself through and then if you are really running into problems or you just want to bounce some ideas off some fellow SuiteMates jump into the community you will need to create a new and separate login in the community for security reasons we decided to make that separate so just create a new user and jump into the community and you'll find that there are groups that are catered to your niche very likely and it's just a great place to share ideas and bounce questions off of other SuiteMates okay great uh something to talk about real quick something to bounce an idea of you guys speaking of bouncing ideas and while i'm doing that feel

Free to go ahead and start putting your questions into the chat so what would you what do you think as the community or as new users or experienced users as some experienced users here of the idea of having something like an open i think the best way to describe it is something like an office hours right so that the idea would be that we would open a zoom meeting like this uh three four five hours a day during a window that is overlapping with the majority of the time zones at least in this part of the world the hemisphere um sorry australia sorry new zealand that might for at least for now um and there will

Be a place where you could jump in exactly like you're doing now the mic will be muted the camera would be off the sharing would be off and it would just be a place where you can type in questions and get a response by chat if that was sufficient if that was not sufficient it would be a place where whoever's manning the office hours would turn on the microphone turn on the video or the screen share and just as i'm doing now just walk you through step by step and show you okay over here go to make create an invoice and then make sure you're thinking about this so you're hearing a voice you're seeing a screen and you're getting your answers in a way that is just real time richly illustrated if needed now of

Course it doesn't change the fact that in some cases that the answers we won't be able to go all the way through a demonstration just like we're here we don't really have time to build an entire implementation for you however we do have time to do exactly what i do here and of course i love we love doing this i love doing this i love connecting with you guys and hearing your ideas and and really really keeping ear my ear to the ground which is a i think a great idea for anyone that's leading an organization um but also of course you it's just one hour a week you know you you guys are busy you're running your ideas i mean you're running your um your businesses you can't always sync with this

With one hour a week that we hold this and uh i think it's a it's kind of a cool way to make you know a chat is great but you know we we've all been there you just your fingers get tired you're chatting they don't understand it's not really making sense what they're saying and we're lost in translation whereas this idea would allow us to just jump in as needed and turn the mic on turn the camera on let's just show you what we mean until the light bulb goes off and then you're off and running okay so i i think the uh overwhelming response that i'm seeing is great idea so all right well that's good it's possible that that kind of thing would be um a

Premium or sort of a reserved for paid users i think and just because that's just the only way it can make financial sense and for the business but uh yeah yeah i think that's something we'd like to consider i've never seen it done anywhere um maybe you guys have but i haven't seen it uh done and i think it's kind of a cool thing that could be really pivotal for someone who is trying to get up to speed and really needs just a few things a few pieces of the puzzle to continue and and that would be a nice way to to do that okay thank you for the feedback i appreciate it really helpful all right i have a question here we're gonna scroll up and just get right into it uh hi ted ted says newbie

Here no problem ted no problem don't apologize that's what we're here for your use case all right good i like ted he's a he's he's explained everything i can already see that this is explained so i'll try to read it and understand it uh the customer known or with own dashboard or unknown um okay fills in a form i want to send an email with a link to a folder where they can upload their photos in their dashboard well we can do that with file request ted so let's let's continue i want to assign this task to two other team members okay in their dashboard or automatically maybe because of the form it's a task okay

So the task is for the customer but then you all also want to assign tasks to two other team members one of them must be able to see all the customer information one must only see selected info about the task okay see where you're going i also want to also want both the team members and myself to be able to chat with the customer but is this possible without seeing the customer name is this use case possible partially tab the answer is um partially and i'll let me illustrate which parts are and which parts are [Music] possibly in the future possible if that's the way to say it okay so we

Have something called a file request that is is perfect for a situation where you just need to send a link and in the easiest way possible have someone on the end of that link be able to upload their their uh the files okay this is something that is not currently in a trigger meaning it when you onboard somebody it's not currently created so that it will trigger the file request but it can be used that way so let me illustrate what i mean so if you click request files you'll go through the ui or you'll name it and this is a case like uh where you have a one-time use say for example uh your you

Are say an accountant and you need some tax returns or you need something you need some documents from someone very specifically and you want to fill that out designate which folder it's going to go into and then the next next view you're going to put in their email address or if they're a user already in your system you can select them and then it will send an email and it will have a very simple link but what you can also do is you can create a very generic file request or a simple file file request meant to be used over and over again and let's look in here and we'll see that here each one of these is a file file request uh that was created but they can be reused okay and let me illustrate so here's one that was just named something for testing but

You can see that mad max here has uploaded five files into this and each time someone uploads a file will separate or i mean a session will separate that session and all the files uploaded in that session will end up in a folder just like this and then the files will be located here okay let's go back so here though if we go back to the file request level i can go to this file request and come over to the options and grab preview file file request which will give me a link in a new browser and this is what it will look like when they reach there but if you take this link you can copy this link and now i can use that in any number of ways and in

Your case ted the way that i would approach this to accomplish this with existing functionality is in the email that they will receive when they complete a form either that would be a portal access invitation or any uh email that you can trigger from any one of our forms just a free email uh i would include a link that link that i just showed you you can create one specifically for that and then just put that link in there and it's always live always ready and then they can upload the files and you'll be notified when those files are uploaded then you'll go into your portal and be able to access those okay so that's a universally useful thing it applies to what you asked

For but i wanted to explain it uh in some some level of detail so other people are able to understand it as well now let's move to the other parts you want to create a task and you want to assign tasks to two other team members this can be us accomplished but where it starts to lose traction in our platform is that one of them must be able to see all the customer information and one of one must only see selected info about the task yeah that's hard to understand completely the answer but the only way that can happen in our platform is separation is using roles so my

Suspicion is that when you get you will be giving away too much permission by say elevating one of those people to admin for example and another one keeping them as a teammate what we hear requests for and i think is what you are pursuing here is is almost like a platform functionality where you're trying to be what i'll call a facilitator right that you're trying to create and let's talk about and you can confirm right um you're trying to create a a sas essentially a a mechanism that will facilitate uh two sides of some kind of arrangement of business arrangement where

One is one of those people is somehow providing or evaluating that in customer and another person is on your team very likely okay that's it yeah you were okay well good ted let's that's even that kind of simplifies things exactly let's go ahead and look at um managed staff because i think we might have the answer here yes yes yes of course you want to work with freelancers you want to pay the freelancers x you want to charge y and you don't want your freelancers to know who the end customer is of there's nothing wrong with that at all that's pure business okay so let's um look here so when

You add a staff member ted one of the roles you'll be able to choose freelancer yeah and we designed that role for exactly this purpose okay so you can do things with a freelancer like for example um send their email their email let's see what i'm missing here yeah i got it okay so you can when you add a freelancer to a project you're going to be able to they're only going to see specific things um and i don't have a don't have a setup to illustrate this for you perfectly it'll take too long to get there but just to summarize it your freelancer will be able to be assigned task

They'll be able to view the project and only the project they are assigned in right so when they go to the list of projects they're only going to see the projects that they're assigned to they won't know the other projects exist they're only going to be able to see the tasks in that project that they are assigned to they won't know the other tasks it exists so in theory you could have six freelancers in the same project working on the variety of tasks none of them will know the other freelancers exists and they will be able to execute their task they will never see the client name there there's such a thing we what we call client talk and team talk the freelancer is excluded from those so

They're really meant to operate outside your organization and have just enough visibility into the project to accomplish their work to to track their time to um get add their time to an invoice as they as needed etc but also you have the tools to protect exactly the way that you're talking about okay and without knowing a whole lot of other details i really think that's probably the solution for you or at least the very beginning of a solution does it seem like uh that's pretty close ted yeah okay let's let's wait for ted to answer but in the meantime i'm going to scroll up oh i think dead ends close okay well yeah so my

Recommendation ted is to record a screencast video or create a document or something that really kind of walks through your logic walks through your workflow and send it to help SuiteDash.com we'll do our best to decipher it to analyze it and uh try to provide you with some pointers some in the right direction and uh yeah that's the best we can do it's it's difficult sometimes to have real hard answers for questions but uh what we would like to do is try to direct you okay all right tanja how are you i hope i'm saying that right most of my clients are married how do i add the option to add a spouse information that's a

Common question tanja and i what we can do now is custom fields so what you would be able to do is create a custom field but what you won't have currently is a separate login for each of them that will allow them to view the same data which i think is what you really want in the end is that right tanja okay and ted let's continue the conversation i'll show you how it worked now and send it to you this is a really specific use case thanks for now okay sure exactly ted that's that's all we can do and we'll just take it step by step the good thing is is is SuiteDash is built to be as as flexible as possible

You should be able to set something up and if not let's let's identify what the piece is missing and then we'll talk about it with the community we can talk about it here you can go to vote.SuiteDash.com submit your idea um let's see what kind of support there is for it and let's try to build a bridge across that that that gap and let's see we can get there okay all right tanja i i totally get that now are you did you say are you in the accounting space my clients are married that's typically that where this is coming from bookkeeping accounting yes okay good good um

Okay tom just so the solution is forthcoming in the future i can't tell you when but we definitely have this on our radar and most of it comes from the accounting bookkeeping space and it's a 100 valid and something we need to look at so what's what what what what is needed two things really enough and and the one is that we need to make a the possibility for one single primary contact to be the primary contact for multiple companies right so if you go and for example the podcast that we just recently recorded with a fellow named alex fleming flemings is uh on the youtube channel check it out there are

So many nice nuggets of uh information and and that totally worth a listen but that's one of the things alex brought up and and that's on our bed on our radar for quite a while that we'll enable that and then additionally this sort of husband wife spouse life partner so significant other whatever you want to call it uh functionality where two people are going to be able to access basically an identical experience with their unique logins and with those two things i think there the accounting niche will be much much uh

Smoother for it for implementations yeah sound right tanja and i apologize i can't i don't have a big green thumbs up for you on that right now but it's very well understood and it's it's in our pipeline it's it's one of the primary primary big ones that we we are looking to to enable so forthcoming forthcoming i would say if i had to put a number on it i would definitely say in the in less than six months very likely sooner okay all right i'm recording myself saying that so i have to be aware of that all right um zach zack says any

Updates on the exporting via spreadsheet from forms that is a current task zach i can't remember currently where it is in our pipeline but it is spec it's everything is we have everything we need for it it's really just and are you you're meaning the submissions i think zack just to clarify you want to take the submissions from forms export them into csv and you're all set awesome i think what the that's not such a difficult task but it grew as things often do and so we um we want to try to make that task in a way that is intelligent and

The intelligent way to make that is to allow you to choose the data points that you want to include in that csv before you do the export i think that would be helpful to a lot of people i'm not sure for your for your purposes but what that also does is takes us it's a very solid step towards a solid reporting functionality so once we are able to identify those columns put them out into a data into a csv it's a pretty easy step from there to some json and then we're into just about anything anything we need so okay less how are you less

Says can you give an update on notifications particularly on mobile okay less i think you mean on the pwa so pwa just a really quick summary is not this quite the same as a native application so what's called a native application is the ones you are installing from the play store or the app store the apple app store and they have some advantages and some disadvantages the advantages are that they are native on the phone they have access to all the root parts of the phone including push notifications etc a pwa is much much much more more flexible and it's what allows us to give you that white label

Experience but as of now push notifications especially on apple devices is not something we're able to touch however the um the overwhelming current is towards pwa and we expect that over the next short term periods of maybe months or years small numbers of months and years that the these push notifications and some notification process will become available to us what is possibly available to us now and we're investigating and researching to see if it's a it's a something we want to take on is the ability to fall back what they call graceful fallback to

Sms uh we do have the twilio integration now we're working to make a more generic integration that will allow anyone even someone that doesn't have a twilio account to have access to turn on sms notifications and pay an a la carte rate for those sms notifications the the plan is yes exactly the plan is to provide those a la carte services at our costs we would we don't want to make money on those we're not trying to mark those up so the the hope is that you even though it does have a cost it will be the lowest possible cost that you can find to send those sms's and then in

The case that you want to send a notification a push that instead of being a push notification with the badge and those things that are native in the app that we'll be able to hit with an sms and so that would be that's really the current thinking but as soon as those apis open up and are valid on the apple side and on the android side yes push notifications is absolutely the number one request for the pwa and it's something we're definitely already moving towards we have an entire team focused on the uh sms or i'm sorry on the push on the pwa so it's just one thing after the other with pwa and our goal is to be and stay

Continue to be on the cutting edge of what pwa is capable of so that every new thing that we're able to add there you basically get that added that functionality to your white label mobile app straight away with a link to the notification i think you mean a link in the sms that would link to the resource or the asset that's being referenced something like that yes again definitely definitely we already have a generic you might have seen it in some places here and there because we are using it and it's already actually if you enable your your twilio integration and start sending uh sms's via

Actions is where it's currently there if you include a link you'll see that it's automatically shortened into what's called a short link and it's a generic link based on the url the domain portal app dot info i think or i can't remember but some really sort of short reference url that has portal in the in the name so yes we're taking those links we're shortening them for sms in a way that's generic and white label so that they don't see SuiteDash and in the future i guess it's possible we would extend and allow you to bring your own short url to that to that table but yes the links will be included and

Shortened properly etc okay good luck okay any other questions let me know all right guys any other questions coming in yep here we go zach good all right zach let's start are we able to take form data submissions and or open invoices and payments made from the data warehouse and put into a page display dashboard meaning the start page that comes for staff admins can see a dashboard at a quick glance revenue summary number of open invoices number of overdue circles

Assign start page okay so you mean the admin on their side or you mean the admins on your side either way it doesn't matter same same answer uh we're getting closer to that zach for sure i mean you you're aware that we already already have the dynamic data placeholders that pull from the data warehouse as you call it the database we're moving towards the ability to perform math operations with those data placeholders so that not only can you display the data from a placeholder but you could build a math equation using those placeholders and do things like i don't know there's all kinds of

Interesting things you could do with that so it's hard to even hazard a an example um we're working towards and we already have as you know portal pages are accessible by to staff now staff data staff placeholders are there so in the end we'll be looking to create dashboards that your staff can and can see as they log in and display data from the database and then as you say very rightly that we'll start to provide data placeholders or or some kind of representation in charts etc so let's look at uh an example

Here i have one that will help i think so here's here's a dashboard that's that's powered all by dynamic data okay even these charts are powered by the dynamic data the a custom field that is common to all custom all the clients but this particular client's value in that custom field that's powering this chart is 25 right 25 and same here these are all dynamic but what if we had as you say a placeholder for number of open invoices or number of overdue invoices or something like that total number of invoices and then we allowed you to you know had a counter here and then in the background we are giving you that as an option to

Power that counter or power that that widget uh let's see just to illustrate a little more so here here is the builder that built that dashboard right and you see that we have this this is a chart block and here is the value that's displayed on the chart block and then you click here and now this is where the data source for the chart block is coming from in this case again as i said as a custom field and it's and what is displayed on the front end is going to be the value of this custom field document needs in this case the value associated with the client who logs in so to close that logic loop and

Make you understand if this client logs out and another client logs in that's also assigned to this same dashboard the other client will see their values and i can actually illustrate that so let's i think that's worth doing so if i'm on this builder page as the admin i'm building on the building side and i go to preview i'm going to see a preview of that page but it's going to be generic right it's just showing me okay this is what it looks like but there's no you haven't identified a data source yet right um so let's identify the data source as we saw and this would look like with josie and then i i'll switch again and then i'll get back to your comment there zach okay but if you change if

I change here and change to a different client see these numbers are going to change i mean not every time because it is possible that the numbers will be the same but these day this data is now being pulled from this client's profile and everything is different so what you're able to do is create dashboards that are common to some type or group of client and then assign those to that group in our case a circle and when anyone that's in that circle logs in they're redirected to that dashboard assigned to that circle and everything looks the same between all the clients except for of course the important thing which is the data and each client is only seeing their data no one

Else is that's that's a core tenant of what we have that they're only seeing things that are theirs or assigned to them all right so zach says right but these come from project data for that individual client what about being able to capture holistic company data for the owners or admins of the company yes so that's really more like a widget zack yeah so we're currently in in process of rebuilding the widgets like for example on the uh let's go to the dashboard here and we'll see if we can find something that will illustrate this uh the dashboard here will be is being rebuilt and will be each one of these widgets you you'll be able to use on any any dashboard so here's something

Like my tasks now you're talking about more the something like my invoices maybe which has yes a list of all the invoices but what you're looking for is some added up some sum some summation right re reporting yeah so it this would be a widget that we would build a widget that would do this kind of thing and it would be like a reporting widget similar to this yes thank you jeremy perfect okay so those are things we're working towards zach yes sounds like we're going in a direction that would be useful for you that's good okay uh times you'll

See when i'm in a project i cannot see my client's files unless i go back out to the area under dashboard uh well it depends it depends on it so let's let's illustrate and and make sure it's clear if the files are related to the project you should be able to see the files inside the project so let's go into let's see here we'll try this so now we're inside a project what i'm looking at here is a project dashboard but if you'll see the files tab here tanja if the files are related to this project and think of a project as the best illustration i can come i have is that it's like a briefcase okay so each project you create is a briefcase about

Related to some to a project or subject or some um folder you know some pro some effort initiative for that client uh and when it's inside the project it becomes sort of protected only the people that are assigned to the project will get will know that it exists a and be able to access it be so now that i'm inside the project i see files that are related to the project and they look a little bit different than you would see in just a normal in the client files area because these are the project files so we have public files inside a project private files inside a project and descriptions are here just like they say and task files inside a project and each task will get its own folder and any files uploaded

Into that task will be organized and kept perfectly inside that task so your client even or your freelancers or anyone who is working on their task can upload and attach files to a task and they can be retrieved either from the task individually so you can go to the task and be able to download those files or you can navigate here and and use the search find the right task and get it downloaded a lot of our customers were are are bigger organizations and they have numbering or some sort of organizational schemes that they use to make sure that everything is well organized and then once they're here they're going to go right for the search and enter some id number reveal the task straight away so

If we see how even when you start typing it's just automatic it's going to filter okay that was quick and now i'm in i'm going to find my tasks my file and upload them or or download or upload new files into the task does that help tom jones again these are related to the project only but i think what you might be saying is that what you might be wanting is the client files to be inside this your general client files and the reason that wouldn't be the case is because you you may have people in here in this particular project and imagine that your client has say four different projects with you and that's pretty common in

Our customer base that some of the files that are that are housed generically in that client's personal client files and we'll look at together to illustrate the difference then you may not want the people that are assigned into that project to see those uh and also the other way around so there's some sense some sensitive some privacy things happening here that at least that's the the logic that currently is so here's what i mean if you go into client files this area is not always the same as the project files area so

You'll need to just house those in the right place all right let's scroll down and see if we can get yes being able to choose what you wanted or customize widgets we'll do our best zach it's it's tough to anticipate the needs but the one the the the examples that you used are quite common and pretty generic and so yeah i think we'll we'll get pretty close to that eventually and and have the options for that i hope so i hope it'll work for you tanja does that help or maybe we can uncover some possibility of things we something that we need or something that we need to think about and and make a way for that i just want to make sure that you're you have your question there okay

Uh-huh well when one approached tanja now i think you're completing a thought and i'm gonna jump a little ahead here one approach might be that if you have a prod you have let's let's talk about let's talk about uh using projects for what you're discussing here okay so there's two things to say here one is if you are starting with a client and um a lot of times we'll recommend that every client you start with if you're going to do work with the client even if it's not kind of a typical project management approach right oh i need to manage this project with tasks and phases and all these things sometimes it makes sense to to

Just even if you don't need that to create a project for each client and then just let that project go forever it's always going to be in your in your portal it's always going to be your briefcase that you work inside of with that client and and maybe you're going to use the files there you're going to use uh all the organizational tools that exist in that in that project one thing that could that was one thing to say but another thing is that one thing that can enable for utanja is we have what's called secondary clients functionality in projects so this would be in the case that i was going to start working with a team from um slack for example you know i don't know apple micros it doesn't matter some a big company and

We were producing a a marketing video for them but they have like four or five people on their side that really need to have optics and really need to be involved uh and of course i don't want you they're not going to share a login that's bad practice so what we would do in that case is we would create five different logins all associated with the company apple and then we they would all log into the portal and then we would add all the it would identify one primary client who would be basically our point of contact primary and then the secondary clients we would put here and guess what they get to see everything so that sounds kind of like if you had one of the essos significant others here and the other so here and

You kept everything in the project including the updates you maybe use the project dashboard to distribute updates maybe you use client talk to um to make your communications everything stays very buttoned up and tight inside that project and then in this case as well your house your your husband wife significant other spouse whatever the case may be would be able to see all these things in here as well so i don't know for sure but it does seem like a possibility and something maybe you could do a proof of concept and see if it works uh for your needs for

Your needs and and they're always different so uh it's always tough for us to anticipate because you're an accountant or bookkeeper in in country a and we have customers from 100 over 100 countries so uh it because we're not niche niche specific we don't focus down and get really really specific about creating tools that enable specific workflows so that being the case it also means that you would have to sort of identify and evaluate whether this kind of approach would work for you but not a bad approach and you'll see here in the in the dashboard you can these are the updates i was meaning if you use the project dashboard every little bit every little

Bit of update that you make you can just leave this little okay everything's going well going well going well and these are date stamped your client can reply here and all those this these threads go into what we call client talk which is a threaded subject-based communication tool inside this project it is um isolated here protected here and only the people that get inside this briefcase get inside this wall garden are able to um even have a chance of participating in this and then there's settings and defaults that prevent something like a freelancer from even seeing this tab knowing that it exists uh and

Will and on the client side all these tabs are very pared down and everything is sort of focused towards just getting them to see only what matters and only what you want them to see well there's a wide range of settings associated with each project globally and individually that allow you to customize what the client can see okay here exactly here like for example earlier i said um the teammates and freelancers inside a project are only able to see the tasks that are assigned to them that's by default but you are able also to enable this setting for example and then everybody sees everybody all the tasks so some teams work that way some

Teams need it to be more isolated in the sense of i think maybe less was saying that earlier trying to make or ted i think ted was trying to have everything protected so all these [ __ ] and allow clients to access project files yes or you could turn that off or you can just say i only want to allow you to download or only want to allow you to upload so all these granular controls are what we provide to help you customize how this works for you in a way that fits your workflow and that's that's kind of the challenge for us but also something that we go a pretty long way to try to provide for you and these are all the settings for the project dashboard that i just referred to so if

You don't want to show their logo that's no problem just turn it off right and we uh there we go it's a little better so all these are are exactly for that okay all right tanja says let's just pop the chat back up so everyone can see tony says my client downloaded their files to their their documents to their file but it only shows up in the files on the dashboard how do i get it to show in the file associated with the project documents show in both sections got it okay so they uploaded through some through just a standard file

Um what they see on the file not inside a project you could move the file you could move the file and then change the workflow slightly to it so that in the future they are uploading through a thought through the project side that would be one option uh but no we don't have a like a default option that if it gets uploaded in one area then show it in another area and currently we don't have that so i would say that you can move the file using the file tool just find the file and move it and then you would solve that problem short term long term i think you would want to modify the workflow and make sure your clients are familiar with you really design

You when when you when you build this and and identify your workflows what you also want to do is is is design an experience for your clients that educates them that directs them on how to do these things uh in the emails they receive and maybe and we have quite a few customers actually that will create a welcome even a video that says okay welcome to our portal here's how you do this step one step two step three and uh some of them even multiple multiple videos explaining each type of client like a payroll or a tax accounting or whatever these these things are so that's that's that's the best i can i could say as far as an answer i think that is an answer um it's

Not a magic wand but it but it does have validity and i think it can work for you hopefully okay tanja i hope so all right what are the questions guys all right let's wait for those but in the meantime let's take a look at this what is this can you say i can't see it let's see let's turn this off what is that what is this weird thing well it's the beginnings of a new functionality or a new direction and functionality but what we have what this is initially

Is going to be is what we're calling a timer widget okay so yeah imagine that you are you get a phone call or an email and somebody says hey can you can you start on this project hey great let's uh let's build this website all right so you just go ahead and just name that prod the task however you want hit tab enter your hourly rate let's just say you're getting 50 euros or dollars and you just hit enter and boom this timer is off and running okay so this timer is going to count you're going to notice in in the tab that you're active your timer is going to be counting up in this tab and now you can move on you can just go anywhere you want you can navigate all over the the platform you

Can say okay now let's go to this let's go to this project let's go to the dashboard let's move around and your timer is always going to be active it's always going to be counting it's always going to be available for you okay so uh let's just do one more one more change and then we'll let it count for a second but what's cool about it right now oh disappeared on me again so it always resets itself down at the bottom we made it so that you can slide it in case some piece of ui gets in the way so this is kind of a short term um arrangement long term will be actually implementing and this is already planned and starting development a bottom toolbar that will stick persistently at the bottom that will house tools like this and other tools that are

Planned like a search like a long term like a command line that will let you do things really quickly from a quick command line type functionality but let's look at the let's continue with the timer and and just so everyone knows this is not live in your account you can't use this right now but it is in sort of final testing phases it will be out uh pretty shortly okay so now you you've you have your um timer running you've you counted up let's go ahead and stop the timer okay and now what we can do everybody see right okay and we'll click add to invoice right now you can say all right i'm ready to invoice this

Timer but now you can just create a new invoice let's just say it's one timer you the task is finished you're ready to invoice all of this right create new invoice um assign the client everything is good or you can add it to an existing accumulating generator uh and remember that this is all this timer has not yet been assigned but you can do that as well so let's say you stop the timer and you and before you restart you say you know what let me go ahead and assign this let's click manage timer and now uh i can come down and say click assign timer and i can assign it to a client or a project or a task any one of these i can

Just select that and then once it's assigned the beauty is is that after that when you go to invoice it we already know the client we already know the project we already know the data and we can put it right in the proper place without any much much more input from you uh another thing is if you stop and you oh i need to switch i want to switch to a new task that's okay you can just switch let's let's start back on this logo design that i was working on i'm starting back so now i can quick switch my timer right and now i have this this other timer that was sort of waiting for me to continue now i can continue that timer and when i'm finished with that one i can switch to another one etc etc so this is a really really nice tool for someone who's working tracking

Time adding them to invoices adding them to what we call accumulating generators which is essentially okay you're just stacking up timers into that generator and then the generator will will spit out the invoice based on a predefined schedule so if you are a web agency i think someone here uh identified that way um imagine that you tell your clients okay i want i'm gonna bill you every month for what we do for you anytime you call us or email us we'll just go to work we'll time everything hey thanks ellis we'll talk we'll run timers and then when it comes time we'll just add them to the accumulating generator you can tell your staff members that you can tell your freelancers that just do the work time track your

Time add it to the client's accumulating generator and then every month that generator its job is every month without fail without reminding it doesn't forget it never goes to lunch it's just waiting it waits all month i'm ready i can't wait i can't wait and then when the month hits boom it's going to take all the timers or all the items anything that's on that in that list it's going to move them it's going to move them and create an invoice with them an actual invoice that gets automatically sent to the client if you choose and then it's going to reset wipe the slate clean and wait in the all next month you're going to add timers and items to it and then the next month it's going to do the same thing over and over again and guess what no more missed

Invoices no more work that doesn't actually get paid right how i mean we i know we all either know somebody or have been in a situation where you just know for sure that there's money left on the table because you're too busy or you forgot or it just it seems like a you know what i'm talking about right everyone so the accumulating generator is the solution now people will say hey can we generate reports from the from the timers can't we generate reports well yeah but doesn't that mean that you have to log in generate the reports and then send them to the to the to the uh client and then you know attach it to an invoice that you have to manually create yeah

That's what it means the accumulating generator is four shortcuts past that right it allows you to take all the timers stack them up in the generator and that's it you're done you don't think about it after that because it's like a report everything is there on the on the appointed day and time based on your specifications the generator is going to generate that invoice and send it game over we're done pay it and everybody's happy nobody forgets nobody drops the ball the client always gets billed no matter what it doesn't matter if it's for 11 or 111 dollars it's going to happen so um yes we we like this accumulating

Generators has been part of the platform from the very beginning and that that rationale has been there but honestly i've never seen it anywhere else i don't understand um i guess i don't understand why i think it's really really useful for anyone who who has that sort of free free work business model where you're working just when on small things here and there it's easy to forget or easy not to add that to an invoice and also it's easy to feel guilty for adding what 11 minutes or whatever number small but in this case you can just do it and then there's a mutual understanding between you and the client like i'm just hey i'm just running timers and adding them to this pile and then every month it'll come to you it doesn't matter if it's for twelve dollars just pay it just just

Go to the portal and pay it and we're good all right so soapbox stepping down anyway uh mike says will you be able to set the month period dates less says i think you mean which date of the month less yes so in the case that is what you mean i'll go ahead and answer if it's not let me know okay perfect yep so when you create an accumulating generator let's just go there good invoicing when you create an accumulating generator and you're setting up the schedule um you're going to say every month and then another thing the next thing it's going to ask you is when what what's the first what's the first date

That you want to generate one of these so of course you don't want to generate right right away you're going to tell it when the first date of generation is so here so you can say i want to do this every one month or a week or whatever you want to do and now it says when is my first creation date well you just set it for next the first day of the month on the next month say for example or the fifth or whatever you want to do right that'll work and then every month on that fifth it'll crank it out or the first however it works mike kelly how are you i think i always think of the actual mike kelly that i know but um cool last good mike i will i

Will go down on record and say very soon very soon i think this week we've been holding it for several weeks really testing it really running through it uh it's got it needs some more some a little more um but it's ready it's it's ready to hit the streets so the timer widget and then coming after that will be as a complete series of new and cool really cool stuff uh coming in in this in this kind of implementation and what's cool about it is everything that we put in into this kind of widget and eventually will be on this persistent bar will just be one or two clicks away uh to get you to these really you know fast i need this functionality two clicks away you'll

Have it and then when the command line is is command line and keyboard shortcuts are in place you'll be able to start a new task by clicking you know typing backslash add space task space uh at for who you know the person if it's you you can do that and then just type the task and then hit enter and guess what in your my task list which you can access always from my tasks it'll just appear and you'll have a task so if you need to remember to call this person or provide that folder for that person or whatever it is if it's in your head for two seconds that's all it needs go right to the command line and start typing boom it'll show up here and it'll become something that's

On your on your schedule you can always use your filters you can save filters so that this is constantly filtered with the way that you need it to be typically you know some you most people would want to filter by due date or something like that and this is the direction that we're moving and this is the one of the first the timers widget is one of the first implementations uh in that direction all right let's uh pop the chat up so that we can see the wow like it okay thanks yes perfect wow good gold good like it like it all right let's see that's

True noel so noah thank you noel for the answer jeremy if you are assigning a timer to a task let's just say let's let's let's do that so you when you say no task it's going to ask you the project then after you after it has the project it's going to have the uh the task and when this gets added it's going to identify the the project and task in the invoice yes also just to point out when you make these notes here if you make notes so you yeah you're going to set a title but then you can send you can make notes these will end up in the description of the item on the invoice so you can really uh get a little more verbose here a small title

Here and really type out the an actual description that your clients will read about you know what you were accomplishing during that time and then you can add it to the invoice based on just the client or or the project or the task if you make a mistake you can just unassign it and continue okay all right guys i think that is going to be i hope i didn't take the chat down i hope you saw that so okay oh cool cool less yeah cool idea les says uh i think you guessed okay yeah wild card yeah can it decrement client plays five thousand the differences is spent that's cool uh

No less but we do have plans in the future to have a balance right so that your your clients can have a balance and you'll see that if you look in you'll see the the ui where that will live in the end if you go to now i'm on client side now okay i'm logged in as a client and then if i go here to my billing this is the client billing dashboard right so right now you can put payment credit cards on file you can put um bank accounts on file if you're if you're in the us that that can work here there's room for a balance and account balance and then you would be able to actually pay invoices

With that account balance or in your case you could run a timer and save you bill end up with three thousand dollars worth of time they can pay that invoice that the timer's added to with that account balance and reduce that down to two thousand and we'll keep that accounting for you in the platform and they'll be able to access always their their existing account balance from this my billing dashboard that work for you less i mean it's basically the same thing except for with the uh but if we get a lot of support for decrementing counting timers and with then with 5 000 that's pretty cool yeah okay all right everyone i

Think that's it we're we're kind of looking just right at time seems like we're we're at the end of questions we've introduced a new feature the timers widget all right okay everyone thank you very much for your time awesome thank you les thank you for coming along thank you mike yes sir and thank you to everyone else we appreciate you coming in thanks for the ideas the feedback on the office hours on the timer widget thank you tanja yes and ted awesome very nice to meet all of you and good to see you all you returning um visitors to the webinar hilton and i see and

Zach all right thanks everyone have a great rest of your day bye [Music] you