Happy New Year from the Gazelle Team!
As is customary at the start of a new year, we have taken a moment to look back at our accomplishments of 2019. This past year we have launched our new calendar, attended our first (of many) international conferences, launched our brand new and improved 2.0 mobile app, and started hosting webinars for teaching and training piano technicians. It’s been quite a year!
As fun as it is to look back, we are eagerly looking forward to our upcoming projects! In October our team met to plan out our roadmap for 2020 and it has us pretty excited.
As we tackle each goal, we are committed to our phoilopshy of software development: we work on a feature until it’s rock solid and polished. This may sound intuitive but it’s actually somewhat rare to find in the software development world. Often, companies will push out a feature before it’s ready due to the pressures to move on to the next project. Sometimes a feature takes longer than we anticipated so we push back our goals to give time to do it right. The end result is a better product and experience for you.
With that in mind, below is our list of development goals, roughly in order of implementation.
Estimates (Formerly Condition Reports)
Condition Reports was the first feature developed on Gazelle. In fact, it was originally going to be the only feature Gazelle offered. But we quickly realized that a full CRM was also needed along with the calendar, reminders, and everything else you love about Gazelle.
Condition Reports help piano technicians sell their services and educate their clients about their piano without feeling like a pushy salesman. They allow your customers to self-educate at their leisure and often result in selling extra services.
It has been five years since we launched Condition Reports, and the feature needs to be updated. We have learned a lot about how you use the reports and our first project of 2020 will be rebuilding this feature and giving it a new name: Estimates.
QuickBooks Online Integration
Gazelle has an excellent invoicing feature that ties directly to pianos and automatically creates a service history for those pianos. It’s a great feature, but it is not a double entry ledger and accounting package.
Due to the complexities of accounting software, we have no plans to create an accounting feature in Gazelle. The cost to add and maintain this would require that we significantly increase the cost of Gazelle subscriptions. Many have requested the ability to integrate with Quickbooks Online for accounting purposes and we will be adding that feature this year.
2-way Calendar Sync
Currently, our Gazelle calendar includes the ability to export to third-party apps such as Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, and Outlook. However, is not possible to actually pull third-party calendars into Gazelle.
Starting with some of the main third-party calendar providers (Google, Apple, and Outlook) we hope to add importing third-party calendars this year. This new feature will allow you to pull these calendars into Gazelle and have them automatically block off time from your schedule.
Mobile Call Center
When we launched our new mobile app in November 2019 it came with a promise that we intended to make it possible to manage everything from the mobile app without needing to go through the web app.
We launched in November with a few of those features missing, including the call center. We plan to tackle this in 2020 and make it possible for you to see any scheduled phone calls you need to make, right on your phone.
Mobile Settings
Another feature missing from the mobile app is the ability to configure all your company and personal settings. We will be working to make these all accessible on the mobile app as well, with the exception of billing. Due to restrictions from the app stores we cannot allow you to change billing settings from inside the mobile app.
Migration to Our New Web Interface
One of our big goals we’ve had the last several years is to unify our web interface. You may have noticed that the various features in our web interface look and feel different from each other. This is because it has been developed in different stages over the past five years on different platforms.
This past year a lot of our development time has been spent laying a foundation behind the scenes to unify these platforms. The end result will be a web interface that has more robust features and will look and feel much more consistent.
Here’s To a New Decade 🥂
The back-end changes we’ve made the past few years have gotten us to this point where we are poised to start adding these long-awaided features more quickly. We are excited to get started!
We say it often, but it bears repeating: we have the best customers! We love working with you, appreciate all the feedback you’ve offered, and can’t wait to spend the next decade working with you to grow your business!
