New in Calxa this month will see Calxa Express users benefit from the biggest feature upgrade since 2010. However, there has been plenty happening for Calxa Premier customers as well. Read on for a recap here in case you missed something.
The Calxa Express Makeover
The big change for Express users included the introduction of two mega features:
- Account Trees
- Report Styles.
The feedback we have had from our customers since the release earlier this month has been very positive. Some love the ability to rearrange, group and summarise their accounts; some appreciate being able to report in their own corporate colours.
More than a few like both!
Reports and More Reports
Calxa is first and foremost a reporting app. At the end of the day, that’s why you use it. We are pretty sure we can claim to be the most flexible reporting tool on the market but, as you keep telling us, there is always more we can do.
So, here are details of our changes to some key reports.
Trial Balance
The Trial Balance report has now similar functionality to most of our other report templates. We have added Account Trees and Business Unit Trees. This means you can run a trial balance for:
- One or more business units within or across organisations;
- An organisation or a consolidated group.
So, when you generate the new Trial Balance Comparison report, it will show your business units or entities side by side.
Using Actuals
Over the past few weeks, we have been rolling out the ‘Using Actuals Up To’ option to almost all the remaining report and chart templates. What this means is, that it gives you clarity and flexibility over the data you’re presenting.
Notably, there are various options for reports like the comparison reports. Essentially, it can show either actuals or budgets. For example:
- Select ‘Using Actuals’ to the month before the start to show just budgets.
- Set ‘Using Actuals’ and the end date to the same month to show just actuals.
- Choose ‘Using Actuals’ to the report month and the end date to a time in the future like the end of the year. This will show a forecast of actuals + budgets.
Grouping and Organising Report Bundles & KPIs
At Calxa, we have many different customers. Some of you have very simple setups, some are much more complex. To better manage complexity and volume, we have added grouping and sorting to Report Bundles and KPIs recently.
Grouping and sorting of Metrics is not far away. One improvement Metrics did get a few weeks ago was the addition of a new calculation type: Average. This calculates the arithmetic mean over a date range when you use it in a report or KPI.
Performance Improvements
As we grow and demand on our servers increases, our team is always monitoring performance and has a challenge on its hands. Thankfully, some of our users kindly alert us of performance issues. Which in turn, helps us log these incidents to better understand the cause.
Recently we have made some enhancements.
- Improved scaling under high load. This one is a bit technical but basically our systems add extra resources when the load increases. In effect, you should not notice a diminished performance of the app. That is the theory. While our cloud platform has mostly worked well over the last few years, we did discover a couple of sub-systems that weren’t taking full advantage of the scaling. We have now remedied this to minimise those moments when everything seems slow.
- Better queuing of Daily Sync. We have reorganised how our daily syncs are managed. Essentially, we wanted to avoid the automated sync interfering with manual syncs run at the same time. Now, when you click on Sync Now, the process starts immediately, rather than waiting on other underlying tasks to finish
- New Document Editor. The updated document editor in the report bundles loads and saves much faster than the previous one. We believe this should improve the generation of your report bundles.
Overall, these improvements should make a difference to you in a few ways.
Usability Improvements
In our feedback collection, there are always some feature requests based on either ‘niggly’ behaviours within the app or suggested better ways to handle things. Many of these requests are logged by Calxa team members as they work in the platform. This month we have made some of these usability changes.
- We added drag and drop between KPI Formula Groups to make it easier to move your formulas.
- You can now pause your subscription at any time, for up to 12 months.
- New users can now sign up for Calxa through the Xero App Marketplace and have their Calxa subscription added to their Xero subscription each month. This will give you just one invoice for everything.
As always, keep the feedback coming. We need to know what works for you and what needs to be done better. Let us know and we’ll build the app you need!
To find out more about Calxa’s new features, go to our Product Info articles or check out our change log.