Brixx June update – 5x faster, bigger plans, new options!

Hi everyone – we have just released a new update to the app, and it’s an exciting one. We’ve made a massive breakthrough on report and dashboard load speed, making them up to 5 times faster in mid-large size plans. As well as meaning all plan outputs now load substantially faster, this speed increase means we have also been able to increase the item count in subscribed plans to 500. In addition, Loan, Employee, Asset and Investment components all have new inputs and new methods of calculating. We have also fixed a number of bugs and laid the groundwork for sharing and collaboration next month.

Phew! It’s been a busy month!

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Report and Dashboard Speed Increase

Reworking the way we generate reports has led to some sizeable speed increases. This is most notable in large plans, which a year ago would take taken 60 seconds to load a 250 item 60 month plan. Now, several phases of speed increases later, this is down to just a few seconds, while the maximum load time on our (fairly modest) office internet is 9 seconds for a 500 item 10 year plan loading a monthly report.

“10 year plan”?

Yep, we’ve been testing 10 year plans! The limit is currently 5, but with these new speed increases we hope to allow plan duration of 10 years in the near future.

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Bigger plans

Brixx plans have an ‘item’ count. In Brixx terms, an item is a section, group or component. Sections and groups are structural parts of your plan, a bit like folders in Windows, while components perform calculations for specific financial activities like receiving income, buying an asset or taking out a loan.

Currently, you can build plans that have 250 items (sections, groups and components), or 100 items if you have a free account. With the release of this update we have doubled the item limit to 500 for subscribers. Our past item limit of 250 was designed to stop plans getting too large, which in turn would reduce the speed the loaded reports and the dashboard.

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New component options

Asset

Read the full guide to Asset here.

New Depreciation options. We have introduced three new depreciation options:

• Straight line – calculates depreciation of an asset over its duration on the Timeline. The asset’s value is reduced to 0 over this period, at the end of which it can be sold or written off.
• % of latest value – depreciates the asset by a % each month, each time basing its initial value on the last month’s value. This leads to a smooth curve of depreciation, reducing slightly each month.
• Manual – if you want to make manual depreciation adjustments – now you can! Model the drop in an asset’s value precisely, or use this option to ensure that your assets are recorded exactly as they are in your accounts, rather than using % assumptions.

Loan

Read the full guide to Loan here.

• Manual Interest. Loan interest can now be entered as a manual amount per month for some loan types – and a new loan type has been introduced to handle manual interest and capital repayments.
• Manual Capital Repayment. Loan capital repayments can now be entered manually on several loan setups, with % interest rates working off the remaining loan principle. This allows you to model ad-hoc payments and overpayments.

Investment

Read the full guide to Investment here.

• Grow by %. Previously, Investment components could only grow in value by an amount per period. Now you can, more naturally, grow investments by a % of their current value.
• Investment Fees. Many investment platforms have fees associated with them. You can now enter these fees as either an amount or a % of the Investment’s value.
• Profile Sale. Previously Investments could be sold in full on their end date (the point at which their component row ends in the Timeline). Now you can sell as much, or as little as you like throughout the duration of the Investment component.

Employee

Read the full guide to Employee here.

• Number of employees table. This input now has a Table button, which allows you to edit the number of employees in each Employee component over time. You could model increasing the number of staff at this salary level over time, or use the new table to set up seasonal staff at a certain pay grade.

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Bugs fixed!

We found and fixed a small number of rare bugs this release, most of which only occur in very specific setups.

You can read about these changes in detail in our release notes.

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Coming soon… Sharing and version control!

Last week we saw our first internal demo of the new sharing and collaboration features for the app! It was stunning to see how fast the collaborative editing was, made possible by this update’s 5x speed improvement. Not only will sharing and collaboration between different users be possible, subscribers will also get access to an audit trail of actions taken in their plans, with the option to restore a previous version of the plan.

We’re hoping to release the first version of sharing in July – so watch this space 😀

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