What’s Next? The Brixx 2021 Roadmap Preview
With our Xero partnership approved we’ll be launching our Xero integration in early 2021.
It’s been a lot of hard work from our team and we are excited to see the many months of hard work pay off!
We’re now in a position to discuss our future plans in a more concrete way after our Xero launch. We have already been working on a lot of improvements post-Xero that will benefit all Brixx users whether using Xero or not.
This week I’d like to preview some of the first releases in 2021 as well as run through some of the mid-term projects we are also planning.
As always, we are guided by your feedback and feature requests so that we can get your most burning requests implemented.
Coming next
- Report format improvements
- Prepayments in the operational cost components
- Inventory revamp
- Change VAT/Sales tax/GST rates mid-forecast
In this article, we’ll preview the report and inventory improvements coming next.
Reports
We’re introducing a new set of report settings:
- Summarise figures (for example grouping up figures in thousands)
- Set decimal places
- Show/hide variance in percentage
- Show/hide variance in a currency amount
- Show/hide empty account lines
- Show actuals to date (or choose a date)
Actuals vs forecast reports
We’ve separated the variance into dedicated columns for clarity. You’ll also be able to see the absolute difference as well as the percentage difference you see currently.
You can toggle either of these variance columns with the new settings controls too. Learn more about variance analysis.
Actuals followed by forecast in reports
A new report type will allow you to display the columns for actuals to date followed by your remaining forecast for the period of your plan:
You’ll have the option for your forecast to use your latest actual cash position as the starting point for the forecast periods in this report. If you are on your P&L report it will use your latest actual retained profit figure.
We have more on the way for these report options so expect a dedicated preview soon!
Inventory revamp
Earlier in 2020, we introduced new manual fields that give you complete control over the purchase and expense of inventory (automatically adjusting the Balance Sheet value appropriately). It’s pretty handy.
However, it does mean you have to forecast the values manually, without automatically referencing your sales forecast at all.
We want to capture the best of both worlds and are currently working on several improvements to Inventory.
Automatic sale of manually purchased Inventory
This simple option will allow manual inventory purchases to be reduced by sales made by connected Income components, where currently manually purchased inventory can only be manually sold off.
Maintain Inventory levels
This will allow you to set a threshold value of inventory. The inventory component will then check your sales forecast and it will only purchase new inventory when your stock drops below that threshold. It will then automatically purchase more inventory to bring inventory levels back to the threshold.
The mid-term roadmap
Actuals vs forecast on the dashboard
There is a huge amount of valuable data in our reports now for analysing your actuals vs forecast. However, this data is always better when visualised in charts to see trends and breakdowns at a glance!
We are working on designs right now to develop this functionality.
Actuals to date concept:
Actuals vs forecast concept:
We’ll be looking to introduce these improvements to the dashboard incrementally over time. Expect to hear more about this once the report improvements have gone live.
We are also looking at other chart types to introduce. There is so much that could be visualised in charts so let us know what is important to you!
Weekly inputting and reporting
Brixx is primarily a long-term planning tool focused on modelling your future to inform your strategy.
However, every month we get more people asking us to implement weekly or daily capabilities so that you can get the short term detail as well as the long term strategic view all in one place.
We completely agree!
We’re investigating implementing weekly data entry into components as well as weekly reporting in our outputs.
This is a fairly large project for us to implement as it impacts many areas of the app in a fundamental way.
It is highly desirable though so we are aiming to get prototypes created early in 2021 so that we can more easily scope the technical requirements. We’ll then be able to give you a better indication for when you’ll have access to this feature.
Further modelling options in components
This is a category of on-going improvements to the modelling options inside each type of component.
Aside from the already mentioned inventory improvements, here are some of the general areas we want to improve on next:
- Exclude from taxable profit option in components
- Costs based on the number of employees
- Unitised assets
- More cost types that can be driven by units from various sources
The general theme here is moving to unitised options in as many areas as possible and offering more intelligent calculation options from these units.
The future
The last project I’d like to mention in closing is the Quickbooks integration. QBs was always our next integration project based on popular request.
Now that we have completed the foundation of our Xero integration, we have a blueprint that can be transferred across more integrations. It means our QBs integration will be far quicker to develop than Xero.
However, we do want to gather more feedback from Xero users on our first integration for a while and continue to refine and improve it where required before moving onto the next.
Of course, this is only a small slice of our plans previewed here! We have a huge range of ideas and ambitions for our software and it’s not possible to discuss all of them at once. Just because you don’t see it mentioned on our roadmap, does not mean it isn’t on our radar.
Of course, getting in touch to tell us what you want is always useful for us, so please do!
