Hello designer! In just a few weeks we will be launching indema 3.0 which is why you see a shiny new website!
This is our biggest update yet, and we wanted to share some of the things that are changing, and some more details into not only what changes happen on the platform but also the company changes as well. As we evolve to serve a bigger audience of designers, we strive on feedback and the user experiences we have at indema, and are constantly improving to ensure that we stay up to date, and ensure that every designer’s voice is heard!
So, let’s dig into the details.
// THE COMPANY
Some of the business operations will be changing and how we handle them. This comes with understanding how designers interact not only with our main website, but also our back-end platform that the designers primarily work in.
- indema no longer will be offering a trial period for new accounts starting July 1, 2022 (pre-release to 3.0)
- We have updated all of our terms, privacy policies as well as security to be more transparent with designers.
- New website to better fit our brand identity.
- New process for onboarding and how these will be performed
- New demo process (Webinar) and will be hosting 2 times per week (after 3.0 launch).
- New training structure once 3.0 is released. This will include a lower one-on-one hourly training rate, as well as free weekly training webinars for specific topics.
- New contact protocol for non-users and users of indema.
- Consolidation of some of our internal processes to make a more streamlined approach to designers.
- We’ve updated how we handle all of our feature requests and bug reporting.
Platform
- Our platform updates are what has changed the most, this was all changed and adjusted based on user-feedback and also user monitoring. We have a huge focus on efficiency – this was complicated to do initially with how robust indema is, but we’re pretty confident that with indema 3, we can hit a different level of efficiency.
// DASHBOARD
- New Feature: indema spotlight allows you to do everything from that single search bar. Add an invoice for a specific project. Edit a specific client? This allows you to be able to do everything without having to click on multiple spots, or know where to go.
- New Feature: My Tasks section – This new section allows you to see all tasks that are past due or becomming due soon. You can also manage the tasks right from the dashboard, or start the timer.
- New Feature: Projects Section- This new section on the dash allows you to see a summary of all your projects – keep track of hours you are using, and the progress.
- New Feature: Finance overview- While not “new”, it just updates the existing finance overview to show more than just income vs. expenses. You can see total outstanding invoices, invoice revenue, markup revenue, billed hours, and value of billed hours. Also on a daily, weekly, monthly and year-to-date view.
- New Feature: Overdue invoices – Be on top of your clients with a section for overdue invoices.
- New Feature: We’ve moved the settings, and account information to a top bar to make it easier to find. We’ve also added “feedback”, and “Report a bug” so you can do both without having to contact support.
// CONTACTS
- Contacts section is no longer in 3 different pages. One page shows your clients, leads and your vendors so that you dont have to click multiple times to switch between the three types of contacts.
- New Feature: Custom fields: You can now create custom fields for clients, leads and vendors in case there are data points you need to keep track of that indema doesnt do by default.
// TEAM
- We’ve updated the term “Employee List” with Team.
- We’ve moved the department and designation sections to the settings so it makes this menu section slimmer.
- We’ve officially retired “Holiday” calendar.
// WORK
- The work section is now slimmer, with removing the tasks, task board, time logs, and freeflow Gantt (this was moved to business menu).
// PROJECTS
- New Feature: Brand new dashboard design.
- New Feature: Performance Metrics: This shows how many hours you are tracking for the project. Total hours allocated, hours used, hours left, # hours over-allocated, % until threshold reached, and value of the hours you have already tracked.
- New Feature: Project Financials: This new section shows project budget, total invoices and current profit, as well as breaks this down below with showing project revenue, expenses, budget remaining, time billed, and total in PO’s.
- New Feature: Estimates and invoices no longer populate in a popup.
- New Feature: Added new field when creating projects called “Max Weekly Hours”. where if you and your client have an amount of hours that you can not (or should not) go over, you can keep track of this.
- New Feature: Visionboard: You can now officially attach visionboards to your projects, where you can collaborate with your clients.
- New Feature: Added credit notes to projects.
- New Feature: Added the ability to hide just 1 file or specific files from the client portal inside project files.
- We removed project summary from the new dashboard, but will still show for employee side and client side.
// FINANCE
- Our finance section is no more! We have completely made it where you have to do everything from either spotlight or within a project. Expenses was moved to Business page since this is still used for business expenses, not necesaarily just project expenses.
- Indema 3.1 release in a few weeks will add a new finance page that shows ALL of these in 1 page. We were not able to release this for 3.0 just yet.
// PRODUCTS
- Completely brand new product section re-designed to not have to scroll in a table.
- New Feature: Product status: Create product status’ so you can keep track of each product YOUR way.
- New Feature: Client status: When a client approves or declines a product, this will automatically indicate this
- New Feature: New user-interface for the product manual add, complete with the ability to add the product image right when you are manually adding the information, not after.
- New Feature: Filtering options: We’ve added a crazy amount of filtering options to include (but not limited to): show items RFQ was sent, show items that were ordered. Show items that have a ship date, show items that have a tracking number, show items that dont have a tracking number, or dont have a ship date. Total filters added: 23.
- New Feature: Images are 4 times the size on the product page.
- New Feature: You can now add decimals to QTY. Meaning if you need 1.84 QTY of something, you can add that and the calculation will reflect accordingly.
// OTHER CHANGES
- We’ve added a new bug reporting tool where you can screenshot, or take a video right within indema to report your bugs.
- We’ve re-structured the self-omboarding process to be a course instead of just a checklist onboarding.
- We’ve re-designed indema.co/gethelp which showcases some of the new things we are doing, as well as helpful articles and content.
- We’ve re-written all of our help articles to reflect all of these new changes and processes.
- We’ve re-recorded all of our how-to videos to reflect all of these new changes and processes.
// NOT SO GOOD NEWS
In short, we’ve struggled quite a bit by being extremely open with new features that we add. In the past, if the feature was super easy for us to implement, we would just do it. Unfortunately, this has somewhat trained some of our users that they can ask for specific things that pertain to their unique process, and then get a bit upset when we cant implement those features for them specifically. While the way we did things was never intended to say that we would customize the platform for your specific use-case, this has fallen short on our end to not set that expectation to everyone.
Moving forward, we will be glad to implement things, however, they would have to be added to our feedback tool (feedback.indema.co), so that it can be voted on. We will implement features that have the most votes AND is the least complex. Meaning, if there is a feature that has 100 votes, and another that has 150 votes to implement but is more complex than the 100 vote feature, we would implement the 100 vote feature first. We wnat indmea to work for everyone of course, but that’s not entirely realistic and we hope you understand our position on that.
What I can promise is that we will do everything in our power to implement as much as the community wants.
With these updates, our platform is easier to navigate making the learning curve lower than before, as well as performance enhancements to make indema a bit faster. We anticipate these changes to officially launch August 4, 2022 pending significant testing and ensuring there are no bugs when launching. As of July 15, we are on track for this release date.
All the best,
Timothy