Providing insight into our product roadmap and, subsequently, the projects being worked on in our six-week cycles.
We’ve been working hard and are excited to share a summary of the projects completed during Cycles Three and Four, as well as what we’re currently focusing on in Cycle Five.
Cycle Three In Review
In Cycle Three, we delivered several key updates designed to improve user experience and progress on some longstanding projects.
- Enhancing Ledger Accuracy and Transaction Exports:
We released changes to the transaction ledger and its export feature to address potential inconsistencies and ensure accuracy.
- Improving the Bank Account Synchronization tool: We completed a major UX review of the Bank Account Synchronization tool for Fiscal Hosts. This update makes the tool more accessible and we plan to gradually make this available to more organizations. If you are based in the US and would like to try this feature please get in touch with our team.
- Introducing Dedicated Funds & Grants: We’ve elevated Funds & Grants to “first-class citizens” on the Platform. This means Fiscal Hosts can now see Funds separately from their hosted Collectives with optimized user interfaces for grant submissions. While there’s still more work to refine this functionality, we’re proud to have created a clear and distinct feature for our users.
- Streamlining Vendor Creation: We introduced the ability to create vendors directly within the new expense submission flow, this is currently available to Fiscal Host Admins.
- Enhancing Expense Modification: We made progress on a new, more robust way to modify expenses within the Dashboard. Giving users better control over who can change what and when, with an improved user experience and a clear history of changes documented in the expense comments. This feature is still in testing as we collect feedback and prepare for a full release with the new expense submission flow.
While we made significant progress on these projects, we did not get a chance to start our Dashboard sidebar reorganization campaign (which will span numerous projects and cycles releasing gradual sensible changes in order to minimize disruption to end users) or the machine-learning project for automatic expense categorization. We anticipate tackling those in future cycles.
Cycle Four In Review
During Cycle Four, we began to focus on laying the groundwork for our new platform pricing model. We’ve been doing a lot of preparatory work in the background and finally some of the pieces became clear enough for implementation.
- New Onboarding Experience: To help new users get started faster, we released an updated onboarding process that lets them create their personal and organization accounts in a single, streamlined operation.
- Organization Overview Page: This has been noticeably missing for a long time. Now that we are working to reach and onboard new customers this became more imperative.
- Onboarding Checklist: New organization admins are now greeted with an onboarding checklist on their new organization overview page. This tool guides them through the essential steps to get started with the Platform.
- European Bank Account Sync: Following the successful redesign of the Bank Account Sync, we integrated with a European service provider. This new integration allows our EU and UK customers to connect their bank accounts and easily reconcile incoming transactions on the Platform. If you would like to give this feature a spin please reach out to our support team.
- Pay Settlements with Credit Card: Platform Settlements have been integrated with Stripe. Enabling payments to be collected with Credit/Debit cards.
Cycle Five Overview
As we move through Cycle Five, our main priority is to deliver a complete onboarding experience for new organizations, a critical step toward a new pricing model that will help us achieve financial sustainability.
This initiative involves several moving parts:
- Building new marketing pages aimed at organizations and Fiscal Hosts. Here’s a little sneak peek.
- Creating the infrastructure to support our new pricing model.
- Designing a pricing page that clearly communicates our new plans for organizations.
- Developing a Dashboard Billing tool that allows organizations to review and manage their platform billing.
- Building an automated billing system that can generate payment requests, send customer notifications, and enable payments by credit card and bank transfers.
Our new pricing tiers provide customers with access to increasingly advanced Platform features. We are working on a new way to communicate when a feature is disabled, highlighting its value and guiding users on how they can upgrade to enable it.
This cycle’s main goal is to bring all these pieces together, from the marketing pages to the pricing page, and all the way through to the onboarding forms and payment systems.
We have personally been in contact with all Organizations/Fiscal Hosts that are impacted by these pricing model changes. If for some reason you think you are affected by this and haven’t heard from our team please get in touch.
In the background, we continue to tackle remaining improvements in the new expense submission flow and the related modify expense experience. These have been a long time coming, and we’re committed to releasing them to everyone this cycle. If you’d like to try out the new expense flow before it’s release, you can learn more here.
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We are optimistic about the changes and look forward to sharing more in the coming weeks. Do you have any questions about these updates or our plans for the current cycle?