Productive Updates May: Budget Templates, Automations, Time Off

As summer approaches, our latest features are ready to prepare you for vacation season.

This May, we’ve introduced several updates designed to make your work more efficient. From budget templates to enhanced Permission sets, we’ve made it easier to manage projects and collaborate with clients. Plus, our latest Automations and Time off improvements will save you loads of time.

Creating a budget is the key to running any project, and the process is now more accessible than ever. With budget templates, you can create and save templates, and each time you need a new budget, you can start from a template.

This is useful if you have budgets that are standardized for the type of service that you offer, for a specific type of client, or any other repeating type of budget you can think of.

To create a budget template, navigate to the Template Center, and from there, you can duplicate an existing budget, or you can create one from scratch.

To learn more about Budget templates, check out this article.

With Permission sets, you can create custom permissions that allow you to tailor what each teammate will have access to in Productive. Now, you can do the same with clients should you invite them to Productive.

To create a permission set, navigate to Settings > Permission sets and select Client as the base permission set.

Learn more about Permission sets here.

One more thing: Bookings and Resourcing are now available to customize in Permission sets.

Automations are enhanced according to your feedback, and this month, we’ve added two significant updates.

You can now set up an Automation that is triggered when an invoice is created, updated, or deleted. For example, you can now get notified when an invoice is sent to a particular client or copied to an accounting tool.

We’ve also added a new feature that lets you use relative “people” values (like a project manager or automation creator) in the assignee, person, or subscriber fields.

This means you can now create more personalized Automations. For example, you can create an automation that notifies the project manager if a task assignee deletes a task, and now the field will respond to whoever is the actual project manager for the project in question.

Also, to improve clarity, a teammate will now receive a notification if they were assigned or mentioned via an Automation.

Check out this article for more information.

Let’s start with the obvious: We’ve improved the design for the time off request page; it’s easier to select the dates, and you can see the time off that has already been booked and the non-working days.

Next, you can also upload an attachment with your time off request – perfect if you require specific documentation for booking time off (e.g., medical records for medical leave).

Finally, you can hide the bookings that don’t match your filters – previously, they have been shown but were greyed out.

Also, for increased privacy, you can now turn on a toggle in Settings to show time off booking as “Absence.”

And for a nice bonus, the whole Resourcing page will load faster.

HubSpot integration is now more reliable; this means that if you edit or add any new data to the deal synced from HubSpot, the integration won’t be interrupted. If something does goes wrong with the data, you’ll get an error warning in advance.

Read more about the integration here.

If you open a person’s profile, it will open from the side as a modal, so you don’t have to leave the screen you were on. You can expand it if you want:

We’re always looking to make your experience of using Productive better.

We’ll keep you updated as we ship more improvements. The following Monthly Updates will arrive at the beginning of July 2024.

For any questions, as always, reach out to our Customer Support.