For September's first feature update, we've dug into some parts of TidyHQ to lay the groundwork for some bigger improvements that are coming down the line.

Tracking explicit kinds of Contacts

First, we've changed the checkbox on profiles that marked if something was a company or a person to be a bit more explicit.

We now explicitly track the "kind" of contact - be it a person or an organization. This is just the start of some bigger, more exciting work coming shortly to improve how you can work between Tidy organisations and when managing people and their associated organizations.

Filter by Contact Kind

In support of this, we've also made it possible to filter your contacts by the kind - so you can, for example, list all your Organizations that are tracked by Tidy.

Quickly add contacts in even more places

Next, we've added support for quickly adding a new contact in more places. Contacts are the cornerstone of tracking activity in Tidy and your associated people, but they can quickly become painful when you need to add them as you're doing something.

Firstly, you can now add new contacts directly as you're writing an email, saving having to go out to contacts and come back.

And secondly, when creating a new task, you can also add a new person then and there.

These two improvements extend on the previous work to roll this out across Tidy and reflect on our focus to make admins' lives as easy as possible in day-to-day tasks.

Reporting on Registration Dates

Briefly, we've added the Registration time of membership - that is, compared to the start/end date, the time it was created - to the memberships report, as an optional field. It's disabled by default, but can be turned on easily.

Thanks

As usual, thanks to all of our customers for getting in touch with your feedback and queries as they come up. We have lots of exciting new features and improvements coming soon, and we can't wait to share them with you all!

In running TidyHQ, we take every effort to ensure the platform remains responsive and reliable, as per our goals previously stated, for all customers.

Unfortunately, sometimes certain types of maintenance require enforced downtime to the application - these kinds of tasks we try to minimize, but in place of that aim to provide notice to all affected customers ahead of time.

On Sunday, 11th of September 2022, We'll be performing a series of tasks which require forced downtime for two periods. Each should last for no more than a few minutes, assuming there are no unforeseen issues) - and during this period, Tidy will instead return a

maintenance page for the website instructing this is happening, as well as a temporary error in the API with a 503 status code until the site returns to service.

This maintenance will occur between 8:00 PM AEST on 11/09/2022 and 4:00 AM AEST on 12/09/2022, but for two short periods. In between these hours, outside of the planned downtime, the rest of the application will remain available but you may see some degraded performance as changes are made. If you're unsure what this is in your local timezone, you can check here to find the local start and end time.

We thank you all for your understanding, and for using Tidy.

One of the most common support requests from TidyHQ customers is to make it possible for administrators to update the login emails for their users. Up until this point, this has required an explicit support process to ensure the security of your members' details, such as payment details don't get compromised. This consumed time for everyone and made it harder than it needed for you to help get your members back into their profiles.

Disconnecting an account from a contact

Today, we're going to put this power back in your hands, in a secure, auditable and easy fashion. From their contact profile, users eligible to have their account disconnected will now have a new Disconnect Account button, which will disassociate the Tidy account from their member:

This will automatically remove the link (e.g. if they've lost access to their original account email), disable any payment methods connected and auto-renewing memberships until you re-invite them and they set up new payment cards.

Connecting an account to a contact

The inverse of this is that you can also either connect their existing Tidy account (based on the contact email) or invite them to join Tidy if they've not done so from the same section on their contact profile:

Who, what, when

Tidy will automatically add activity log entries associated with who did it, and when, to ensure that you have a complete history of this process for your club.

We'll also send an email to the original address, to let the person know exactly what has been done:

Use Case: Lost Accounts

Going back to our opening, you can now change the login email associated with a user by doing the following, e.g. if the person accidentally wrote hotmail.con instead of hotmail.com:

1. Navigate to the Contact Profile
2. Use Disconnect User to remove the link between the existing account and contact.
3. Edit the contact and change their email address.
4. Use Connect User to create a new account and send an invite with the new email address, or to connect to their existing Tidy account if they've made one.
5. The Tidy system will take care of all communications with your Contact advising them of their new connections, and disconnections.

We hope you enjoy this new addition and hope it saves you some further administration time! 😎

Hi there, you may have spotted at the top right of our platform a lightning symbol. This gives you a shortcut to our latest announcements, it also shows you feedback and ideas that you can vote up, add your own context or comments to, or, if you can't find it, nominate your own idea!

Have a great day 😎

Today we're dropping two long-requested additions for TidyHQ's built-in communication functionality.

Cancelling Queued Emails

Sometimes, depending on your plan's outgoing email limit and other factors, emails can sit queued in the system some time before they go out. We do this to help manage spam and to ensure your emails get delivered completely as possible.

Until now though, if you made a mistake - or you just generally wanted to stop these emails from being sent - the only way was via our support time. Now, you can cancel entire emails, Both from the emails list:

Or from the email page itself, where you can additionally cancel individual recipients, not just the whole email if you so choose:

We'll stop the email from being sent up until right before we send it, and we'll reflect this in the interface for you so there is no confusion about cancelled emails or recipients:

This has been a long-requested feature, and we're glad to be able to give our organizations more control than ever before.

Draft Emails

Secondly, we've added the ability to write an email and save it a as draft, only sending it when you're finally ready. It was possible to work around this before by scheduling it to go out at a future time, but this is much simpler and makes it clear that you're still working on an email without risking accidentally sending it if you've forgotten about it.

To create a draft, we've added a new button on the compose email page:

And a new drafts tab which allows you to review all unsent drafts, where it's as simple as clicking "Send" in the menu on email:

Thanks

Both of these features were long requested, highly voted features on our Ideas page. We appreciate all of our customers taking the time to let us know what is important to them, and we look forward to rolling out more new features in the coming few weeks.

Today's features were based on the following features:

TL;DR Version: On the weekend, Tidy HQ saw an outage affecting custom domains related to overzealous blocklisting of IP addresses accessing the site.

What Happened

Late on the evening of August 6th, 2022, we were reviewing recent scanning activity on the TidyHQ site from tools run by third parties (a common experience for any public-facing website - people run automated security scanning tools against sites all the time, hoping to find a vulnerability) and noticed an increase in activity over the last 24 hours.

​Typically, we block the source of the attacks (however harmless, it’s best to stop them in their tracks early on) using the security functionality built into our application which is designed to disallow access to a set of source IP addresses.

Inadvertently, due to an issue in the way the scans were being logged, the IP address associated with the scans in the log files wasn’t that of the attacker’s source machines, but rather the address we use to implement custom domains - blocking access for custom domains for a period until late n the afternoon on Sunday the 7th of August when the Tidy tech team was alerted to the issue thanks to several customers.

​

What we’re doing to change this​

1. Improved Monitoring of Custom Domains

​We have extensive availability monitoring and alerting in place for the TidyHQ systems.

Unfortunately, due to an oversight in the system, this didn’t extend to monitoring our custom domains configuration - meaning we weren’t automatically notified when access stopped working, and had to rely on customer notifications.

We’re adding improved monitoring, specifically designed to capture these sorts of issues and across our customer custom domains to ensure they continue to work, or if an issue occurs, we’re proactively notified.

We've already added monitoring to custom domains or this specific issue, but will be revisiting our overall monitoring approach this week.

2. Weekend Support Process Improvements

​Secondly, we’ll be putting in a place for urgent support handling and notifications on

the weekend - Typically the Tidy team sticks to business hours, Australia time - with

some occasional out-of-normal hours support (you may have received a late evening or

early morning response from some of our team members).

​In the case of urgent, access-restricting issues such as the above, we’ll be instituting

a new process to ensure customers can easily raise it with us for triage as needed

outside of these business hours, to ensure the Tidy team can respond in a timely fashion.

​

3. Fixes and improvements to the security monitoring​

Lastly, we’ll be significantly improving the way we handle these situations to not

only remove the change of issues like the above, but to keep our customers even

more secure - You can be confident your data in Tidy is kept safe and secure,

but we always want to make sure we do everything possible.

​

In Closing

​We’d like to offer a sincere apology to all customers affected by this issue - We take great care in trying to ensure that Tidy takes all of our customer’s security very, very seriously.

As security is of utmost importance to us, it takes a priority - but unfortunately in this case, an overzealous setup here cost the availability of custom domains, and due to the weekend, it wasn’t resolved as quickly as we would like.

We endeavour to be transparent, open and always improving - and to push to make sure we offer the best experience possible for our customers.

Tidy strives to make it as easy as possible to have a clean, well-structured contacts database - and to that end, we aim to make it as easy as possible to find, and tidy up duplicate contact records.

To that end, and following customer requests, we're rolling out a series of updates to our Possible duplicates page (which you can find for you club under Contacts > Possible Duplicates in the side bar from your club dashboard).

What's new and fixed?

This brings the following new features and improvements:

1. Find duplicates by Full Name, Contact Email, Contact ID Number, Phone or Company - This gives more ways than ever before to find possible bad data. Note that before we would show (but not find) what fields overlapped between the contacts - we'll shortly re-add that, to make it easier to find.
2. Ignore duplicates! Have a batch of contacts which are completely different? Ignore the current set of them. If a new one gets added, we'll automatically show the whole set again.
3. Working pagination and performance improvements - We've significantly sped up the time it takes to load the page when you have lots and lots of members and made sure that it now reliably paginates your results.

Thank you

We hope this release will help make a big difference and would like to call out the following ideas from our customers that led to these improvements:

In the last two months, alongside the usual small improvements and bug fixes to Tidy, we've also rolled out a series of bigger improvements to the functionality of some core pieces of the Tidy platform.

Today's update will bundle together a whole swatch of updates to Tidy that we've shipped in the past little while, and we have more on the way.

🛍 Shop - Sales, Default Image and More

The shop has seen the most attention - and we have even more coming!

To start, from a given product you can now set up a temporary sale price - It'll show as on sale in your shop, and you can easily revert it back after the sale period:

We've also given you the ability to set a default image for your store products. This can be managed from the Shop section inside the Web Pages section of Tidy:

And likewise, added the power to override social media information for a given product, so you can control what people see when you share it on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter:

We've made it easier to duplicate products quickly from the list, and added expanded reporting options on the Orders page:

Behind the scenes, we've also started improving the robustness of our shop to be more reliable and robust than ever before, and we look forward to the next set of bigger improvements here.

🎪 Events - More power from the transactions list

In events, we've added more options directly inside your events admin area - such as allowing you to directly refund attendees from the list, without having to switch out to finances. It still respects all of your club role permissions, so only those with finance permissions can do it - but makes it much easier when you have cancelled an event, for instance, and must refund every attendee:

💰 Payment and Finance Improvements

We've also worked on significantly improving how we generate and handle receipts behind the scenes, and to allow more easily generating old ones. As part of this, we've been working hard to make payments and finances in Tidy as robust as possible.

👨‍👩‍👦 Memberships - Managing Family Memberships

Finally, we've rolled out some fixes to managing family memberships, to make it clear when you can actually add more child and adult members, and to prevent a few cases where you would previously see error pages.

We received reports from some users that the autocomplete function in Tidy can be slow at times, and the results aren't always what they expect. This was a particular problem for organisations with large numbers of contacts.

Today we are rolling out a new autocomplete system.

You should notice that the existing autocomplete fields on many pages are faster, more resilient to variations in the spelling, and sorted by their relevance rather than alphabetically.

Over time we will be further tweaking the relevance algorithm to ensure optimal results.

Also posted in forum.tidyhq.com

For many users, the contacts section is a core part of their tidy experience. With the addition of Advanced Filters, we made it even more powerful by allowing you to slice and dice your data as you see fit.

Today, we're beginning the roll out of some new features which will make this even more useful again for your clubs - and based on feedback from you, our customers, some tweaks to how it works to make it fit your flow better.

Improved Filtering Attributes

We've added a whole bunch of new, more flexible filtering attributes to make it easier for you to find the exact members you care about.

Filtering on Event Attendees

You can now filter by members who have attended specific events:

Or, if you want to match multiple groups (e.g. to find anyone who has ever attended a Christmas Part), you can match across the event name:

Matching Groups with Partial Names

Likewise, you can now match across people in groups with partial names. Note that in large organisations, this may be slow when used on it's own.

For example, to find anyone in any group with the word "2022" in the name:

Combined with a well structured naming scheme for your groups, this levels up the ability to combine groups, especially when used with Smart Groups which will automatically update them.

Matching Memberships by a Membership Level Name

As a final example, if you have a consistent naming scheme from your membership name, you can now match against the name of the membership level, not just a single level, to apply the same kind of logic:

New Subscription Filtering Options

For advanced users, We've exposed more details around membership and subscription periods within them - Allowing you to filter by the latest subscription, as well as whether or not a given subscription is a renewal - Allowing you to, for instance, find all renewals in the last 30 days:

Filtering by Notes

Likewise, we can now filter by notes - search for contacts with notes from specific people, or with specific content, to make it easier than ever to find members with important details on them.

Only show matching subscriptions and memberships

Now, when filtering on subscriptions and memberships, we'll only show (and include in the CSV export) the matched subscriptions / memberships.

Previously, exporting and the table would confusingly list all when using advanced filters, where as our old, traditional filters selection would only show a subset.

This means if you have members with lots of different memberships, you'll now only see the ones that matter according to what you've chosen.

If you require the old behaviour, please contact support.

Smarter Smart Group Updating

Finally, to combine all of these and make it more powerful (and a hint at our next feature), we now more intelligently update smart groups. If we detect a smart group is time based, it'll automatically update daily - even if the members within haven't changed anything.