Category: Product News

Insightly customers are thrilled by the productivity increases they experience after connecting QuickBooks Online to Insightly. With easy access to the status of invoices right in your CRM, you can minimize delays as you move through your sales pipelines and business workflows. Some customers have told us that they don’t want everyone in their companies to have access to customer accounting information, so we’ve added a setting that you can use to limit which of your Insightly users can see the QuickBooks tab and information in Insightly.

From the Insightly-Quickbooks Online integration page, your Insightly administrators can grant permission to everyone on your account or only select teams or individuals. From then on, only the designated users will have permission to view the QBO financial information in Insightly, keeping financial information more private while still giving access to those who need it.

Improving existing features is just as important to us here at Insightly as building new ones, so feel free to chime in on our Product Feedback & Requests forum by submitting your suggestions or voting for existing ones. We appreciate our customers. And we’re listening.

As we add more features to our iOS and Android apps, we’re very pleased to see more Insightly customers accessing their CRM on mobile. Now, we’re announcing another big step toward bringing all the Insightly features you love to your smartphones and tablets: Your Insightly calendar and events are available on the go!

With access to your Insightly calendar in our mobile apps, you can quickly check contact details before a meeting, dial in to conference calls, and view a day’s agenda in a calendar view.

The Mobile Calendar

To view the calendar, select the calendar icon from the menu on the left. Your Insightly mobile calendar displays all of your own tasks and events. Days with scheduled events will display one dot for a single event and two dots for multiple events.

From the calendar, you can:

• Swipe down from the top to switch between monthly and weekly views.
• Swipe the calendar left or right to move to the previous or next week or month.
• Click the + symbol to add a new event.
• Click the search icon to search through your events.
• Touch a date to view the tasks and events for that day.

We lists your tasks at the top of the daily agenda, then your all-day events, and then events by time. Tasks will be listed on the calendar by due date, if you’ve included one, or on the start date. (If a task has neither date, it won’t appear in the calendar.) Swipe down on the agenda to refresh it.

Events

You can add events directly from the calendar view or from the Related section of other records. When you create an event from the mobile app, we’ll display the time zone to remind you that the app is using your phone’s current time zone, not the time zone from your Insightly settings.

When viewing a contact or other records, you’ll find upcoming linked events on the Related tab. Click “Load past events” to view events that have already occurred.

When you tap an event to view it, you’ll see email and phone icons. If your event includes a phone number in the location field, such as a conference call number, you can click the phone icon to dial in. The email icon will allow you to email contacts who are linked to the event.

The latest version of Insightly mobile (3.6.1) has been released for Android and submitted to Apple for approval, so the iOS update will be available on the App Store soon.
(Updated 6/24/2015: The iOS app is now available for download!)
 

If you haven’t tried the apps, download them now and access Insightly anywhere you go!

We’re excited to announce a new resource called Insightly Support where you can connect with your peers to get answers fast. Insightly Support is made up of a community of Insightly customers and team members and an extensive Knowledge Base of articles by Insightly so you can:

• Ask questions about Insightly, your industry, or business in general
• Share your Insightly knowledge and best practices with customers looking for answers
• Cast a vote on feature requests you like
• Access tons of articles to learn about Insightly features
• Watch how-to videos

The Insightly Support Homepage

You can use the the search bar at Insightly Support to quickly find answers in the Knowledge Base and Community at the same time. Tip: Use broad keywords like “task reminder” instead of questions like “How do I set up a reminder for a task” for the best search results.

Access the Community

When you’re ready to ask the community a question, click the talk bubbles, then click the “+ New Post” button and ask away! If it’s your first time visiting Insightly Support, you’ll need to create an account using the same email you use to log in to Insightly. Our Getting around the Insightly Community post walks you through all the steps.

When someone answers your post, you can continue the conversation by commenting at the bottom of the thread. Sometimes there’s no better way to learn the ins-and-outs than from your peers. Remember to return the favor by sharing your Insightly tips and best practices with other customers, too!
 
Provide Product Feedback

We’re also counting on you to share your honest product feedback and use your votes to tell us about the feature requests that are important to you. This input helps us understand your business needs and shape the future of Insightly.
 
 
Whether you’re new to Insightly or an experienced user, you’ll find the biggest support team ever in Insightly Support. Ready to join our community? Access Insightly Support, today.

If you want to see more, take a video tour of Insightly Support.

Lead management is an important part of any sales process, and our new Leads record allows you to separate pre-qualified leads from your qualified sales opportunities and contacts. A lead is the best way to manage information about someone who might be interested in your products or services but hasn’t yet been qualified by your team.

After you determine a lead is qualified, you can convert it and have Insightly automatically create a sales opportunity with a linked contact and organization. By adding these prospects to Insightly’s Leads tab first, you can keep the pre-qualification process better organized and save space on your account, since related contacts and organizations are not created until the lead is converted.

The Leads tab will appear in the left navigation panel, and your administrator can enable or disable the tab from the System Settings > Lead Management page.

Leads include the functions that you already use for contacts, such as importing, Web to Lead forms, emailing from Insightly, activity sets, filtering, and custom fields. And they also include unique fields to record the lead’s Industry, Number of Employees, and Lead Rating—a way to score your leads to rank the more likely and less likely prospects.

When you’ve confirmed a lead is qualified, you can quickly create a related opportunity, contact, and organization all in one step by choosing the convert option from the lead’s Action menu. By converting the lead, you’ve now created three new records in Insightly that your sales team can use to pursue the new business.

Leads can help you manage the early stages of your sales funnel with ease and create qualified opportunities to pass on to your sales team for more closed sales. We’re very pleased to bring this new tool to our customers.

See our support article Setting up and using Leads for full details on setting up this new Insightly feature for your business!

We’ve just shipped a new version of Insightly with some great improvements to custom fields.
 

New Custom Field Types

To start we’ve added four new custom field types you can choose from when creating new custom fields:

• A checkbox field type
• A number field type
• A URL / Hyperlink field type
• A Multi-line text field.

New setting options for each custom field

We also added a couple of additional settings for each custom field.

When you create a new custom field you can choose to make it invisible in the user interface. This is useful for custom fields that represent lookup values to other systems for reference, but are of no interest to your users. You may want to hide those values from showing in the Insightly user interface on web and mobile to reduce clutter if those fields have no meaning to your users.

The second option we have added is the ability to make custom fields read only in the Insightly user interface on web and mobile. If you add records to Insightly with custom fields via our API, and you don’t want some of those custom field values changed by your users because they are important and should not be altered, you can set this flag and these fields will only be updatable via the API.

 

Default Values for All Custom Field Types

You can now set a default values for all custom fields you create including text fields, number fields, checkbox fields, date fields, and dropdown option fields. Adding a default value to a field that already exists will not populate existing records with that field.

 

New Custom Field Grouping Functionality

For those customers that have a lot of custom fields, we now allow for you to place those custom fields into groups to make organization of them easier on the screen. You can drag custom fields between groups and change the order of fields within a group, and you can also change the ordering of the groups themselves on the page. This allows for a lot of flexibility in designing the layouts of your detail pages for individual contacts, organizations, opportunities, projects, and leads.

We’ve just released a new version of Insightly with dramatically improved filtering capability for building lists. The new filters apply to lists of contacts, organizations, opportunities, projects and leads.
 

New Filter Operators

Text fields now have the following operators: Equals, Not equal to, Less than, Greater than, Less or equal, Greater or equal, Contains, Does not contain, Starts with, Is Empty, Is Not Empty.

Drop down fields now allow you to choose one of the option values along with operators: Equals, Not equal to, Is Empty, Is Not Empty.

Date fields now allow for: Equals, Not equal to, Less than, Greater than, Less or equal, Greater or equal, Is Empty, Is Not Empty.
 

Relative Dates in Filters

One of the biggest features we’re excited about is what we are calling ‘relative dates’ in filters. When you’re filtering by a date field, instead of picking a specific date to filter by, you can now type in a relative date value like ‘this week’, ‘next week’, ‘last month’, ‘3 months ago’, ‘last quarter’, ‘next 90 days’, ‘last year’ – and Insightly will determine what date range that represents each time you use that filter.

This means for example you don’t have to create a new filter each new week if you want to look at what contacts were created in the last week, you just type in ‘last week’ as the filter value, and each time you use that filter it will show you what was created in the last week, as shown below. We think that is a super powerful feature for date filtering and we know customers who do a lot of date filtering are going to love it.

 
Relative date support includes the following possible options:

Relative Date Value	Range
YESTERDAY	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the day before the current day and continues for 24 hours.
TODAY	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the current day and continues for 24 hours.
TOMORROW	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the day after the current day and continues for 24 hours.
LAST WEEK	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the week before the current week and continues for seven days.
THIS WEEK	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the current week and continues for seven days.
NEXT WEEK	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the week after the current week and continues for seven days.
LAST n WEEKS	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the week that started n weeks before the current week, and continues up to 11:59 p.m on the last day of the week before the current week.
NEXT n WEEKS	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the week after the current week and continues for n times seven days.
n WEEKS AGO	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the week that started n weeks before the start of the current week and continues for seven days.
LAST MONTH	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the month before the current month and continues for all the days of that month.
THIS MONTH	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the current month and continues for all the days of that month.
NEXT n MONTHS	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the month after the current month and continues until the end of the nth month.
LAST n MONTHS	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the month that started n months before the current month and continues up to 11:59 p.m on the last day of the month before the current month.
n MONTHS AGO	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the month that started n months before the start of the current month and continues for all the days of that month.
NEXT MONTH	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the month after the current month and continues for all the days of that month.
LAST 90 DAYS	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. 90 days before the current day and continues up to the current second. (The range includes today.)
NEXT 90 DAYS	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the day after the current day and continues for 90 days. (The range does not include today.)
LAST n DAYS	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. n days before the current day and continues up to the current second. (The range includes today. Using this date value creates a list including records from n + 1 days ago up to the current day.)
NEXT n DAYS	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the next day and continues for the next n days. (The range does not include today.)
n DAYS AGO	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the day n days before the current day and continues for 24 hours. (The range does not include today.)
LAST QUARTER	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the calendar quarter before the current calendar quarter and continues to the end of that quarter.
THIS QUARTER	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the current calendar quarter and continues to the end of the quarter.
NEXT QUARTER	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the calendar quarter after the current calendar quarter and continues to the end of that quarter.
LAST n QUARTERS	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the calendar quarter n quarters ago and continues to the end of the calendar quarter before the current quarter. (The range does not include the current quarter.)
NEXT n QUARTERS	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the calendar quarter after the current quarter and continues to the end of the calendar quarter n quarters in the future. (The range does not include the current quarter.)
n QUARTERS AGO	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the calendar quarter n quarters before the current calendar quarter and continues to the end of that quarter.
LAST YEAR	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on January 1 of the year before the current year and continues through the end of December 31 of that year.
THIS YEAR	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on January 1 of the current year and continues through the end of December 31 of the current year.
NEXT YEAR	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on January 1 of the year after the current year and continues through the end of December 31 of that year.
n YEARS AGO	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on January 1 of the calendar year n years before the current calendar year and continues through the end of December 31 of that year.
LAST n YEARS	Starts at 12:00:00 am on January 1, n+1 years ago. The range ends on December 31 of the year before the current year.
NEXT n YEARS	Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on January 1 of the year after the current year and continues through the end of December 31 of the nth year.

We’re very excited that Optimize Social Media, an Insightly and Office 365 customer, was recently highlighted by Microsoft to illustrate how Insightly’s integration with Outlook 2013 can help make big improvements to running a business.

Optimize Social Media educates companies on social media and manages their social networks so that they can focus on their day-to-day business. They moved from desktop versions of Office to Microsoft Office 365 for freedom of access and better software management. When they needed a way to organize and maintain their accounts and projects, Jessica Barone, their IT Director, looked into Insightly. Optimize found that the integration between Outlook 2013 and Insightly allows them to have email and CRM in one place, a CRM calendar that’s synced with Outlook, and mobile access to the information they need when they need it.

As Jon Greene, President of Optimize Social Media says, “Social media is a tough thing to sell to people. Insightly and Office 365 really help you do that by managing all the data and getting it back to the customer and being able to show them what we’re doing so they can concentrate on their business. So it helps us grow, and grow, and grow.”

Check out Microsoft’s short, information-packed video to learn how a growing company is utilizing this valuable Office 365 integration to help them move forward on the path to success.

If you’re an Office 365 customer who doesn’t know about 365 Ninja yet, you’re missing out on some great tips and tutorials that will help you become an Office 365 expert. If you’re an Outlook 2013/Office 365 customer who hasn’t tried the Insightly app for Outlook 2013, Ninja’s recent post on integrated Office 365 tools could convince you to give it a try.
 
365 Ninja offers the only free daily newsletter for Office 365 users, sharing their best tips and tricks, how-to videos, downloads, freebies, and more. They can help you make the most of your Office 365 solution, whether you’re an IT pro, a power user, or a true beginner.
 
365 Ninja included Insightly, along with BetterCloud and Docusign, in their article 3 productivity & security tools that make Office 365 even better, where they note that “Microsoft has opened up their business in a significant way” by allowing developers like Insightly’s product team to build tools to extend the reach and capabilities of Office 365. With a great summary and an even better short video, 365 Ninja has captured the benefits of adding Insightly’s app to Outlook 2013.

Take a look at the article and let 365 Ninja help you master Office 365 for free.

In our constant drive to make your CRM experience even better with new features and improvements, Insightly is updating our mobile apps with three new features that will make your days on the road easier. Our release for Android is already available, and the iOS update for iPhone and iPad users will be coming to you by the end of the month.
 

Business Card Scanner

With our new business card scanner, you can snap a photo of a colleague’s business card to have Insightly automatically create a contact record in your CRM for you. This new feature is available on all paid Insightly accounts.

On the Contacts screen, Insightly users with a paid account or on a 14-day trial will see a new camera icon. Tap the icon to begin the business card scanning process. Insightly will let you know how many cards you can scan this month and guide you through the process of taking one or more photos.

You can then add tags, background information, and visibility permissions for the new contacts we’ll create.

Once you’ve saved your card image. we’ll follow up with an email to let you know when the contact has been created or to let you know if there was a problem, such as a blurry image.

You can scan a batch of up to ten cards at a time, and you are limited to a certain number of cards per calendar month according to your subscription plan:
 

Plan:	Basic (and older paid plans)	Plus	Professional	Enterprise
Limit:	5 per user/mo	15 per user/mo	25 per user/mo	50 per user/mo

 
If you’re on a paid plan, open that mobile app, grab one of those business cards that’s been sitting on your desk, and give the new business card scanner a try!
 

Mobile Tags

Regular users of our mobile apps might have noticed that tags are included with our business card scanner. This is because we’ve added them to the app across the board. When you’re editing a record, you’ll now be able to add tags! This was another item high on our customer request list, and our team is happy to bring mobile tagging to you.

 

The Insightly Widget

If you’re a widget user, you know the benefit of having information readily available on your mobile device. Now, you can have your Insightly task list displayed right on your Android Home screen or iOS Notification Center. You can view your tasks, open the Insightly app, and add new tasks right from the Insightly widget. And iOS users can mark tasks complete and jump to the Contacts or Organizations screen in the Insightly app.

Every device has a different way of installing widgets, so check your product’s documentation or do a quick Internet search to learn how to get Insightly on your Android Home screen or on your iOS Notification Center.

 

If you haven’t tried the apps, download them now!

 
Here is the full list of changes in the released version of the Android app (v3.4.1). The iOS update is making its way through the App Store and will be available soon!
(Update (4/29/2015): The iOS update is now available.)

• Add a contact by scanning the business card (paid users only)
• Add, edit, and delete tags
• Add an attachment while adding a comment
• New “My” filters for Opportunities and Projects
• Insightly Task Widget with the list of My Open Tasks
• Bug fixes, usability and performance improvements