TopLeft now offers Gantt charts for your ConnectWise or Autotask projects!

Gantt charts are a well-known visualization used by project managers to understand and plan the timing of tasks within a project.

Now in addition to Kanban boards for projects, TopLeft can represent projects using Gantt charts.

Read more about it in the knowledgebase.

Gantt charts are available to users with a Premium license. If you don't have a Premium license but want to try it, email help@topleft.team and we'd be happy to offer a no-charge Premium license for a few weeks.

Gantt is currently offered for indivdual projects. But we are planning a number of immediate improvements:

• managing tasks in multiple projects
• managing overall project timing
• showing projects and tasks by assigned team member to help you with resource planning
• charts in client portal

About a month ago we introduced a way to notify technicians by email when you assign them to a ticket. This worked in both the assignment forms and when dragging tickets between member swimlanes.

However in the case of dragging between member swimlanes to assign work, this meant the notification dialog always appeared after dropping a card into a swimlane. Not everyone needed this functionality.

Now there's a way to disable the notification dialog when assigning tickets by dragging and dropping. To disable this for a Kanban board, edit the board and disable the "Swimlane assignment notifications" option in the swimlane section. You can have the notification option disabled for some boards and enabled for others.

We know you and your team depend on TopLeft and need it to be reliable. So we've introduced two new things to help in this regard:

1. Stable release channel for those who prefer more stable features rather than the newest features as early as possible. Customers on this channel will receive updates every couple of weeks rather than as soon as a feature is available. To use this channel, email us at help@topleft.team.
2. Incident reporting system that pages an on-call engineer for operational problems, 24x7, whether detected automatically or by a customer report. You can report an operational problem at https://incident.topleft.team/. For example, there could be error responses, timeouts, or significantly delayed data sync that doesn't trigger our monitoring. If you observe this and there's not already an incident reported at https://status.topleft.team/, feel free to submit an incident.
   
   Please do not use this for technical support (i.e. system setup, usage questions, 2FA resets, bug reports)- for support, continue to message us at help@topleft.team.

Here's what we improved in the TopLeft app in April.

Improvements

• When you assign a member to a ticket or task, you can send them a notification email. This is possible whether you assign them via the Manage Resources dialog, Dispatch/Service Call dialog, or by dragging and dropping between member swimlanes.
• Our application upgrade pipeline no longer upgrades on every new version, to reduce the number of "Reload?" messages you see. Now the application is upgraded once a day.

Autotask

• You can use contracts from an account's parent account.

Bugfixes

• Fixed an issue that could cause a board to scroll up or down after reloading in the background.
• Fixed an issue in Autotask mode that could cause a time entry to be recorded at the wrong time, depending on certain time zone settings.
• Fixed an issue in Autotask that prevented checklist items from being completed.

In Autotask mode, when editing tickets, you can now select a contract from an account, or from the account's parent account as you can do in Autotask.

Previously you could only select contracts for the ticket's account only, not the parent account.

Now in TopLeft when you assign a technician to a ticket or task, you can notify them by email.

Notifications are available in all three places TopLeft can be used to assign someone to a ticket/task:

1. From the Manage Resources dialog
2. From the Dispatch/Service Call dialog
3. When dragging tickets between resource swimlanes, a prompt with the notification option is shown after dropping the ticket.

Here's what we improved in the TopLeft app in March.

Improvements

• Introduced the Premium plan for managers and the ability to choose licenses from different tiers.
• Highlight tickets whose logged hours are close to reaching their budget hours.

ConnectWise

• Ticket summaries are limited to 100 characters when set in TopLeft, matching the limit in ConnectWise.

Autotask

• You can specify which Autotask queues to fetch tickets from. TopLeft can ignore queues with large numbers of tickets such as RMM queues.
• For managing projects, view projects according to their company's Account Manager.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a problem that could slow down rendering of boards when showing ticket contacts on cards.
• No longer show Kanban boards in the Boards menu when a user doesn't have permission to view the board. Previously a user could navigate to a board but then be presented with an access denied error message.

Have you heard? TopLeft now supports a new licensing model which is a lot more flexible than our old model. 😀

Now each person who uses TopLeft can be assigned the best license tier for them. You don't have to use Standard or Basic for everyone on the team if that's not what works best for your organization.

There's also a new tier, Premium, which allows you to see work assigned to members who aren't licensed in TopLeft- great for managers and dispatchers who don't plan to have their team work out of TopLeft.

Check out the blog post for all the details, and email sales@topleft.team if you have any questions.

TopLeft can now help you identify tickets and projects whose number of logged hours are approaching their budget hours.

You can specify a threshold as a percentage of the budget. For example, using a threshold of 80% would show a warning on a 4 hour ticket when the logged hours were between 3.2 and 4.

When a ticket or project exceeds the warning threshold, the card appears with a warning label like this:

Then you and your teammates can pay close attention to the work to ensure it is completed before reaching the budget.

As always, when a ticket or project exceeds its budget, the hours are shown in red as an error.

Budget thresholds are set separately for each column on a board. To set a threshold, edit the board, then on the Columns tab click Advanced Options and look for these fields:

Autotask customers have new ways to organize project boards according to company account managers. This is useful for account managers to have a single view of the projects of all their companies.

There are two new features:

1. Project boards can use swimlanes according to each project's company's account manager. There will be a swimlane for each account manager, each swimlane showing the projects for that manager's companies.
2. Project boards can be filtered to show projects for only one specific account manager's companies.