PBJ Suite release — nine tabs become five, a merge you can undo, and settings that stop sending you to the admin

Five plugins shipped together today: PBJ CRM 1.57.0, PBJ Helpdesk 2.44.0, PBJ Invoicing 1.32.0, PBJ Dispatch & Appointments 1.23.0 and PBJ Vault 1.14.0. Update from Plugins in your own dashboard as usual — CRM first, then the rest.

Nine tabs across the top, plus a second row of pills, are now five tabs. Work, Customers, Field, Money and Insight. Everything that was there is still there — it is grouped by what you are trying to do rather than by which part of the system it came out of. The second row is gone entirely, because a menu that needs a second row is a menu that has stopped answering the question.

A rail down the left, and a bar along the bottom. The rail holds the places you move between most, so you are not opening a menu to reach them. The bar carries a breadcrumb saying where you are, a Back button, and a pager that steps you from one record straight to the next — no going back to the list first, which is what everybody was doing twenty times a day.

A jump box. Press Cmd+K, or Ctrl+K on Windows, anywhere in the portal and start typing where you want to go.

A Create menu, and an account menu. Starting a new anything is one place in the header now. Your account menu sits at the top right, and Settings has moved into it — which is where people kept looking for it.

A new Midnight preset, and a Theming screen on the front end. Underneath the presets there is now a layer of colour settings the new navigation reads, so the rail, the footer and the menus take their colours from the theme you already chose instead of inventing their own. Owners and managers can change how the portal looks from the portal itself, without going into the website admin at all.

Contacts are one list. Businesses and people sit together, small chips mark which is which, and tick boxes with a bar let you do one thing to several at once. Merging two records now shows you a review screen before anything happens.

And a merge can be undone for up to 30 days. A merge now leaves a record of exactly what was merged, so putting it back is a decision rather than a rescue operation. A duplicate suggestion you dismiss for a business also stays dismissed for good, instead of coming back next week.

Settings stop sending you out to the website admin. A PBJ module can now describe its settings to the CRM as plain data, and the CRM draws them itself inside the portal — no separate admin screen, no second look and feel. Twelve of the sixteen module settings panels render in the portal as of today: the helpdesk’s five, dispatch’s five, and the invoice theme and email templates. What they do has not changed. Only where they live, and what they look like when you get there.

Handing a ticket over is one act, done at the ticket. Open it, type a name into the picker, choose the person, done — instead of picking somebody in one place and then crossing the screen to apply it. The six separate assign controls scattered around the helpdesk have all been brought onto that same picker, so it works the same way wherever you do it.

The Vault’s front end is sub-databases and records, and nothing else. That is what it is used for day to day, so that is all it shows. Deciding who else may see a particular record has moved to the website admin, beside the other owner-only controls that already lived there — moved, not removed. Nothing about the vault itself changes: no schema change, and no change to your passphrase, your recovery code or anything stored.

Manage is the screen you land on for visits, and the strip of sub-tabs above it is gone — the filters already on Manage did everything the strip did. The visits portal also takes the CRM’s theme and the suite’s shared cards now, so it looks like the rest of the portal instead of like a separate product bolted on beside it.

Fixed: the keyboard shortcuts. There were three separate causes, independent of one another, and all three are fixed. Fixed: the page was 28 pixels taller than the window — padding on the canvas was doing it, which let content slide underneath the header when you scrolled. Fixed: four module panels had no way to close them, and they all have one now.

Fixed in the helpdesk: the “it worked” message destroyed itself the instant it appeared. It was being put on the screen a moment before a redraw that wiped it straight off again — in five separate places, all five fixed. The agent directory was also being fetched five times per screen instead of once.

Full details on each changelog: PBJ CRM · PBJ Helpdesk · PBJ Invoicing · PBJ Dispatch & Appointments · PBJ Vault. Updates are offered automatically to licensed sites.