2019 was a great year for VerticalChange! We introduced many new features, and spent time improving and fixing existing parts of the application. Below are highlights from some of the most exciting changes.
Improved Design
In early and mid-2019, we updated our branding on our website, app, and Visual VerticalChange.
Some of our improvements included an improved logo, fonts, colors and spacing.
One of our most noticeable updates was an enhancement to the left-hand navigation menu, which has updated icons and now slides out when hovering over the menu.
We also made major changes to our mobile application - allowing you to more easily navigate the system on a phone or tablet.
We will be continuing to make improvements to our design throughout 2020!
Contacts
Your contacts page holds the most vital information about the people you serve. This is an area that we at VerticalChange try to keep as up-to-date as possible! Here are improvements we made in 2019:
New functionality to create a contact from a pop-out menu when adding a new contacts in a Relationships field or Other Contacts field
Added more columns available to display in a contact's Activities and Assessments grid (Program, Program Enrollment Category, Enrollment Date and Disenrollment Date)
Permissions
These new features are only applicable to agencies with advanced permissions.
We introduced five new permissions this year, which allow admins to grant/revoke access to:
The Standard Exports tab in the Reports section
The Programs section in the left-hand navigation menu
The QRIS Rating Preview tab (for QRIS agencies)
The Attendance section in the left-hand navigation menu (for agencies with Attendance enabled)
A contact's Activities tab and/or their Assessments tab (split into two separate permissions)
We also fixed a bug in the application allowing users to enroll contacts in programs that they did not have access to.
Forms
This year, we added a ton of new features to the Form Builder, giving you the power to track your data in more complex and comprehensive ways.
In-Form Calculations
For agencies using our scripting feature to perform in-form calculations, we have added more capabilities to allow you to perform more actions, including:
New Fields & Settings
E-Signatures - you can now capture electronic signatures in your form by adding a Signature field to the form!
Form archiving - lock a form so that users can view old versions of forms, but not update or add any new forms
New setting on Contact Forms to require that the Last Name field be entered when creating a new contact
Field Access Levels - a new feature that allows admins to control which fields in a form users can see. Admins can grant edit, readonly, or none access to permission sets for a particular field
Hiding the "Participants" section on group forms - a new setting in the Form Builder to hide the blue "Participants" section when filling out a form result on a group
Reporting
Reporting is one of the key features of VerticalChange, and so we are always working on improving our reporting capabilities. Here are some ways we have improved our reports in 2019:
Added a form result's status (Complete vs. Incomplete) to the Report Builder
Added a contact or form result's program enrollment category to the Report Builder
Attendance
Only relevant for agencies where the Attendance feature is enabled.
We have added even more features and improvements to our Attendance, Sessions and Registrations module in 2019. We are also looking forward to a number of improvements in early 2020!
Added a PDF print button for Attendance & Roster views
Added a new "Teacher Registration" form, which allows you to capture staff/teacher information separate from students
Improved the notifications when updating or submitting attendance to make it more clear what actions the user is taking
Preventing accidental session deletions by requiring that all registrations be deleted first
Programs
In 2019, we introduced the ability to make a program inactive, hiding it from the Form Builder program options and a staff's Programs permissions.
Infrastructure and Performance
We have made some major improvements to our database and application infrastructure and have already seen a major improvement in loading times, saving times and report generation speeds. We will continue to make even more performance improvements in 2020!
If you have questions about any of these new features, please reach out to us through support chat or support@verticalchange.com !