Jetpack CRM: Product Update #12 – Apr 2018

Published on April 30, 2018

Wow, it’s pretty crazy. We’ve been writing product updates for a full year now. How time flies when you’re having fun. Our aim with these product updates is to keep you up to date on the happenings with Jetpack CRM, what we’ve been adding and how we’re improving the product every day.

If you’ve not yet purchased any of our extensions, then our Entrepreneur’s Bundle is our most popular choice.

Core Updates

Contact List Migration

We’ve been hard at work migrating the contacts to a new database structure. This moves them out of a custom post type and into their own database table. This migrated a LOT of objects to the new structure and months of development work building the data into a much more flexible solution. This was released in version 2.70 and lays the foundations for a lot of cool things to come.

You may have already noticed some of these features sneaking in, such as the ability to add custom fields to your contacts list view (which wouldn’t have been possible, easily) in the older layout

“Website Link” is a custom field, which can now be shown in the list. Awesome 💖

Transactions Refinement (Sync Tools)

Our Sync tools (PayPal Sync, Woo Sync and others) have been storing transactions slightly differently than you’d expect. If you had a checkout cart with 10 items, then Jetpack CRM would add them as 10 separate transactions. This over-stated the number of transactions and also meant each one was logged with an ID like ‘woo-transaction-0, woo-transaction-1’.

This also meant that additional operations on those orders (such as refund a WooCommerce transaction) would not be possible with the data setup the way it was. So we’ve improved this. Transactions are logged only once and any items are stored against the transaction itself.

It makes it easier all around. You can’t edit the line items, but it paves the way for improved transaction reporting (and accurate transaction counts from now on).

System Email Improvements + Tracking

This is a big piece of work around the system emails coming out of Jetpack CRM. Prior to this addition, emails went out in a template and you’d have to edit the template to change it. It was also inflexible in controlling some of the “headers” information of the emails. It also tracks whether the emails have been opened 📧

If you want to see the history for a single contact, no problem. Just hop on over to the “Send Email” page and you’ll be shown their email history.

It also allows you to click into each email template as shown below and edit the following

  • Subject
  • From Name
  • From Email
  • Reply to
  • BCC to
  • Body (add your own logo, etc)

If there’s certain emails you want to stop from going out, you can turn them to Inactive and they won’t be sent anymore from the CRM (be careful when using that feature though). You may want all your CRM users to have Client Portal access but not send them an email about it. Simply disable the template and they won’t get sent.

We’ve also added the ability to Preview any of the templates, as well as send a test email (this sends to the site admin – so again make sure that’s you!).

This will show you the email as it looks to the recipient (although the links will be blank and placeholders) replaced by the real thing when the emails go out.

Customer Files – UI improvement

Another biggie here. We’ve been using customer files ourselves and hit this problem a few times. A file is uploaded with a title like ‘myfile.pdf’ and we cannot remember what this file is (without clicking into it and loading it). This gets hard to manage when there’s multiple files for a customer and knowing which is which.

So, we’ve improved this and added the ability to name the files and give them a description. For you people hankering for our coming soon “Client Portal Pro” we’ve also added a choice for whether to show the  file in a contacts client portal for them to download (or not).

Company View Page

We’ve also added a “Company View” page which gives you extra information and a nice design for your companies (if you’re using B2B mode).

It’s a perfect option if you’re managing companies, and want to be able to see who works at that company, and yes, you can add custom tabs here too.

Custom Tabs (Contacts and Companies)

We’ve added some filters into the contact view page to allow you to add additional tabs. Right now you have a tab for Contact Vitals and Socials (if social profiles are entered). You can however, add extra tabs through code. This is useful for integrations with other services, or displaying additional information about your contact (such as adding custom fields into the view page)

Developer Code Examples

We’ve also started to document some example code snippets for extending Jetpack CRM. There’s lots that you can do here (or a developer, if you aren’t technical).  You can check out the examples here.

Other Updates

Live Product Demo

We’ve started a commitment to provide you with Live product demos where you can join and see Jetpack CRM in action (including our extensions). This is a guided tour where you can ask us questions and learn more about our CRM.

April Change Log (Full)

The change Log for April is pretty jam packed.  Rather than continue to paste them in here (some of the points are technical), we are making a new area that’ll display these in a simple, clear no BS way for those who are interested.