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One of our passions at AffinityLive is ensuring that time is recorded in a meaningful way - against a particular activity for a client. A key reason for this is when it comes time to bill your clients you can be confident in invoicing for the time that has gone against those issues, jobs or contracts. As our client base grows we've learnt a couple of lessons about the way people work:

1. Professionals work out of their email a lot.
2. Professionals look after their clients and work first, and timesheets second.

These factors have helped us re-design the Work screen - effectively the timesheet screen - so that you can go back in time and log work easily and see the email conversations you had that day, which will help you log that past time more accurately.

The new and improved Work screen can be accessed as before - by clicking the Work button from the top navigation menu.

Timesheet Graph

This is a new feature at the top of the screen which illustrates how many hours you have logged over the last 14 days - so you can quickly identify days where you missed some hours.

Click on a day to see the breakdown of items that you worked on - issues, jobs, prospects and more. Your diaries will be nested under items in the My Activity list.

See ALL your activity for a previous day

Besides seeing work that was logged using a diary note, you'll also see email conversations and meetings that occured on that day, nested under the record they relate to - such as a component for a job. This is super-handy for those who do a lot of work via their email. You can simply use this activity list like a timesheet to quickly add some billable hours for those conversations or create a follow-up diary!

Log past time for Tasks too!

Not only can you add/update past hours for your diaries and emails, you can also log past work against any of your overdue, scheduled or suggested tasks on the right-hand side of the screen.

And a bonus feature is the ability to mark a task as complete from this screen too!

One of the strengths of AffinityLive is the fact it is so tightly integrated - you bring a new, prospective client into the front end, and you're able to manage all of the sales, work, support and billing for that client in one, central place.

However, some of our clients have been asking to make it even easier to get clients into that front end. 

• Wouldn't it be nice to have an enquiry form on your website create a new company/contact in AffinityLive, saving you and your team time in entering data?
• Wouldn't it be nice if someone can fill in an online enquiry form and have a new prospect/opportunity created in AffinityLive?
• Wouldn't it be great if you could have the same flexibility and customization that AffinityLive gives you - with custom fields, notifications and file uploads - in these online forms?

The new AffinityLive Forms API gives you all of this and much more. With the AffinityLive forms API, you can construct forms on your own website or websites, and when users fill in the form details they can be pushed across into AffinityLive, instantly. You can configure notifications - so that your staff get an email letting them know about the new submissions - and submissions can handle all of the custom segmentation and profile fields, as well as file attachments, and all you need is a little help from your web developer or CMS to create a simple web-form - and AffinityLive will do the rest.

For an example of a great web form in action, check out AffinityLive client the Angel Group. This innovative recruiting practice uses the AffinityLive Forms API to capture lots of key information about jobseekers and prospective clients; to get a sense of the power and flexibility of the Forms API in action, check out their Applicant Registration Form.

For more information on how to use the new Forms API, check out our extensive documentation at http://help.affinitylive.com/setup/api-and-forms/forms/

Quickbooks, from Intuit, is a very popular accounting system - especially in the US where it has around 85% market share. As many of our clients began asking for integration, late last year we released an update which allowed AffinityLive to connect to QuickBooks Online via Intuit Anywhere online services.

This update was great for those who had moved to the QuickBooks Online system, but at the time users of the desktop/installed versions weren't included.

After a few weeks of hard work, we've just released the ability to integrate AffinityLive with Quickbooks Desktop Edition (Windows Only). This means now you can create invoices in AffinityLive, and see them synchronized with QuickBooks Windows in both the Pro and Premier versions!

If you're interested in making the connection, you firstly need to have an Intuit online account. In order to create an account that can access your data, launch the Intuit Sync Manager within QuickBooks and follow the instructions.

More instructions are on our help website

Here's a summary of what you can with AffinityLive and QuickBooks:

• Import clients/contacts, invoices and payments from QuickBooks to AffinityLive.
• Import account/ledger codes from QuickBooks to AffinityLive for more accurate invoicing.
• Create invoices in AffinityLive that push to QuickBooks. New client/contacts will also be pushed.
• Receive payments in QuickBooks that will synchronize back to AffinityLive
• Optionally have invoices created directly in QuickBooks sync up to the company record in AffinityLive.

It's been a busy couple of weeks for the AffinityLive team as we work out all the movings parts needed to bring our beta customers on as monthly or annual subscribers to AffinityLive!

Fortunately we've also found time to prepare a few features that have been sorely missing :-)

Email Notification Preferences

This feature resolves the frustration of receiving too many email notifications from AffinityLive - especially when you set yourself as a manager of another user but don't want all their diaries sent to your inbox!

As we started planning this feature we quickly knew it was going to be very tricky to build an intuitive interface to configure the plethora of notifications built in to AffinityLive. So we came up with a plan to allow a user to configure their email notification preferences for all diaries that are created via the "Add Diary" screen. In the future we aim to expand the notification preferences to control a range of other automatic email notifications which are generated from other actions in AffinityLive.

To view the notification settings, click your username from the top right, then click "Settings".

On the screen that appears, you'll notice we have added a new section called "Notification Settings" which provides a matrix of options. By default all these options will be enabled - as per the current behaviour of AffinityLive, but using the On/Off buttons you can update your preferences and then click "Save" from the bottom to confirm.

In the image above, I have setup my preferences to be notified about diaries added by other staff when I am the manager of the object (Job, Issue.. but not companies or contacts).

I also care about diaries that are created against Issues, so even if I am the company manager for an issue, I wish to be notified (as per the single ON setting in the 3rd row).

Finally, if any staff I manage add diaries, I only want to be notified if those diaries are against Issues.

Exchange Integration now supports Exchange Web Services and Office365

Once we had access to an Office365 developer system we found we had to re-write a lot of code to get the calendar, contact and task integration with AffinityLive working smoothly.

After a week of testing we're happy to release this for all to try - remember though, this is our first field test, so it is only for the brave!

To connect your AffinityLive account to Exchange (2007 SP1 or later) / Office365, simply navigate to the Integrations screen in AffinityLive and start the connection.

For more instructions, please see this page on our help website.

Invite External Guests to Meetings (schedule diary)

As more users have taken advantage of the calendar integration (Microsoft Exchange and Google Apps) we've heard that not being able to send a meeting invite to the client when creating a meeting diary was quite tedious.

We've now introduced a "Send Invites" tickbox to the schedule area on the Add Diary screen so that if you are scheduling a diary and attentioning a contact, you have the option to send the meeting invitation to them.

If you do, ensure that the diary subject and body have something meaningful to the client contact!

Note that the meeting description will not include the contact details and links back to AffinityLive (as previously included) - as this could confuse the client!

Today is a very big day here at AffinityLive. It is the culmination of all the work our team has been putting into over the last couple of years. After months of development, then alpha testing and beta testing, today we're allowing our users to sign up for a subscription and go from being a beta tester or trial user to become a full AffinityLive client!

From today, we're making it easy to see where you are up to in your trial. If you're an administrator, when you next log in you'll see a bar across the top of AffinityLive which shows how much time you have remaining. This bar also has a handy link that allows you to sign up for a subscription whenever you're ready.

Sign up by Nov 20 & get a free t-shirt!

You can now sign up for a subscription to AffinityLive quickly and easily.

From the yellow bar, click on the green "Choose a plan" link.

Firstly, you'll be able to choose how many Professional (paid) users your company needs. We'll guess based on your current Professional users (which includes Administrators), but you can select to purchase more (or less if you plan on changing some accounts to be Collaborators or remove users).

We'll automatically suggest the best plan for you - Boutique, Team or Company - and you'll be able to choose whether you want Monthly or Annual billing. Annual billing has some big price advantages - see below for more info.

From there, just enter your credit card details - we accept Visa, Mastercard and American Express - and you'll be activated instantly. We'll also send you an invoice for your records. If you select the Annual billing plan, you can elect to pay on an invoice instead.

As a special bonus for our early users, if you sign up by November 20th, we'll send you one of our awesome and stylish AffinityLive t-shirts!

Month-to-month vs Annual Plans - what's the difference?

When you sign up for AffinityLive, you're able to select between month-to-month or an annual plan. To reward our users who commit to AffinityLive, we've structured our annual plans to provide a discount of up to 25% compared to our month-to-month plans.

The month to month plan gives you maximum flexibility - you can cancel at any time, and we just won't invoice you the next month. The annual plan means making an annual commitment, but if you change your mind in the first 30 days you're still able to get a refund thanks to our money back guarantee.

Since annual plan purchases are naturally larger transactions, we also offer our annual plan purchasers the option to pay on an invoice rather than via a credit card. Payments for these annual plan invoices can be made using checks or wire/bank transfers.

Training, Support and Feedback

As we've been talking to more of our users during this transition, we've heard from a few folks that they want to get some refresher training and help to become more familiar with AffinityLive.

To help out, we're running a series of special training sessions through our demo webinars. Sign up for free today for one of our regular sessions in your timezone.

We're excited to announce that we've reached a special milestone today - AffinityLive is leaving beta!

When we launched AffinityLive into beta in late February, we didn't know what would happen. Would people like our product? Would people even sign up for it and give it a try?

The answer came within a couple of hours of us flicking the switch and setting the site live. In the last 8 months, we've had companies from 86 countries sign up to use AffinityLive, including more than half a dozen hardy souls from Egypt who signed up during the middle of the "Arab spring"!

During the beta period, we've had a lot of feedback from users which has made a massive difference to the quality of AffinityLive. And throughout the period the rate of feedback and engagement has accelerated - aside from emailing us, users can also submit their own ideas and vote for other people's suggestions.

So, what does the transition from beta mean for you and your users?

In short, nothing changes. Your deployment address, your data and your user experience remain the same. However, the one thing that is changing is that during the month of November you're going to need to sign up for a plan to continue using AffinityLive.

New Pricing Plans

We also took the opportunity during the beta period to look at our pricing and plans. Initially, we thought that our users would value having a choice between the different modules in AffinityLive. We went into beta with four offerings: CRM for client data and sales only, a Work version with clients, projects and invoicing, and a Service version, with clients, support, retainers and invoicing. We also offered a combined "everything" version we called the Suite version.

As it turned out, most of you clients wanted our Suite version. In fact, well over 80% of all active users on AffinityLive are on the Suite version, making it by far the most dominant. We also received feedback that more than 90% of our users liked the concept of "free" and "paid" users depending on their role, but having multiple versions and multiple user levels was confusing.

So, we reviewed our pricing model to make it simpler and fairer. Now there is only one version of AffinityLive, which includes everything, and we've lowered the price of the paid Professional user tier from $38/month to prices starting at $29/month. We've also introduced some handy bundles which provide even better prices for Professional users, which we hope will make it even easier for companies to get started and bring all their key staff into AffinityLive.

In the next couple of weeks, we'll be sending out emails and using visual cues in AffinityLive to let you know how to select one of our new pricing plans. You'll be able to pay via Mastercard, Visa and American Express, and if you make an annual commitment you'll be able to pay on an invoice (handy if you need to get things approved by finance first). If you've got any questions in the mean time, please don't hesitate to contact us.

One more thing...

This week we're excited to announce another highly requested and pretty awesome feature - Quickbooks integration! 

Now you can integrate AffinityLive with Intuit's new Quickbooks Online and Intuit Anywhere product. For more information and instructions, check our our help page and get started with Quickbooks integration today.

The big news this week is the release of a new dashboard screen, and to make life easier, the ability to choose your home screen! Skip to the bottom if you want to review other minor updates.

New Dashboards - Manager Dashboard

If you are a client, project, sales or staff manager then this could be your new favourite screen :)  See below for an outline of the panels included in this new dashboard...Contract managers - please bear with us as we're making some changes to the contracts module in the next 4 weeks!

To access the new manager dashboard (and the admin dashboard), click the "Dashboard" button from the top left of AffinityLive.

• My Companies - There's 2 panels here. On the left you can review the companies that your staff interact with the most. The pie chart on the right is great for then comparing those high-touch clients with the ones your team have actually been working on, and how much revenue they're generating.

• My Prospects - clearly for the sales staff, this panel provides lots of handy filters to review your prospects by due date, created date, rating, value and activity (# of emails, calls, etc.)

• My Jobs - with a focus on budget tracking, this panel will help project managers see which jobs are running over budget, over time, or have a lot of hours remaining.

• Staff I manage - easily see how much time your staff have logged this week (or last week) and what percentage of that time was billable!

Home Screen Preferences? Yes Please!

Not a big fan of the To-Do List? Prefer to have Bookmarks as your home screen?

1. Click your username in the top right corner and select "Settings".
2. Use the "Default Home Screen" picklist to choose between To-do, Bookmarks, Schedule, Work and now Dashboard.
3. If you choose Dashboard then you should also select the default dashboard screen - either Admin or Manager, with an Individual one coming soon.

Note - We've actually pulled out the old manually configured dashboard in favour of a new set of role-based dashboards. If you are really missing something from the old dashboard, email us so we can help.

Minor Changes and Updates

• Adding Non-Google Apps users. Until this point, if your AffinityLive system was connected to Google Apps, you could not create a new user inside AffinityLive. Due to popular demand we have made it possible to create a normal AffinityLive user from the Users & Groups menu. This user will have no connection to your Google Apps domain.

• Defaulting billable diaries. As we are updating reporting interfaces it became evident that allowing users to create "billable" diaries against records which you cannot approve for billing could cause reporting inaccuracies. Therefore, billable time can only be recorded against Jobs, Components and Issues as of this update.

• Emails replies to Invoices. Some of our users noted that if a client replies to an invoice from AffinityLive, the reply isn't captured. We have changed the architecture so that the reply will be processed and directed to the email address that is configured under Admin > Accounts > Configuration

This (a little overdue) post highlights some recent features and improvements in AffinityLive.

Make A Suggestion - feedback system

As more businesses sign up to AffinityLive and begin to engage all of the features, we're seeing a good flow of feedback, suggestions and the occasional bug report. It was getting a little tough to manage, so to be fair on our support & product staff - and to those users submitting great feedback - we've setup a UserVoice forum to track ideas for improving AffinityLive.

Just click the "Make a suggestion" link from the top-right corner of the screen to load our new ideas forum. You should be automatically logged in via Google Apps, otherwise you can quickly create an account.

New Dashboard screen - Administrator

If you're an admin user, you might have noticed a new "Admin" button across the top toolbar. It's a new dashboard screen to give you a quick overview of user activity and setup progress. There will be more panels added to this soon, but if you have any suggestions, feel free to send them in via the "Questions or Feedback?" link in AffinityLive.

• Panels to see the types of Job, Issue and Prospect available, their usage and configuration progress.

• Activity chart to see the number of diaries (work & communication) tracked in AffinityLive over time.

• User Sync table to see which staff are logging in regularly and whether they have setup calendar, contact and email sync.

• AffinityLive Account panel to see version, licence and payment details.

Coming soon: The Manager Dashboard!

Simple Job Budgeting - Fixed Budget

When you create a job you'll find a new budget option called "Fixed Amount". This allows you to set the budget for the job without requiring components. Of course, you can still add components to help you break the work into pieces, but the component budgets don't affect the overall job budget. What you'll see when editing the workflow is a comparison between the job budget and the estimated budget from the components:

This is especially handy if you like to change around the components/tasks in a project without changing the overall budget!

Staff Rates

If you edit your user in AffinityLive, you can now select a default billable rate based on the rates configured in your system. However, not all records support the use of staff rates - yet. If you create a fixed budget job (as introduced above), you can specify a component to use staff rates instead of a single/specific rate. Additionally, any time logged against the job itself will use that staff members rate.

 Other Changes

• Quick link to add a "New Job" from the jobs navigation.

• Added a filter to the "Issue Invoice" screen so you can exclude uncompleted issues.
• Phone number fields in exports (spreadsheets) are now formatted as text - fixing an issue with some numbers have the "+" removed.
• Added a "Company" column to the Task export so you can easily sort tasks by company.
• Reverted a change on diary notifications which turned the diary note into a diary email (and removed the handy links back to AffinityLive).
• Added "Rate ID" to the list of fields you can update in a progression action for the Issues module.

Hi, Geoff here from San Francisco, where I'm flying the flag for AffinityLive at the big Techcrunch Disrupt conference. I've just come off the stage after a really busy Sunday where I was the MC for the Hackathon, which involved developers working through Saturday night and into Sunday morning on interesting startups, ideas and hacks. You can watch the video of the event here.

Tomorrow (Monday) AffinityLive will be featured in Startup Alley, where we'll be showing AffinityLive to the the tech elite of Silicon Valley at the industry's premier tech conference. If you're heading along to TechCrunch, come on over and say hi!

A few hours ago we released some new features for AffinityLive, summarised below. Some minor fixes were also included.

Tasks box now has a toggle to see complete tasks

Our UI team has pushed out another handy feature by popular demand: Seeing completed tasks for a company, prospect, issue or component, anywhere you see the purple tasks box. This includes any tasks that were completed before this feature was available!

Click the green tab to see tasks that have been completed, including the completion date and the time logged.

Preview an Invoice

This feature allows you to see what an emailed invoice looks like before you send it to the client. When creating the invoice, you can skip the options for sending an invoice, and simply save it. Now that you are looking at the invoice in AffinityLive, there is a new feature:

Click Send > Preview to have the invoice emailed only to you, giving you an exact preview of what the client would see. If you select Email, then the invoice will be emailed to the client.

Customise the footer text on invoices

This is the bottom section on an invoice where you might add payment instructions. You can't edit this section when creating an invoice - and until now you needed the AffinityLive support team to manually customise that text for you!

To configure this section, under the Admin tab, go to Accounts > Configuration > Custom Payment Methods. Here you will find a simple Rich Text Editor where you can enter rich text (different sizes, bullets, colours, etc.) which will appear at the bottom of all invoices emailed from AffinityLive.

 Minor Fixes

• Fix for re-ordering components on the workflow screen - for IE9.
• Fix for hours rounding down for issues, and rounding up for components!
• Improvement for Saasu invoices to use auto-numbering.
• Fix for reporting on a meeting that you didn't attend.