What’s in store for 2024? With Lee Wade

Though we’ve just rung in the new year, the team at Re-flow are still hot on the heels of a monumental 2023 – our biggest year yet. To discuss some of that success, this month, we sat down with Re-flow’s CTO, Lee Wade, to discuss how the software has changed in the past year, the effects of the company’s rapid growth, as well as what clients can expect from Re-flow in 2024.?

Re-flow’s big feature release of 2023 was 1.6, which added a myriad of new features, including new security capabilities, improvements to the usability of jobs and the scheduler, as well as more options for cross-team communication. To begin with, Lee went over these highlights and shares some insights on the process behind their implementation.?

“In 2023, we did quite a lot of architectural changes to the system to facilitate the growth that's required by our clients. As we started taking on more enterprise-scale clients, we needed to make sure the system could scale with them and handle that sort of throughput. A lot of that was in the 1.6 update. We also took some key features and improved those based on client feedback. For example, the Re-flow scheduling system got drag and drop functionality, as well as granular resource management, which helps when you're scheduling large teams or trying to manage your resources to make sure you're utilising them fully.”?

From the very start, one of the biggest driving factors of Re-flow’s development has been client feedback. In recent times, we’ve seen more and more large businesses, with operations spanning the entire country, adopting the software as part of their future vision. At Re-flow, we refer to these businesses as enterprise level, and much of the time, their specific feedback drives the software to greater and greater heights.??

“As part of this year's upcoming 1.7 release, we’ve got a lot of client-requested features, and it's probably the largest update we've ever done. It’ll be covering all sorts of things. Features like soft deleting records, which has been highly requested, now allows users to restore deleted records for up to 60 days, so it provides a lot of safety around the data, making sure that things are restorable. We've had visual updates to the system - in this release we’re improving the look and feel of Re-flow, making it more pleasing on the eye. “?

We've got some really great features, like our partnership with Polymer which adds data visualisations, and that's something that any business can benefit from. It's sort of a one-click solution to instantly see some good results from your data. There's been a huge amount of work on Re-flow’s connectors, as with enterprise, we're connecting to ERP systems like NetSuite , and along with our other connectors to software such as Xero , Sage Business Solutions Cloud Accounting, and HubSpot , that's had a lot of refactoring to improve. With these changes, connectors will now allow even more throughput and customization.?

While client feedback is certainly the driving force, there are other factors that affect Re-flow’s development. One important consideration facing the development team in recent times has been the company’s rapid growth, which is certain to continue in the coming year.?

“As the company grows, all the departments within the business are obviously growing, so we we're taking on more as a development team. With the types of businesses we work with, it means we need to consider different types of functionality and features for the system, but pretty much most features added to Re-flow are still customer driven. If there's enough demand, there are additions that may come about whether it's requested by small businesses or large businesses.??

Obviously, with this sort of growth in the amount of data that we process for our clients, a key part of that security, so we’re always continuing to improve our architecture and our security. In just 1.6 alone, there as a lot of security, and there’ll be more in 1.7. Throughout this year, part of that will be doing more architectural changes, which will improve security and reliability even further.”?

In addition to tracking client feedback, we’re always trying to stay up to date on the latest industry trends, requirements, and challenges – another factor that informs the way the software is expanded, and which features added.?

“I think there's always some things that are put upon an industry. For example, 1.6 added working time directive support, which was something that was industry wide, making sure you're tracking how many hours operatives are working and making sure they're not doing too many back-to-back shifts to ensure health & safety compliance.??

That functionality got added to Re-flow based on industry feedback, as a need for them to track that sort of information. I think the next industry-wide requirement that we'll be looking to implement is CO2 tracking, because businesses need to make sure they're aiming for carbon neutral or lowering their carbon footprint. We need to bring that into Re-flow to help them help them do that, and help them track their carbon output across all operations.”?

Re-flow has always supported a number of pre-built connectors, including Xero, Sage Business Cloud Accounting, QuickBooks Company , HubSpot , as well as boasting a robust REST API that enables custom third-party integration for enterprise customers. With our rapid growth, we’ve had the opportunity to establish a number of new software partnerships that can further expand the capabilities of our software.?

With our biggest feature release yet slated for this year, we’re ready to make 2024 even better than the last. Clients can expect updates on Re-flow 1.7 throughout the coming months by keeping up with our website or following us right here on LinkedIn.?

Re-flow is an award-winning field management solution trusted by hundreds of businesses nationwide, including industry leaders such as WJ , FM Conway Ltd , COLAS and M.V. KELLY LIMITED .?

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