2020 Release Notes

A full summary of all PicSpotr releases in 2020.

October 11, 2020

  • New Features
  • Scheduling/Appointments: If you’re a Stripe or Square user, you can now accept payments for your sessions booked via the scheduler. This is limited to Stripe and Square; additional integrations will be added soon.
  • Activity Log: a new activity log has been added to your dashboard. The log will when an action item has been completed by your client.  Actions include things like the signing of a contract, payment of an invoice, or booking of a session/appointment. This is phase one of our alerts functionality; we’ll roll this out with push notifications in the mobile apps.
  • Resolved Defects
  • Square Payments: A number of Square integrations have not been working as intended.  This was a system error that has now been resolved.  Please update your Square integrations!!!
  • Enhancements
  • Navigation: We’ve added the left navigation labels back to make it easier to browse. Thanks for your feedback on this.

September 6, 2020

  • New Features
  • Calendar: We’ve integrated the calendar grid and the default list into one view. Now you can easily navigate your calendar month by month.
  • App Development: We’ve integrated the core backend that we needed to re-release a PicSpotr App.  We are targeting January 1, 2021 for our app release to Android and Apple Stores.
  • Resolved Defects
  • Square Payments: On August 27th, we noticed a defect that forced Square payments to process with our test credentials and not the configured account credentials.
  • Insights Update: When invoices/payments are deleted, the insights section will now be updated with the correct values.
  • Questionnaire Templates: After a questionnaire has used a template, the template will no longer lose it’s questions and some answers.  This primarily affected multiple choice (radio, select, checkbox) question types.

August 26, 2020

  • New Features
  • Payment Refunds: You can now issue full or partial refunds for credit card payments accepted via PicSpotr.  Payment refunds can be issued for integrations with PayPal, Stripe, Square and Authorize.net.  All refunds will be logged in your transaction history.
  • Taxes Summary: We’ve added a tax summary view in our Insights section. Just choose the dates and we’ll summarize the taxes you’ve collected during that period.
  • Monthly Revenue Insights: You can now view your month by month revenue insights on your dashboard.  You’ll view revenue, expenses, outstanding invoices, past due invoices as well as net profit.
  • Reschedule and Cancel Appointments: Your clients will now be able to reschedule and cancel their appointments booked via the scheduler.  For every appointment scheduled, a link will be added to the confirmation email (if you have customized the email, you’ll need to add the link).

August 10, 2020

  • New Features
  • Events, Leads & Messages Pagination: To improve performance and a better experience, we’ve implemented pagination for your leads, messages and events.
  • Resolved Defects
  • Profile Thumbnails: We’ve implemented a new tool to generate profile thumbnails.
  • Insights on Dashboard: The calculation of monthly percentage was displaying incorrectly.  
  • Invoices & Invoice Templates: We’ve resolved an error that wouldn’t allow you to delete an invoice line item after it’s been created.
  • Square Payments: We saw increased feedback in the last two weeks of payment failures for our customers using Square.  We’ve updated our integration and declines should now be limited.

August 03, 2020

  • New Features
  • Insights on the Dashboard: If you have set goals, you can now view your annual and monthly progress on your dashboard.
  • Questionnaires: We’ve added the ability to add sections to your questionnaires and questionnaire templates.
  • Resolved Defects
  • Invoices: We’ve fixed a bug where one of the “Save” buttons was not working when creating and editing invoices.
  • Appointments: When a client books an open appointment, a confirmation email is now sent to the photographer also.

July 26, 2020

  • New Features
  • Onboarding Tasks: We’re making it easier for you to get onboarded.  A new onboarding task list will appear at the top of your dashboard with steps to help you get up and running.  As tasks are completed, items will fall off of the list.
  • Revenue on Dashboard: We’ve been told that displaying the total revenue on the dashboard wasn’t useful. Per your requests, we’ve changed it to display the total revenue this year (based on what you indicate as your tax year).
  • Questionnaires: We’ve added drag and drop functionality so that you can easily re-order questions in both the questionnaire and questionnaire templates.
  • Resolved Defects
  • Workflows: Workflow tasks were not being displayed on the dashboard for some events even though they were being loaded.  Tasks were also being executed for some deleted events.  Both of these items have been resolved.
  • Client and Invoice Search: We’ve added a search button to simplify the client and invoice searches.
  • Calendar Sync: We’ve resolved an issue with our calendar time sync for Google Calendar.  You will have to grab a new calendar link from your dashboard.
  • Questionnaire: Resolved an issue that would not allow you to delete a question from a questionnaire after it was created.
  • Scheduling/Appointments: When you cancel an event that was originally created in the scheduler, it will open back up the time slot for someone else to reserve.

June 21, 2020

*** HAPPY FATHER’S DAY 2020 ***

  • New Features
  • Scheduling/Appointments: You can now edit your scheduling and appointment details.  When clients are reserving time slots, single day events will only show the times; recurring events will also show the calendar where clients can select a convenient date.
  • Contracts: You can now copy contract templates (including the complimentary templates we provide).
  • Email Templates: You can now change the e-mail template types.
  • Zoom Integration: We’ve integrated Zoom Video Conferencing into your calendar and appointments. Check out our blog for more details.
  • Resolved Defects
  • Outlook & Apple Calendar: We’ve resolved a defect that stopped Outlook online and Apple Calendar from displaying your synced events.
  • Invoice & Client Search: We’ve updated our invoice and client search functionality to return better results and to improve performance.  Enter your search keywords and tab off to initiate the search

May 17, 2020

  • New Features
  • Scheduling/Appointments: You can now manage your schedule with even more freedom and flexibility by creating open appointments and recurring appointments that your clients and potential clients can book.  This initial release features the ability to create single, multiple and recurring appointment blocks.  Each appointment block has a unique link that you can send to customers for them to reserve their time slots.  To start using scheduling, go to Templates > Appointments & Scheduling.  More to come including rescheduling, reservation limits and ability to link contracts and invoices templates.
  • Sign In/Sign Up with Google: You can now sign in or sign up with your Google/Gmail account. To convert your account, go to Settings > Google Account Settings.
  • Pre-sign New Contracts: You can now apply your signature automatically to new contracts.  Go to Settings > Contract Signature, sign your signature and hit Save.  Once your signature has been saved, it will automatically be applied to contracts going forward.
  • Resolved Defects
  • Contracts Update: We’ve fixed a bug that embedded the wrong links into emails sent to photographers and clients to countersign contracts.
  • Resolved a pain point that occurred when you try to create a contract and did not select an effective date, the site would hang without resolving itself.
  • Global Alert Messages: We’ve resolved a bug where confirmation alerts were not being displayed.

April 14, 2020

  • Workflows (Beta Update): We’ve had to make a significant change to our beta release of the workflow engine for technical reasons.  All photographers running workflows should re-apply workflows to the appropriate events.
  • Workflows Access: All of our spotters should now have access to our beta workflow engine.  Reach out to our team if you’d like a walkthrough of this new feature.  Go to Templates > Workflows to create your workflow templates first and then apply your workflows to your shoots from the event detail screen.
  • Referral Program: Our new referral program has now been released.  Go to Settings > Referral Dashboard for your unique referral link.  We’ll pay you USD $7.50 for each new customer referral that results in a conversion from a trial account to a paid PicSpotr account.  Payouts require a $25 minimum payout.
  • Fundy Integration: We’ve partnered with the fundy team and now allow photographers to import Fundy transactions.  To go Payments > Fundy Import (top right) where you can upload the transaction XML file.  We’ll create the invoice, apply the payment and mark the invoice paid on your behalf.
  • Pause Subscription: In response to COVID19, we’re allowing you to pause your subscription payments for up to 90 days.  When you’re subscription payments are un-paused, you will not be charged for the months your subscription was paused.  To pause your subscription, go to Settings > Pause Subscription.
  • Infrastructure Updates: We’ve made some updates to our server infrastructure to speed up the performance of PicSpotr and to make way for the build of our upcoming mobile app.
  • What’s next?
  • We’re in the process of working with the Setmore team to identify how we can build an integration with their scheduling functionality.  

March 8, 2020

  • Workflows (Beta): Congratulations to our Beta Testers who are now able to test our brand new automated workflow system.  The workflow system allows you to send emails, invoices, contracts and questionnaires to your clients when you want automatically.
  • Dashboard Highlights: We’ve introduced new highlights on your PicSpotr dashboard which includes your total revenue, revenue from the last 30 days, unread leads and upcoming events.
  • Weather: We’re reintroducing weather data.  When you sign in, you will now see your local weather forecast.  For your upcoming shoots & events, if you have a location entered with a postal or zip code, you’re weather information will also appear.

February 16, 2020

  • Multiple Lead Forms: We’ve updated lead forms and now allow you to have multiple forms that can be embedded on your website or linked to.  You can manage, setup and delete lead forms by going to Templates > Lead Forms. Setup as many forms as you’d like
  • Questionnaires update: Now you can set items in your questionnaires as required or optional.  We’ve made updates to the questionnaires page where your customers respond as well as updates to your response page
  • Workflows: We’ve continuing to implement minor changes to the backend to support the upcoming release of our workflow engine to beta users
  • Customer Profile: Fixed a bug that hid customer portal login information for leads
  • Performance: We’ve removed some javascript code and consolidated some files to improve performance
  • Text Editor: We’ve fixed a bug that caused formatting issues (bold, italic) for the text editor

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