PBJ Suite release — your settings move into the CRM, and every refusal explains itself

Six plugins shipped together: PBJ CRM 1.76.0, PBJ Helpdesk 2.57.0, PBJ Invoicing 1.42.0, PBJ Dispatch & Appointments 1.34.1, PBJ Vault 1.18.0 and PBJ RingCentral 1.11.0. This is the settings overhaul — the biggest reorganisation of where things live since the portal itself — plus everything from a week of daily field-testing.

Your settings live in the product now. Almost everything that used to send you to the website admin opens in the CRM: who sees what, custom fields and deal stages, the recycle bin, file limits, notifications and marketing rules, imports, sync review, the setup checklist, reports, add-on settings and the theming screen. The website admin collapses to one menu with five screens — Connections, Money, Mail, Danger and Licences — and everything on those five is there for one reason: it can spend money, break a connection, change where your mail comes from, or destroy data. No screen was removed and no address stopped working; bookmarks and the sign-in return journeys all still land where they should.

The owner can finish setting up their own CRM. Imports and sync review moved from the administrator bar to the owner level — the person the product calls Owner could not import a contact list on day one, and that complaint is what started this whole train. Money and credentials stayed exactly where they were.

Everyone gets My settings. One screen collecting what used to live in four places: your eight notification choices — now one answer per way of telling you, in app, by email, or as a browser notice — quiet hours that hold everything except the running-late warnings until morning, your working days and hours, an Away switch that auto-assign respects and explains, light or dark or match-my-device, row height, where you land when you sign in, your calendar feed, your assistant connection, your own phone line and your own saved replies. The site’s look stays the owner’s; how it looks to you is yours.

Managers get a settings screen for the first time. One screen per group they run: the group’s notification defaults, who is in it, which ticket categories land there, and who picks up unclaimed work — nobody, round robin, or one named person, with anybody marked away skipped. Every read and write re-checks the group by id, so a manager only ever reaches a group they actually run.

“Who can do what” is a screen instead of a phone call. Every act in the suite against the four levels — employee, manager, owner, administrator — with a plain-English note and where the setting lives. An owner sees the whole table; a manager sees their own column; an employee gets one sentence and a card of what they can and cannot do, money first. The help desk and invoicing contribute their own rows, so the table grows with the suite.

Every refusal explains itself. “You do not have permission” is gone across the whole suite. A refusal now names the level, names somebody on your team who holds it, and offers the thing you can do right now — “A manager sets up repeating invoices. Mindy runs Billing. Ask Mindy to set it up, or send it once instead.”

Settings changes are on the record. A new change log — who changed which setting, when, and from what to what — written automatically whenever settings are saved. A change to anything held back of house, a payment key or a mailbox, is recorded as having changed and never with its value: secrets stay write-only. And “who sees what” widened from one switch to a switch-plus-exceptions, so tickets, invoices, bookings, contacts and deals can each be opened up or scoped separately.

A line you save is yours until a manager shares it. Saved invoice line items are personal first: an employee’s new line no longer lands straight in everybody’s price list — a manager promotes it when it belongs there. Every line that already existed stays shared, exactly as it was.

The add-ons moved their settings in too. Shared canned replies are editable on the front end with their formatting kept; invoice reminders and late fees are editable from the CRM, warnings included; all sixteen of Dispatch’s booking and reminder emails are editable in the portal; the RingCentral setup half opens in the CRM while everything that could break a working connection stays deliberately behind; and the Vault’s settings screen opens for a CRM owner instead of falling back to the administrator level. Where a screen stays in the website admin, the product now says so and says why, instead of leaving you to find out.

And a week of field-testing is in here too. The Agenda groups your day by what the work is waiting on — Late, Due today, New work, Waiting response, Backlog — with a Focused view and a Board view. Convert asks what should happen to the record you converted from instead of leaving the same job counting twice. Conversations can be read newest-first everywhere. Details cards read one fact per line. Photos in a text message appear as photos. The Inbox is what is waiting on you — work you have answered stands down until the customer replies. And the portal notices when the server has moved past the build in your browser and offers a reload, without ever reloading on its own.

Every update is free for licence holders and arrives through the normal update channel — your site will offer it within a few hours. Full version-by-version notes: PBJ CRM, PBJ Helpdesk, PBJ Invoicing, PBJ Dispatch & Appointments, PBJ Vault, PBJ RingCentral.