April brought BigTime another successful monthly release. Our focus was on enhancements to all areas of our system, driven by great customer feedback. Throughout each month, we meet with customers to discuss new features and ensure we have a deep understanding of how they are using and leveraging current features. These in-depth sessions allow us to continually evolve our solution and provide increased efficiency to all users.
Some highlights of the enhancements released in April are:
- Core Solution
- Special characters in timesheet notes
- Notification for data warehouse nightly export
- Client Portal
- Single-sign-on
- Flat client list
- Reporting
- Invoice type
- Invoice review detail
- Separate field for different credit types
- Ecosystem Integrations
- Import story points from JIRA
- Pull BigTime project ID into Salesforce
- Import additional standard fields from Salesforce
Core Solution
Our core solution has continued to evolve each month and many of our customers have evolved as well. International expansion has been one of the areas BigTime users have leveraged during their growth and with that came the need to honor special characters in our timesheet notes. Special characters such as é, è, ê, à, û will now be accepted in the timesheet notes.
In addition, as companies have grown, many look to integrate multiple data sets and leverage the BigTime data warehouse functionality. This month we made it even easier to use by providing automated notifications for the nightly export.
Client Portal
BigTime Wallet’s Client Portal became even easier to use this month with the addition of single-sign-on. As more and more of our Wallet customers provided access to their clients, we received feedback that people wanted to use SSO- so we listened. Making it simple for our customers’ clients to leverage the portal just makes it an even stronger feature for our customers to better serve their clients.
Wanting to always make each customer’s life easier, we made an update to the portal to better represent customers who have single projects or their clients do, by creating a flat client list instead of a dropdown. These changes make the portal more user-friendly and a better representation of our customers to their clients.
Reporting
Every month we learn more about our clients’ reporting needs and work hard to ensure our report library reflects those needs. In April we made three enhancements to allow for that:
Invoice type: On an invoice list-type report, users can view the invoice calculator that was used to generate that invoice (eg. time & materials, fixed fee, item-based billing…)
Invoice review detail: On an invoice list-type report, a user can view review detail on each invoice. When an invoice is forwarded to review, this field populates with the reviewers for that invoice and who has approved or rejected that invoice.
Separate field for different credit types: Users can now report separately on manual credits (or write-downs) and deposit credits. A manual credit refers to any negative line item on an invoice that has been entered as a manual line item. For example, adding a discount or write-down to the invoice.
A deposit credit refers to the negative line items that are automatically applied to an invoice when utilizing the T&M+Deposit invoice calculator. The client has already paid the full deposit amount so each T&M invoice becomes a $0.00 invoice as it deducts from the original deposit amount. That negative line item is the deposit credit.
Integrations
Rounding up our month of enhancements, we’ve leveraged feedback to make our ecosystem integrations even stronger. Starting with importing story points from Jira. In Jira, story points are a common measurement to estimate the size of an issue. It also can be a measurement for how long it will take to complete an issue and level of difficulty.
If your firm is integrated with Jira, BigTime will import this value to its corresponding task. A custom field on the task will automatically be created to store this value to further strengthen the integration by sharing more data between the two systems.
Next, we spent time enhancing our Salesforce integration by pulling the BigTime project ID into Salesforce and importing additional standard fields from Salesforce into BigTime.
On a Salesforce opportunity, in addition to any custom fields added by the firm, there are several standard fields that are automatically available on each opportunity (eg. order number, main competitor(s), tracking number). BigTime now provides the option to import these fields to the project.
On the Salesforce integration screen, there is a picklist to block fields from Salesforce. This will include both custom fields and standard fields. If they are not blocked then a custom field is added to the BigTime project and will import these values.
These two enhancements make our Salesforce integration even deeper and more comprehensive. Allowing customers to see all the information needed to be efficient where they operate in Salesforce or BigTime.
The April release was full of enhancements to continually improve the BigTime experience. Additional enhancements will arrive in May along with a series of new features being led by customer feedback and the changing marketplace. We look forward to all that is still to come! If you would like to provide feedback or be part of a future focus group, let us know at product@bigtime.net.
