December 13, 2023
New
Schedule Mail Merges
Mail merge emails can now be scheduled to send at a later time. When creating the mail merge, if you enter schedule information, the emails will be created, but not sent until the scheduled window is met. If you leave the schedule information blank, then the emails will be sent immediately.
Scheduled Email Groups
There is a new Scheduled Email Groups page where you can view and manage all of your emails that are set up to send within a scheduled window of time. This can include Autodrafts as well as scheduled Mail Merge emails. Depending on your permissions, you can either view all users' Scheduled Email Groups, or use the page to manage your own.
There are two new permissions that grant you access to this page. The 'Scheduled Emails Groups' permission gives you basic access, and the sub-permission 'View and Edit Other's Scheduled Emails' allows you to see every user's scheduled email groups.
You can get to the new page by going to Marketing > Scheduled Email Groups.
There are various search fields you can use to narrow down your results. The table will show each scheduled group that fits the search criteria. For each group, you can perform various actions such as editing the schedule, linking to the Autodraft or Mail Merge Campaign, and opening the Sent Emails page filtered for that group.
My Emails Page
There's a new page in the system called My Emails, which can be accessed from the left Home menu, and is not restricted by any permissions. The page shows all of the same information and allows you to perform the same actions as the Sent Emails page under the Admin menu, but only for your own emails, not every email sent from the system. This addition makes it easier for users to track emails they have sent without needing access to the Admin menu.
Improvements
Autodraft Updates
We are continuing to improve our Autodrafts. This release there were a couple of additions.
Users now have the ability to search for contacts on the Autodraft detail pages. The new filters include email address and contact name, as well as email status. By default, emails with a 'sent' status will not display in the table.
There is a new 'Autodraft Template' field when creating Autodrafts. This field allows you to create static content, or content that will be the same in every email sent from that Autodraft. Within this field, you'll need to enter the ##AUTODRAFT_PROMPT## tag, which is where the dynamically generated AI content will appear in the email.
Credit Card Surcharge Updates
A couple of improvements were made for credit card surcharges this release.
On the Recorded Payments search page, there are two new display fields. One is 'Cash Net' which reflects the total payment amount made minus any surcharges. The second is 'Surcharge' which shows the surcharge amount. These two columns together will equal the Cash Net column.
Surcharges can now be disabled for specific companies. To do so, you need the new User Permission 'Can Exempt Surcharge Fees'. With the permission, when editing a company's Billing Info, you'll see the new setting 'Exempt From Card Surcharge Fees'. When set to Yes, the company will never be charged credit card surcharges, even if surcharges are enabled in your system, and they are paying with a credit card.
Opportunity and Forecast Improvements
We are continuing to update and improve how our opportunities and forecasts operate. This release, we made a couple of updates.
When initially creating an opportunity, if you add forecast items, you can now 'Delete' the forecast items prior to saving the opportunity. When the items are deleted this way, they will not count towards 'lost sales' whereas forecasts and opportunities deleted after they are initially saved will count toward lost sales.
A new bulk update option has been added to opportunities. You can now bulk update the amount for each forecast on the opportunity. This action will update the value of each forecast based on the percent entered. For example, if '5' is entered in the field, the value of each forecast item will increase by 5%.
On the Forecasting tab of creating an order, you can now filter the 'Forecasts' list by selecting 'Opportunities' first. Based on the opportunities you select, the forecasts will be automatically updated to only show forecasts for the selected opportunities. The information on each forecast has also been updated to show more information and allow you to find the forecast items you need more easily.
Ad forecast items will now show publication name, issue, and size when applicable.
Digital media forecast items will show the publication name and product name if set, as well as the delivery date.
Service forecasts will show the service name if set, and the delivery date.
Event forecast items will now show the event name, the specific event product if applicable, and the delivery date.
Sent Email Updates
The Sent Emails page has been relocated. It can now be found by going to Settings > Marketing & Emails > Sent Emails.
Additional search fields were added to the Sent Emails page, including Sent Status, Open Status, and Click Status.
Other Improvements
A 'User Group' search field has been added to the Consolidated Sales and Consolidated Snapshot Reports.
The default setting can no longer be removed for Email activity category type. You may change which category is set as the default, but not remove it altogether.
To more easily find the relevant user permissions, all permissions related to Astro now include 'Astro' somewhere in the permission name.
Astro was updated to its current model.
The iPhone app branding has been updated to reflect Ad Orbit branding.
Line item XREFs have been added to the Dim Order Item and Analytics Sales tables in the Data Warehouse and Metabase. We also added payment XREFs to the Payments Fact table.
The Pivot View on the Impression Inventory Report now supports partial month inventory display, which makes it consistent with the Table View.
When a contact unsubscribes from a contact list, they will now be brought to a secondary confirmation page, rather than being unsubscribed immediately. In the new page, they can confirm they would like to unsubscribe. This change was made to prevent spam and malware filters from unsubscribing contacts automatically.
Start and End dates were added to the 'Ticket Assigned' emails users receive for service and digital media items.
The Ticket ID has been added to the Export History for SendMyAd items.
Service line items are now included on the Consolidated Production Report. Like all other product types, you can send material reminders for delivery solution services, as well as perform actions on the items such as opening the ticket and changing statuses.
The User Dock will now always be visible. You can still toggle on and off the full dock display, but we've removed the ability to hide the dock altogether.
You are now able to reply or 'resend' an email that you created and was tracked as an activity in Ad Orbit. When opening the email details, you'll see a 'Reply' button as long as the To email for the activity is associated with your user account.
Primary contact email addresses have been added to the orders FTP export.
The 'Add Email' button from the top + menu has been relabeled 'Send Email'.
You can now 'Download Latest Errors' on completed imports. Previously, this option was only available on incomplete imports.
Our third party system that was used for announcements has now been disabled as we transition to our internal solution. The only visible change should be when clicking on the ? icon in the top menu. Now, rather than seeing a popup with various options, you will see a dropdown where you can enter support tickets, contact live chat, and navigate to the help center.
A display field for Line Item Rep(s) has been added to Delivery Solution tickets.
Call recordings can now be automatically transcribed. When the option is checked, the call will be transcribed in the background, and the transcription will be available when viewing the activity.
Fixes
On the Credit Memo search page, there was a typo if you toggled back and forth between the 'Invoice Month/Year Range' and 'Use GL Month/Year' options that has been fixed.
An unnecessary loading icon was removed when running the Sales Rep Goal Metrics Report.
The Create Invoices 'Product Category' dropdown has been updated to include all product categories except for Events, and will now automatically update the 'Products' dropdown based on the categories selected.
The Invoice Charges report can now find charges added per month when using a combination of monthly late fees, and not using special invoices for late fees. Previously you could only find charges based on the first charge added in this scenario.
Print ads on national rate cards will now show up under the 'Print Ad' header on package item setup.
When a ticket is automatically assigned to a user upon creation, previously the status update on the ticket was showing the ticket was assigned by the user who finance approved the order, which was incorrect. Now, it will reflect that the ticket was assigned by the 'ADMIN' user.
The Publication dropdown on digital media rate cards is now alphabetized.
A HubSpot connection error has been resolved.
Omeda FTP exports are no longer dependent on having generic FTP exports enabled.
Only split files will be FTP'd to Omeda, previously non-split files were also being exported.
Deleted subscriptions are now only included in files when doing 'incremental' exports.
The Page Number column is now sorting properly on the ConsolidatedProduction Report.
When there were certain combinations of pricing and discounting, the net unit price on impressions were being rounded incorrectly. This has been resolved.
A bug with multi-select dropdowns not displaying 'check all' has been fixed.
The Billing Date is now being updated properly on Delivery Solution services if the line item is edited and the event date changes.
An error on the Annual Sales by Month report has been fixed.
A bug preventing Slot Inventory widgets from displaying has been resolved.
A bug where monthly invoice fees were generating $0 invoices has been resolved.
An error with global announcements has been fixed.
A formatting problem with the header on announcements has been resolved.
A memory issue preventing Reserved products from being edited has been fixed.
The option to add Ad Items to opportunities has been updated to be consistent with that option being available on orders.
When using CardConnect on the Subscription by Publication webform, there was an issue preventing customers from entering their card information. This bug has been fixed so the field is visible.
A handful of icons were updated to reflect Ad Orbit colors.
An error when importing email activities with attachments has been fixed so the attachments are being brought into Ad Orbit correctly.
Imported reserved line items are now being scheduled automatically based on the dates set. Inventory checks are also taken into account when performing this process.
Ticket dynamic attributes are now being set properly when using the Historical Order Importer.
A time out issue was resolved when approving orders with service line items when SendMyAd is enabled.
When syncing an order to SendMyAd, we added a measure to prevent multiple Ad Orbit line items from being brought into SendMyAd as a single item.
The 'Mark for Export' checkbox for Credit Memos on Company Billing tabs has been removed.