The application has been slow and unresponsive for the past 15 minutes,  the team are currently investigating the issue and will look to put a resolution in place as quickly as possible.

We will provide an update shortly via the blog and twitter on when we expect the issue to be resolved.

We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused.

UPDATE - 11:53 - We are taking the database offline currently and will look to restart the database.  

UPDATE - 12:30 - We're currently performing a number of checks on the database.  We hope to have an update shortly

UPDATE - 12:45 - We have brought the database back up successfully, we have found the cause of the issue and are performing checks across several tables to confirm that we are all okay to bring the application back up online

UPDATE - 12:55 - WorkflowMax is now back up online. We apologise for the massive incovenience this outage has caused. We will follow up with a further blog post shortly detailing what the cause of the issue was and how this wil be avoided in future. 

UPDATE - 2:30pm - One of our database servers failed to complete a routine maintenance task which resulted in a temporary performance degradation on the core invoicing table within the database.  This resulted in the database queuing requests from the application which in turn resulted in the degrading performance of the application.

To resolve the issue the operations team took the database offline to ensure all loading was removed while we investigated the cause and subsequent resolution. 

There was no loss of data as a result of this issue however the application was offline for approximately 1 and three quarter hours.  We have a number of levels of redundancy within our hosting environment that typically means our system is not impacted by database issues.  Unfortunately in this situation there was no way for the automated recovery to resolve the issue.  

We are currently planning an upgrade to the database platform that supports more advanced resilience, which should further reduce the risk of a similar outage.

It is with huge excitement that today we announce Xero has purchased WorkflowMax. Xero (XRO) is a world leading provider of online accounting software, and is a publicly listed company on the New Zealand stock exchange. 

We are genuinely excited about the enormous opportunities this affords both the WorkflowMax team and the product itself. When we founded WorkflowMax back in 2007 we always envisaged that WorkflowMax would be a truly global solution, and now with the funding, talent and energy that Xero brings we have a significant opportunity to achieve this goal.

But as always our customers are paramount, so what does this mean to you. In short it is service as usual: 

• your data will still be hosted on our Rackspace servers
• there will be no loss of service
• there will be no change in the current subscription pricing
• we will still continue to develop and support the product
• we will continue to support our existing interfaces with all accounting products

What will happen is that the WorkflowMax team will grow. We will bring in more development, support and implementation staff. We will have access to some of the best user interface designers and infastructure experts in the country. WorkflowMax as a product will evolve and improve faster for the betterment of all users. 

We see a huge positive upside for our entire client base, and we hope that you our customers do also. However if you have any concerns whatsoever then please do raise them with the support team, we are more than happy to discuss any questions you have.

This is the recorded webinar from last weeks session on creating and managing your own custom print templates within WorkflowMax

Today's update introduces Custom Templates allowing you to personalise your invoice, quote, statement, purchase order and job briefs within WorkflowMax.

With Custom Templates you can set up multiple templates to use in different situations. For example:

• if you run more than one business under the same company structure, when you print your invoices, quotes, purchase orders, job briefs and statements you can choose the appropriate templates to suit
• if some clients require more detail on their invoices for instance you could build a custom template specific for that purpose
• if you wanted to include pages and pages of preamble and terms and conditions as part of a larger proposal for each of your quotes then look to use a custom template
• you could even create client engagement letters or deed documents that could be printed as job briefs from each of your jobs. 

For more information on how to build your own custom templates please refer to our online help. 

We are super excited to be releasing the WorkflowMax Practice Manager today. The Practice Manager has been built specifically for accounting practices. Some of the key features include:

• KPI Dashboard - Review your key performance indicators daily. Utilising standard industry metrics you can review your average hourly rates, revenue per partner, WIP days, and Write ons at a glance.
• Value Based Billing - Quickly setup fixed price quotes based on your standard templates. Agree internally on how long the job is likely to take, then fix price the work based on the value to the client, rather than how long it is going to take.
• Client Relationships - Define relationships between your clients to view shareholders, directors and trustees of each entity
• Xero Integration - Tighter integration allows you to import recurring invoices from Xero
• Compliance - Capture and store all compliance data against each client including IRD numbers, GST registration details and balance dates.
• Job Focused Workflow - With a strong focus on jobs it allows the whole team to see exactly where each job is at, if you are in budget and what status the job is at.

It was a huge honour and a fantastic surprise to be awarded the Xero Solution Partner of the Year award at the Xero Partner Conference in Taupo. The award recognises the solution partner that has the most joint customers with Xero. It is brilliant to know that we are building such a widely accepted and liked product. A huge thank you to the team, to Xero and to all of our amazing customers.

We're really excited to announce our latest feature - Custom Themes.

Custom Themes allows you to personalise the WorkflowMax user interface to work more closely with your brand.

Using Custom Themes you can: 

• Select from a number of colour palettes to customise the look of the user interface
• Upload your own banner, and
• Configure a custom domain for your staff and clients to use when accessing WorkflowMax, e.g. mycompany.workflowmax.com 

Below is an example (thanks to our good mates at Interactive Accounting) of how Custom Themes can be applied to WorkflowMax:

One of the enhancements we've been working on which is nearing completion is Custom Fields.  Custom Fields will let you define any number of additional fields against your clients, contacts, suppliers, jobs and leads allowing you to collect a wide range of information.

A list of the available custom field types is displayed below: 

Using Custom Fields, you will be able to store additional contact information against your clients such as their Twitter account, LinkedIn URL, Facebook URL, Skype details etc.  Not only can you store the likes of the Twitter account or Skype name, these values can be displayed as contextual links meaning you can click on the Twitter account to view the contacts timeline or click on the Skype name to initiate a Skype call or chat.

Adding Custom Fields to your leads will allow you to store additional information such as products, services of interest, web site addresses etc.  Further to this, when a lead is marked as won, any custom fields shared between the lead and job will automatically be copied to the newly created job providing more information to your team when they come to start working on the job.

Using the Report Builder you will be able to extract and filter upon any custom field.  For example, you could create a report to show all the leads for a specific product or perhaps extract an email list of all your clients who support your favourite football team. 

We always love to get feedback from our users. With our customer base extending to some very diverse places, its fantastic to see how WorkflowMax is benefitting small businesses everywhere, including Madagascar:

Just to let you know that JWF Legal has won 2 industry awards.

Winner - Project Finance Advisory Firm of the Year in Madagascar 2010
Winner - Natural Resources Advisory Firm of the Year in Madagascar 2010

Much of the above would not have been possible without not only the excellent accountability which WorkflowMax provides 24/7 but also the dedicated nature of the WFM team.  WFM has been making our lives easier by the day and without it we would not be able to operate across multiple countries, timezones and workforces. 

We've introduced three new report layouts to the Report Builder.  In addition to the existing Table layout, you are now able to build:

• Monthly Summary Reports
• Bar Charts, and
• Pie Charts