In an effort to reduce the possibility of Kerika’s notifications ending up in your spam folder, we are making a bunch of changes: one that’s already gone into effect is that all notifications generated by Kerika — for example, when someone sends you a chat message, or you get your 6AM Task Summary email — will come from the same sender: notifications@mailer.kerika.com.
It would help us a lot if you whitelisted this sender email, either for your own personal email, or ideally for your organization’s entire domain.
If you have had a Kerika account team in place for a long time, we probably don’t know when specific people joined your team because we weren’t always tracking that information in the past.
As a result, your Manage Users tab in your Account page may show a Not Known value for something like the Joined Team value:
This isn’t something that you will see, as a customer, but we have spent several months improving our internal systems for managing users, accounts, payments and invoices.
We used to do things in a very ad hoc way before, as we concentrated all our efforts on improving the Kerika app, but we realized earlier this year that we had reached the limits of ad hoc approaches and needed a lot more automation to handle growth.
Everything, pretty much, is now automated: our admin staff can quickly look up any any user or account, see which payments have been made (online or offline), and manage changes to accounts.
A new feature that should help our customers better manage their account teams, particularly in large organizations: the Account Owner can export (in Excel format) a complete list of everyone working on any boards owned by that account.
This feature can be found in the Manage Users tab of your Account page:
Exporting Account Team Members
The exported data also includes the IP address last used by an account team member: this can help IT departments review their security periodically, or investigate any concerns they may have about misuse.
If you are using Kerika with Google, you don’t have to convert your documents to the Google Docs format in order to use Google Drive.
Google Docs Format Preference
You can use this preference setting to ensure that your Microsoft Office documents, for example, are retained in MS Office format even while they they are stored and shared using Google Drive.
With the implementation of our shiny, new and fully automated billing system, it’s become a little more important for our customers to make sure that all the users within their organization are working in the right accounts — preferably, a single account.
Working in a single account, rather than a bunch of separate accounts, has advantages:
It makes it much easier to pay for subscriptions: if all the Kerika users within a department are working on boards owned by a single account, then only that account needs to purchase subscriptions. This means less invoicing and payment stuff for you to worry about.
It also ensures that all project assets — boards, documents, canvases, etc. — are owned by a single entity. And ideally this single entity would be a service account rather than an individual. Many of our customers are using service accounts, set up using emails like kerika@example.com.
We have done a ton of improvements to the new user sign-up process to help guide people to working with their coworkers, using accounts that the coworkers have already set up, instead of creating new accounts.
But, there are still situations where an organization may find that, across all of its Kerika users, there are too many different accounts. If this is the case for you, we can help: we can consolidate multiple accounts into a single account if you ask us.
This consolidation preserves all the existing boards, content, and project teams: it just changes the ownership of everything to be a single user ID.
We used to have a feature that let you get a task summary email from Kerika everyday at 6AM that summarized all the things that you were responsible for that are overdue, due this week or due next week.
When we introduced the Views feature, we thought perhaps this 6AM email was not needed any more, so we took it out of the user interface for a few months — although people who had previously been using this feature continued to get their daily emails.
It seems like we underestimated the usefulness of this feature: new users started asking for something just like it, so we have brought the feature back. (And thanks for helping us understand we had screwed up in taking it away.)
You can access this feature from your Preferences page:
Daily Task Reminder Preference
“Responsible for” includes not just the items that were assigned to you, but also items on boards where you are a Board Admin (and, presumably, have some responsibility for.)
This email can show your tasks organized in two different ways, and, if you like, you can get both sent to you every day:
6AM Task Summary Options
A typical task summary, where tasks are grouped by date, would look like this:
Example of 6AM Task Summary
The board names and card names are also links that you can use to open the relevant work item.
Our new billing system makes it much easier to manage your Kerika account, and one of the feature we built is easy online access to your Kerika transactions:
Billing History
Please note that we are not showing retroactive data: only transactions entered into after August 2018, when we rolled out this feature, will show up.
If you purchase subscriptions, or do other actions like request a refund, Kerika prompts you to update your Billing Information:
Updating Billing Information
This information is needed to complete a transaction:
Your name or organization (school, college, nonprofit, company, government agency…) are used to ensure invoices and receipts are addressed to the correct person (the purchaser).
Your phone number is needed to handle any problems we face processing your invoices or purchases.
Your address is used to create invoices and receipts, and to check whether we need to charge you Washington State sales tax.
At the bottom of this screen you can optionally include Billing Contacts: people who need to get copies of all your transactions, such as your organization’s Purchasing Department or outside accountants/bookkeepers.
We store this information securely: as you may have already noticed, all access to Kerika servers is done using SSL/HTTPS, and within the Kerika virtual network, our servers communicate with each other using SSL as well.
We never ask for your credit card information: we use Stripe to handle all online payments, and we never see your credit card at any time.
If you pay by bank check or electronic funds transfer, this information is handled by Bank of America: details of these transactions, such as your bank information, are stored only at Bank of America and not stored on the Kerika servers.
The rollout of our new billing system seems to have been smooth — so far, fingers crossed! — and with this you now get better controls over who is part of your Account Team:
Manage Users
Please note that you don’t get charged for Visitors: if someone is only a Visitor on your boards — i.e. is not a Team Member or Board Admin on any board you own — you don’t need to pay for this person.
It doesn’t matter how many boards this person “visits”.
Visitors do show up on your Manage My Team list in the Manage Users tab, so you are reminded that they have access to some, possibly all, of your boards, and you can remove a Visitor entirely from your Account in the same way that you might remove a Team Member or Board Admin.
