For Autotask customers, you can select the types of notes you see in a ticket's Show Notes dialog.

To view and change the settings, administrators can click Admin in the main menu, then Note Options.

This can help your team stay focused on the most important notes. The setting applies to all users.

When someone new joins your team and needs to begin using TopLeft, now it's much easier to invite them.

TopLeft can send a message such as this one:

Administrators can invite users from the brand-new Settings page. In the main menu, click Admin, then click Invite Users. Then select the users you want to invite.

Full instructions are in the knowledgebase.

For ConnectWise 2020.4 and later, TopLeft requires two additional security role permissions for entering time.

These permissions need to be granted on the security role of the TopLeft API member as well as the security roles used by members who use member API keys- for example, the "Engineer" security role.

Please grant these permissions from the Finance section, Billing View Time record:

• Edit: all
• Inquire: all

It should look like this:

If these permissions aren't granted, users entering time in TopLeft will see the error "You do not have security permission to perform this action."

Autotask users can now show a ticket's contract on the card.

To enable this option, administrators can edit a Kanban board and in the General tab, select the Contract option.

You can now drag cards diagonally on certain types of swimlane boards. Boards that previously supported dragging between swimlanes, that is, resource swimlanes and Autotask queue swimlanes, now support dragging between swimlanes and columns at the same time. Depending on the type of board, you may see a prompt for more information when you drop the card.

In the not-too-distant future we plan to add support for dragging on other types of swimlanes.

Want a demo of these improvements? Join us TODAY, March 3, for the webinar.

Here's a summary of the improvements we've made to TopLeft in January and February.

Training and teaching

• Regular drop-in training sessions - Free group training twice/week
• Completed Ticket Challenge - Does your team have too many tickets? This new 3-week bootcamp teaches you a plan to finish work before starting new work.

Improvements

• Email contacts from time entry and notes - keep your contacts up-to-date when making time entries and notes in TopLeft
• Timers for time entry - you love them in your PSA and now they're available in TopLeft
• WIP limits for individual techs and swimlanes - identify the bottlenecks in your team and ensure work stays balanced
• Show only cards with warnings or errors - make it easy to see only the problem tickets, so you can manage by exception
• Board metrics for custom fields/UDFs - report on numeric custom fields
• Keyboard shortcuts for board metrics - switch between simple and detailed views of the board with just one keyboard shortcut
• Worldwide regions - TopLeft is closer to you with four regions worldwide
• New status page - Service updates and automatic availability reporting
• In the column edit function, some options were moved to a dialog to make the main options easier to use.
• Added an Open in ConnectWise/Open in Autotask option to card context menus, for easier access on some touch interfaces and for customers who have customized the card title link URLs.

ConnectWise mode

• Show next step on ConnectWise sales opportunities - stay on top of your sales activities, including highlighting when activities are overdue

Autotask mode

• Improved the ticket and task time entry dialog so by default the work role is set to the technician's role on the ticket, not the technician's own default role.
• RMM notes are shown in the ticket Notes dialog. Previously RMM notes were not shown.

Bug fixes

• Fixed a problem in Autotask mode that prevented ticket notes from being synced when the once-per-day sync option was enabled.
• Fixed a problem displaying time entries in ConnectWise mode when a time entry had a blank end time.

Busy technicians can now send messages to a ticket's contact when making a time entry or note, in both Autotask and ConnectWise. They no longer need to return to the PSA software to send the time entry or note to the contact.

Emails to contacts was previously only available for time entries (not notes) in ConnectWise, and nothing was available in Autotask, due to restrictions in the ConnectWise and Autotask APIs.

ConnectWise customers: to enable this feature, you'll need to grant the TopLeft API member's security role the "Company/Contact inquire level" permission. Full instructions for security role setup are in the Knowledgebase.

Autotask customers: TopLeft doesn't need new permissions for this, but if you experience any trouble please review the API security settings in the Knowledgebase.

Administrators may want to customize the format of the messages sent to contacts. If you chose not to do this, messages to contacts will have a very basic format and responses will be sent back to the technician who wrote the note or time entry. But there are a lot of options for configuring message subjects, reply-to headers, and HTML and plain text templates. The template formats support the most important fields, using the same formatting as your PSA, to make it as easy as possible to duplicate the templates used in your PSA.

For full instructions on configuring this, choose your PSA: ConnectWise docs or Autotask docs.

Messages are sent from TopLeft's email service using a "From" address at topleft.team, so you don't need to worry about configuring any email servers or DNS settings on your domain. If you've configured the "Reply-to" header, replies from contacts will be sent back to your ConnectWise or Autotask connector and result in a new ticket note. If you haven't configured the header, responses from the contact will be sent back to the technician's mailbox.

Try it out! And send any questions or problems to help@topleft.team.

Here by popular request, timers for your tickets! We know technicians in both ConnectWise and Autotask frequently use the timer/stopwatch feature from the respective PSAs, and now you can do the same practice in Kanban.

You can start timers on cards and then transfer the time to the time entry dialog, or start open the dialog first and use the timer there- it's up to you.

Documentation is in the Knowledgebase, as always.

TopLeft is now offering regular drop-in training sessions twice per week. We'll show how to use and configure the software, how to improve service and project practices, demo new features, and answer questions.

The recurring sessions are:

• Tuesday 8:30-9:30 AM Pacific Standard Time (Vancouver)
• Wednesday 3-4 PM Pacific Standard Time (Vancouver)

Details are on our website: https://www.topleft.team/training-sessions/

You can now set Work In Progress (WIP) limits that apply to each technician on your team, instead of the Kanban board as a whole. You can also apply the limits to projects, priorities, boards or queues, or any type of swimlane.

This helps you ensure work stays evenly distributed in your team. You could always apply a limit to the Kanban board as a whole, indicating when your whole team had exceeded the limit in a column. But this wouldn't help you catch cases where one technician had too much WIP but other technicians had less WIP and so it all averaged out.

Now you can more easily see when just one of your technicians has too much WIP- because even a single technician with too much WIP can slow down your team's overall velocity.

This option also calculates the whole-board WIP limit automatically by setting the board limit to (per-swimlane limit) * (# of swimlanes). This means you don't need to adjust the board WIP limit when you change the number of people on your team.

To make column WIP limits apply to swimlanes instead of the whole board, on the board edit page on the General tab, just enable the "WIP limits per swimlane" option.