1.13.61 – Assets And Integrations

Dear Ambitious Professional,

Summer is officially over (at least here in central Europe 🙂 and we’re enjoying a beautiful leafy autumn.

Today, it’s October 24, 2024, and like all great movies, we have been working tirelessly to bring you some of our most exciting (and difficult to implement 🙂 releases yet! 

So, without further ado, let’s get right into today’s Alvanda Development Update: 1.13.61 – Assets And Integrations.

If you have any questions or ideas, please email them to support@alvanda.com and our team will gladly help with any matter or consider any idea! 

Expansion Release Date: 6th of February, 2024

Today’s Update: 24th of October, 2024

If you want to watch this as a video, click on the below link:

Real-World Use Cases

One of our largest goals with Alvanda was always to create something that actually adds value. 

Not another to-do list. Not another calendar app. Not another note-taking app.

We wanted to talk to you, our actual users, and ask: What is your biggest operational challenge right now?

For example, as a result of this mindset, one of the things we’ve found out was that many of our users manage more than one team, or work at more than one company. 

This, like every other real-world use case you’ve been sharing with us since our launch, is a very important, real-world piece of context, that we’ve taken very seriously. 

And today, we’re presenting you a few of the solutions we’ve been working on these last couple months.

New Features

Today we’ve officially launched, not 1, not 2, but 3(!) major features on top of the dozens you already have access to! 

Let’s start with #1. 

Multi-Company Support

Yes! It’s finally live! You can now have as many different companies and accounts on Alvanda as you wish, and easily switch between them with just one click!

Multi-company Support allows both freelancers that work at multiple companies (with different email account) to see all of them in 1 dropdown AND people that own multiple businesses to see all of them under 1 single email account. 

We’ve been working on this major feature for months now, and we’re ecstatic that it’s finally out! 

As always, let us know what you think! We love your feedback! 

Custom Email Provider Settings

This feature allows business emails sent from Alvanda to be sent from your domain instead. 

It was the 4th most voted feature request in our last Development Roadmap Voting Poll, and guess what? It’s now live! 

So instead of your Team Members or external stakeholders getting notification emails from @alvanda.com, they can get emails directly from @yourcompany.com. 

This feature also paves the way for future features such as auto-emailing clients/vendors, etc., which based on what we’ve heard so far from our community, is yet another very important value-adding use case!  

Anyone can now go to their Company Settings page, and add their own email provider in just a couple minutes! 

Of course, if you face any issues, or just want some assistance, email us and we’ll get right back to you.

Alvanda Now Integrates With 7,000 Other Apps

As you might remember, Webhooks and API Integrations were the 6th most voted feature in our last Voting Poll. 

Today, we’re excited to let you know we’ve done it! 

You can now set up automations between Alvanda and Gmail, Sheets, Hubspot, Dropbox, Calendar, and literally over 7,000 other platforms! 

You can find everything Alvanda integrates to here:

https://zapier.com/apps/alvanda/integrations

And you can easily search for your most used apps on the above link, and start creating as many different automations as you’d like! 

Improved Features

As we progress more and more into this journey of building one of the best business (and now portfolio) management tools on the market, we keep one eye on new features, and another eye on constant quality of life improvements. You know, just like a chameleon…

Jokes aside, here’s what the team’s been working on these past couple months, alongside the above new features.

Faster Department Deleting

Before, we intentionally didn’t allow for an entire Department to be deleted if people were assigned to positions within it. 

This was to keep people safe from making changes that they might regret later. 

However, there are cases when someone actually wants to restructure their entire organization; a case in which they might need to delete an entire department. 

As such, we now show a very clear warning popup, asking if you’re sure you want to delete an entire department, and letting you know how many people would be affected. 

We Can Now Provide Live Support!

This isn’t a user feature, hence why we haven’t included it above. However, it does benefit all our users significantly!

Before, if anyone had a bug that we couldn’t replicate on our end, we’d have to hop on a call with them to see for ourselves what’s going on. Or, if anyone forgot their password and didn’t know how to reset it, we’d have to guide them to do it or manually do it for them in the database. Etc.

We’d have to either hop on a call for you to show us what the issue is, or we’d have to do other manual work to get you sorted.

Well… not anymore! 

Our Alvanda Support Team can now, with your permission of course, log into your account, see for themselves whatever situation you’re dealing with, and help you right then and there! 

As we keep helping you make the best use of Alvanda, we’re sure we’ll add more use cases into this module, like for example updating billing information with just a few clicks, but, as always, we’ll keep letting the real world dictate the development decisions we take. 🙂

Automatic Task Delegation Based On Bandwidth

On the topic of industry-leading innovations, this is definitely one of them! 

Alvanda is raising the bar of business effectiveness by making it super simple to assign tasks to people based on how much bandwidth they have! 

So if Frank has 5 hours of tasks on their plate today, and Sophie has 3 hours, then Alvanda will automatically delegate the task to Sophie! 

This works whether you want to delegate a task right now AND it works even within automated workflows! 

So if a workflow is triggered 3 months from now, Alvanda will look at Frank’s and Sophie’s bandwidth at the time (and maybe in 3 months we’ll have a 3rd member on the team, and Alvanda will automatically look at their bandwidth as well), and delegate the automatically assigned task to the person with the most free time available. 

This update in itself is an amazing leap forward within our industry, and we look forward to keep raising the bar every year. 

Bug Fixes

1. Fixed an issue where certain users weren’t able to upgrade to a new paid account because our payments processor wasn’t handling the form data correctly.
2. Also fixed an issue where if a user would be assigned to both types of Org Chart Positions (Managerial and Non-Managerial), some managerial features weren’t available.
3. Resolved an issue where if you would hover over the Account panel in the top right, sometimes the Notifications panel would persist, even if you took your mouse off of it.
4. Adjusted certain texts and graphical elements that seemed off. None of them were critical, but they were a handful, and we said we’d at least make mention.
5. For example, we corrected a minor UI glitch where if a user added a 100% off coupon to at checkout, their past billings would display “00” instead of “$0.00”.

Development Roadmap

We must say, the past couple months, since the last Development Update, have been crazy busy. BUT, we’re very happy we’ve finally reached the finish line with all of the above! 

In terms of next steps, some of the items from the last Development Roadmap are still being worked on (such as Procedure Templates and the Alvanda Marketplace) and will be released this quarter, so we won’t mention them again here.

However, we will mention one more Module that we plan on releasing in November…

Group Overview

There are almost no software platforms out there that allow you to create and manage an entire portfolio of companies and assets from one single platform. 

Until Alvanda. 

Starting November, 2024, owners of multiple companies and assets will be able to oversee ALL of their operations, from a single screen. 

Whether you’re:
a serial entrepreneur that has a few small businesses, or
a business consultant with multiple clients, or
a huge enterprise with many thousands of employees, all in different divisions, and departments, and teams,
In ALL of the above cases, you will be able to both have complete transparency AND be able to manage or oversee everything, from one single place.

All org charts, all strategic plans (from the highest to the lowest level), all tasks, all comms, all docs–everything, in one place.

This will be another massive step forward within our industry. One of many more that we will take.

Opportunity To Join

Looking at what we’ve recently achieved, and what we plan on building moving forward, we’d like to ask: 

Do you know anyone who can help us build or promote Alvanda? 

If you do, please send the link to this article their way, so they get a sense of what we do, and if they enjoy what they see, they can email our team at: support@alvanda.com

Thank you.

Final Thoughts

When we were asking our friends to read the manuscript for our latest book “Unshackled: The 7 Levels of Business Excellence”, Brian Smith, Founder of UGG ($2Bln) said about the book:

“Unshackled clearly explains one of the most important skills in business: pivoting. Most of the huge success stories you read about took decades of constant strategic pivots. New tactics, new markets, new people.”

3 years ago, Alvanda was just an idea. 

We wanted to create the ultimate business management platform, creating higher levels of effectiveness, transparency, and clarity, for everyone. 

Little did we know back then, that the ultimate version of that vision was one that would provide those benefits across an entire PORTFOLIO of companies. 

As Steve Jobs famously said: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” 

So true. We realize how our years of hard work have put us into this position, where we can carve an entire niche for ourselves; and who knows, maybe eventually lead an entire industry.