New look for organization view!

When you tap on a feed notification or search result of an organization, a brand new view appears:

New organization view on desktop

This new view has a better focus on being actionable instead of just summarizing info.

Maybe you want to call a contact, leave a comment or see if a certain opportunity already exists. This new view helps to achieve business tasks easier.

A nice feature is to create a project or opportunity right from this organization view:

Create opportunity from organization view

Besides making this view more actional, this new UI makes better use of screen space on desktop.

Soon we will develop more views like this, so keep an eye on this blog...

What's new?

This month we released some brand new features and made some great improvements!

Find out what they are in this post!

Improved date picker

Selecting a date in the far past or future took a lot of clicks because it was not possible to jump directly to the required date. 

The date picker is updated and now has the possibility to insert the date (with the keyboard), or by navigating to the required date with the date picker.

Insert date

Date picker

Select approvers for quote

When a quote is submitted for approval, it’s possible to select other employees than the managers. This makes the approval flow more flexible because now there are more options for selecting approvers for your quote.

Select other approvers

Email quote (use Gmail Client)

A nice improvement for sending quotes to the customer: when a quote is sent from VOGSY, a draft mail is generated and directly opened in your Gmail client. This draft email has the same templated subject and body. This gives you the possibility to edit and finetune the mail before sending it to the customer.

Sent quote via draft email

Register absence

How can I track my absence hours? A frequently asked question. There is a new option released in ‘My Timesheets’ which makes this possible. When creating a time entry select ‘Absent’ and choose an absent type to create a time entry for absent hours.

Track absent hours

Approval of absent hours can be configured per employee with setting ‘Absence hours approver’. There are 3 options:

• No approval
• Approval by employee manager 
• Approval by department manager

By default option 'No approval' is activated.

Configure the approval of absent hours

My Timesheets: Submit week

If you want to submit a timesheet, you'll need to submit all days separately. Now, there is a new option’ to submit a week. This action submits the time entries of all days of that week at once.  

Submit timesheet

Specify reason when rejecting time entry

If a time entry is rejected, you can specify the reason why. The employee of the time entry gets notified by a feed item which tells why the time entry is rejected. 

Specify reason when rejecting time entry

Allocate resource: specify hours per day

When allocating a resource to a calculated activity you can specify a day pattern. This pattern is used to automatically plan the hours on the selected days over the specified period.

The day pattern is extended with the option to specify the number of hours of a selected day. This makes it possible to automatically plan 6 hours on Tuesdays en 4 on Fridays. This will eliminate a lot of manual changes afterward because the generated planning meets reality better.

Specify hours in day pattern

Planning Projects: Filter ‘My Projects’

A minor but useful new option is filter 'My Projects' in function 'Planning Projects', which shows only the projects where you are involved in.

Filter 'My Projects'

Pin charts on board with filter settings

Ever felt the need to pin a chart with a particular filter setting so it shows the data for one specific department? Now it's possible! When pinning a chart on a board, the filter settings are saved for that board so the pinned chart always shows the right data!

Create draft invoices for selected period or department

Generating draft invoices is improved by making it possible to select the period which needs to be invoiced. If you specify a period only the time entries (when time and material) and billing periods (when fixed price) within the specified period will be invoiced.

It’s also possible to specify the company or departments for which you want to create draft invoices for.

New filter options in 'Create draft invoices'

Import customer data

To make a rolling start with VOGSY an import is released which enables you to convert your customer data into VOGSY in no-time. There are two import sheets added to section ‘Third party services’ in the back office. These sheets can be filled with customer data and pushed into VOGSY with the VOGSY sheet add-on.

Manage user access

By default, every user in your Google domain can access VOGSY. If you want to have full control of who’s able to access VOGSY, you can change the access permissions:

In function ‘User management’ (Back office), you can activate the option ‘Manually manage users’. This enables you to specify which employee can login to VOGSY. When this option is activated, a new field ‘User’ shows in function ‘Employees’ which determines if the employee is a VOGSY-user and can login to VOGSY.

Manage user access

What's new?

Create opportunity from project

Do you have opportunities for potential projects which you did earlier before and are you tired to create the same opportunity over and over again? There is a solution for that, because now you can create a new opportunity for an existing project. Tapping on this option, starts a form on which you can specify the organization and desired finish date of the new opportunity. This will generate an opportunity and automatically clones the project including its deliverables and calculated activities.

Create opportunity for existing project

Ordering opportunities by expecting order date 

The expected order date is relevant for prioritizing opportunities. Therefore the option to sort opportunities by expected order date is introduced.

Order opportunities by expected order date

Detail level of invoices

Recently the possibility to configure the detail level of invoices is introduced. Now a new level of detail is added which specifies one line per activity.

Added option for detail level of invoices

  

Cap on time entries for fixed price deliverables

A cap on time entries is very prevents exceeding budgets. Last month the possibility to limit time entries for time and material deliverables was released. Now this limit can also be applied for deliverables with invoicing type 'Fixed price'.

Limit on time entries for fixed price

Draft invoices

From feedback we've learned that some important information is missing on the view of a draft invoice in function 'Draft invoices'. Therefore the following information is added:

- Account manager

- Project manager(s) 

- Department

Information added to view

Let’s communicate in VOGSY!

Good communication is essential to successfully convert opportunities into projects, and execute these projects with good results. Therefore we strive for maximum engagement of users so all communication is done thru one channel and in the right context. That way, the information shared in conversations becomes incredibly valuable!

Some big improvements are released to make communicating in VOGSY better, easier and more transparent.

@mention people

Get someone's attention by mentioning them in your post. They will get a notification on the feed which tells them that they are mentioned in your post. This is also useful when you want to share a post with someone which is not a follower. The mentioned persons automatically become followers of the conversation and are updated of all new posts in that conversation.

@mention people

See all conversations in one view

When tapping on a feed-notification or selecting a record from the search suggest, the card is opened and all conversations are shown on the right or underneath the card (depending on screen space).

Post directly from your home screen

If you want to create a post which is not directly related to a project, organisation or opportunity you can easily do this from your home-screen with option ‘Share an update’. This is a quick way to create a message en sent it to one or more people by @-mentioning them.

Create post from home screen

What's new?

Adjusting and submitting timesheets of other employees

It can be a struggle to get time entries submitted in time when colleagues are not able to submit them because they are sick or on vacation. To make sure the process of submitting time entries never comes to a hold, a new feature is released which enables staff employees to adjust and submit time entries of other employees.

To access the timesheets of other employees, the person card has a new item in the dropdown menu. Tapping on ‘Timesheets’ opens the timesheets of that person and makes it possible to adjust and submit time entries.

Access timesheets of others

Alternative flow for approval draft invoices

From feedback we’ve learned that for some companies the support staff takes care of the approval of draft invoices in stead of project managers. Since both flows are common practices, a new switch is introduced which selects the desired approval flow. This switch can be found in back office function ‘Project invoicing settings’.

When option 'Support staff' is selected, draft invoices can be approved in back office function ‘Draft invoices’, which is described in the next paragraph.

Adjust draft invoices

More hours realized than you want to be invoiced? No need to reject the invoice and correct the hours in the time sheets, because with the new back office functionality ‘Draft invoices’ it is possible to change the number of hours on draft invoices. When hours are changed, a new draft invoice will be generated automatically and put on the feed of the project manager for approval. Only the invoiced hours are changed, realized hours will be untouched.

Note: when the approval of draft invoices is done by staff employees (see previous paragraph), draft invoices can be approved in this function by action ‘Approve’. 

Multiple receivers for project invoices

Draft invoices are sent to the email address which is specified for the customer. Now it’s possible to specify multiple email addresses. Just tap on the ‘plus-icon’ next to the field to add more.

Add email addresses for invoices

Set the level of detail of invoices

Some customers wants to see a detailed specification on the invoice of all time entries. Others only want a specification per activity and employee.

Now it’s possible to set-up the desired level of detail per customer so each customer can get the desired level of detail on his invoices. Off course this setting applies only for invoicing time and material projects. 

Set the level of detail of invoices

Text invoice

When generating draft invoices with function 'Create draft invoices' you can specify a text which wil be displayed on each created invoice. This text can be used if you want to let your customers know which period the invoice concerns.

Invoice discount

A new feature enables you to give an invoice discount in percentages. Just tap on option ‘Add discount’ in the project form and specify the percentage and description which will be displayed on the invoice.

Limitation of spend hours on projects

VOGSY lets you know if budgets are exceeded by a notification on the feed. Now it’s possible to prevent exceeding these budgets by a simple switch, which makes it impossible to log time if all allocated hours are spend. This limitation can be activated per deliverable by checking field ‘Limit time entries to allocated hours’.

Limitation of spend hours

Improved look and feel

Optimized for larger screens

"Why isn't VOGSY using more screen space when I use it on a larger screen?"

We listened to your feedback and improved the UI so it makes optimal use of the available space on your screen.

The feed has a dynamic grid which shows multiple columns when there is enough space.

On laptop

On mobile phone

Tip: To use maximum screen space, you can hide the menu on the left side!

New search

The search is improved and matches the UI-patterns of Google. This makes searching organisations, projects or opportunities much more easy!

Search on mobile

On a larger screen, the search field is always displayed in the header of the screen. When the search field is tapped, you can start searching by typing a keyword. By default the results contain all entities (persons, organisations, opportunities and projects), but if you're looking for an organisation, you can tap on the tile 'Organisations' and search only in organisations.

Please note that the keywords are saved and can be used again by tapping on them in section 'Recent'!

Search on laptop

Looking for a list of all your organisations or projects? Just tap on a tile without searching and you'll see the complete list. 

On the right side of the screen you can filter search results.

Filter and sort search results

What's new?

Information added to 'Planning projects'

Make planning of your projects more easy by adding project information which gives you instant insight in the progress of projects and shows if the planning is on track. Also you can see the actual hours and the completion. With this information you'll get the right context to plan projects.

Information can be added to the view by tapping on the settings wheel and select the desired columns:

Add columns

Improvements 'Planning Resources'

Three major improves will make planning of resources a lot easier and more efficient.

1. View totals in 'Planning Resources'

To get an actual view of the overall availability of resources visualized in time, it's possible to see the totals of working hours, planned hours and available hours. These totals can be turned on and off with the settings wheel.

View totals

2. See if resources are on track

Are hours spent as planned? The answer on this question is an important indication of the probability that the project wil be finished in time. Now it's possible to get insight in the actual hours vs planned hours by adding these columns to the view of 'Planning Resources'.

Added columns

3. Planning Resources: Change planned hours

No need to navigate to the project to change the planning. Just tap on a cell to change the planned hours.

Change planned hours

Project planning

The visualization of the project planning when accessed from the project card is improved. The biggest issue was the poor navigation and visualization. This is solved by starting function 'Planning projects', filtered by the project from which the planning is accessed. To get a complete view, deliverables are automatically collapsed.

Project planning started from project card

My planning

Just like the project planning (as described above), the visualization and navigation of 'My planning' caused friction because its poor UI. This is solved by starting 'Planning Resources' filtered by the current employee which makes navigating thru time and changing planned hours (by tapping on cells) much easier.