NEW RELEASE • JUL 2 2026
Productive 5.1
In this release the AI Assistant learns a few impressive new tricks, Retainer Deals finally land in Sales, and there’s a brand new billing type that does the maths for you. Plus plenty of smaller improvements across the board.
AI ✨
- The AI Assistant can now create Artifacts (or visualizations). Describe what you want – like a “Q2 client report”, and you’ll get an entire visual dashboard with your data, ready to download as a PDF or HTML file.
- Report interpretation gives you instant data visibility. Ask The AI Assistant for a one-sentence summary or a full report on the state of your business: profitability, utilisation, time off, revenue forecasts, and more. You get the exact data you need, written in plain language, not a complex report you have to interpret yourself.
- The AI Assistant can now work with Scenarios in the Scenario Builder. It can create them, but also compare and apply them if you ask.
Automations 🤖
- When you create a Project from a template, all Automations from that template now come along with it.
- Custom fields are now available as rules in Automations. For example, an Automation can start when a certain custom field value is added.
- Automations built through the AI Assistant are now more accurate.
Budgets & Time Tracking ⏰
- We introduced a brand new billing type that lets you add a fee automatically calculated as a percentage of the revenue recognised on other billable services in the same budget section. You’d use it whenever you charge a fee that’s proportional to the rest of the work, such as a 10% project management or studio fee applied on top of all the billable services in a budget section.
- Should you need it – approvers can now edit submitted time entries.
Integrations & Invoicing 🧩
- You can now send Invoices, Purchase Orders, Proposals, and payment reminders using your email integration, whether you’re on Google Gmail or Microsoft Outlook.
- Payment terms now come with three options: invoice date, end of the month, or due upon receipt. You can modify each of them with extra days, and define them for specific companies or for all clients.
Project Management ✅
- We made numerous under-the-hood improvements to Docs, so your tables will look better than ever.
Resourcing 👥
- We’ve rolled out a big UX update to the Booking popover in Resourcing, making it much more streamlined for creating and managing Bookings. You can now switch between a Compact state and an Expanded state that opens in a sidebar, keeping all your resourcing context visible.
- You can also see the remaining hours left on a Service, which supports resourcing much better than the old Worked/Estimated fields, and you can even define whether that calculation includes future scheduled hours or not.
- A project manager (as a role) can now be added as an approver on absence approval policies.
Reports & Dashboards 📈
- Reports can now be grouped and sorted by data on adjacent objects, meaning you can group Budgets by project manager or client, or sort time entries by Project name.
- You can now manually define recognised revenue in Productive. When set, this will override your default revenue recognition settings. As always, this applies to fixed service types only. Time and materials will continue to follow the usual logic.
Sales 💰
- Retainer Deals are here, letting you represent an entire recurring contract as a single Deal. Once this type of Deal is won, it automatically creates a recurring Budget, which allows for much more accurate financial tracking and organisation.
- When creating a new Deal, the numbering sequence is now separate from Budgets.
System ⚙️
- When filtering, you’ll now see frequently used filters, including suggestions from our side as well as your own once you start adding them.
- Custom fields can now be managed in bulk, so you can add a certain type of custom field to multiple Projects with just one click.
- When importing a CSV file, you’ll now get a more detailed error message if something is wrong with the file, so you know exactly what to fix.
- Workplace is now renamed to Subsidiary across the app.
- If you’re using Adobe Acrobat or a similar Chrome extension, all PDF files will now display their actual file name instead of a generic “document.pdf” name.
- Using our desktop app? Be sure to update it to v1.17.3.
- Thanks to a new custom permission, users can now see their own cost rates on their profile, under the Cost Rates tab.
4 New Features That Make Deals Work the Way You Do
Deals just got a major upgrade. Four new features make managing your pipeline easier than ever: represent recurring contracts as a single retainer Deal, manage Deal Value, add multiple stakeholders to a single Deal, and track progress with new Deal Aging fields.