Simple In/Out Year in Review 2017

2018 is now upon us and we couldn’t be more excited.

2017 was another record-shattering year for Simple In/Out. We shipped a number of new features that had a broad impact on the way our customers use Simple In/Out, living up to our continued commitment to make Simple In/Out the best in/out board. These new features not only make Simple In/Out even better, but they lay the ground work for some exciting new things we have in store for 2018.

A huge thanks to our great customers! Every day we get to travel to Simply Made Apps HQ and work on the product we love with the best bunch of people ever. In many ways, we’re living out our dreams and we can’t thank our customers enough for the opportunity to serve them each and every day.

Here are just a few of the many features we delivered in 2017.

Office Hours: Simple In/Out works when you do

We began 2017 with a ground-breaking feature called Office Hours, which allows users to control the windows of time that they wish Simple In/Out to perform its automatic tasks. This feature not only helped those using Geofences avoid unnecessary updates on nights and weekends, but it also would be critical for new Notification features we shipped later (more on those below).

Notifications come to the native Mac app

We retired our Safari push notifications that required users go to their web browser and replaced them with notifications right in our native Mac app just like Windows. This may seem trivial, but combined with Office Hours this provided a lot more power to our Mac users.

Reminders sent right to your device

For the first time, Simple In/Out could send a reminder right to your phone if you had forgotten to check in/out. This was a popular request, and it couldn’t have been done without the additional power of Office Hours and Mac Notifications.

Safety notifications sent to you as well

Also taking advantage of Office Hours was Safety Notifications. Like reminders, this notifications come right to your device. Unlike reminders, they are for managers to be alerted when someone hasn’t checked in/out when they were expected to do so. This feature has had countless applications among our customers.

Invite your users to your Simple In/Out organization

Getting Simple In/Out setup the first time became easier with user invites. Send everyone in your company a link, they sign themselves up, and you’re all set.

New reports and new ways to create them

We shipped major enhancements to our reports to make it easier to target the users in the reports while also making reports faster to load. We also shipped two new reports, the Print/PDF report and the Export report, which both allow for up to 6 months of reporting data at a time.

Archive users to make them disappear while maintaining their data

Changing our report interfaces laid the foundation for allowing companies to archive users. Archiving a user takes them off the board while allowing admins to run reports on their data for historical purposes. No more exporting data for a rainy day.

More public links

Public Links saw an upgrade too. Companies can have more than one and can restrict them to specific groups of users if they wish.

It is also worth noting a few non-feature things that happened in 2017.

Our first contribution to the open source community

We publicly released our first open source library, Simple Scheduler, which we use internally to make our development lives’ easier. We’re flattered that fellow programmers love it as much as we do. We suspect this won’t be the last time we donate some of our code to the community.

We stood up for Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality is incredibly important to small businesses like ours located in North Dakota. The reason we can continue to build compelling products is because we can reach customers everywhere. We’re very disappointed in the actions of the FCC here in the United States, and we’ll continue to advocate on behalf of a free and open internet. We believe in an internet with no throttling, no blocking, and no paid prioritization. You can read our original blog posts here and here.

We hit full Spanish support for our entire website

We added support for the Spanish language in Simple In/Out in 2016, but in 2017 we launched our Spanish public site. Now Spanish users can see our Spanish language support everywhere.

It was quite the year and 2018 is positioned to be another big year for Simply Made Apps and Simple In/Out. We are very excited about our plans and we can’t wait to share them with you all.