👋Introduction
Welcome to the Realpad Product Updates hub! Here, you’ll find all the latest updates, improvements, and new features that we’re rolling out to enhance your Realpad experience. Stay informed and get the most out of Realpad with our comprehensive update notes and release information.
Discover Product Updates
What are we currently working on?
Simplified and faster UX of the Deals section
Our goal: Transform Deal section from a tab-heavy, navigation-intensive interface into a clear, action-oriented control center.
Today: Completing core tasks - preparing contracts, creating payment schedules, adding customers and discounts - requires excessive navigation. Users jump between tabs, struggle to locate actions, and waste time on repetitive clicking - or even make mistakes.
Future: Deal is understandable and overviewable. The most common tasks on a deal are clear and follow actual business procedures and flows. Users (Sales agents, lawyers, accountants) complete tasks in fewer clicks with clear context and predictable outcomes.
New REST APIs
We are aware of a wide range of problems with our current set of API endpoints, and we are designing the next generation of our APIs.
Suboptimal architecture
Our endpoints are oriented around particular use cases; their naming implies specific actions and intents. For example, get-all-projects retrieves detailed price list information for all the projects, in an atomic way suitable for loading a mobile application that should then be able to work offline.
Endpoints reading from or writing to many different entities, and opaquely handling rich business logic, such as create-lead, are the norm at the moment.
A vast majority of the entities in our CRM are not exposed to any external manipulation.
The design of the endpoints for retrieving the price list information and Takeout data makes it hard to achieve the expected performance. Lacking a good automated rate-limiting mechanism, we are discovering troublesome clients and have to negotiate with them only retrospectively.
Our plans for the next generation are to build the endpoints around entities in a RESTful manner, and include means for the integrations to be notified of changes to the relevant entities (change the pull model to push). Access to full entities in a paginated manner, including bulk operations, is also planned.
Problematic authentication model
To use our existing endpoints, a login & password of a CRM user with particular permissions need to be passed as parameters in the request. The user experience of setting this up is very poor, with little to no self-service available to our clients and their integrators.
We are looking at options like API tokens, OAuth, and others for the next generation of APIs. We are considering providing a self-service playground for our integrators to build and test their solutions.
Input and output formats
Our typical endpoint expects a multipart/form-data POST request. The output types range from XML (the oldest, but also very widely used), through JSON for certain endpoints, through plaintext for endpoints that create and modify records, all the way to Excel files in the Takeout API range.
Most use cases needing to read data from the CRM are forced to use the Takeout API and parse Excel files, having to deal with configurable (and thus unstable) columns.
Our goal is to settle on JSON on the input and output side for the vast majority of the future endpoints.
Documentation
While public documentation is available, and a subset of our API integrators is subscribed to a technical newsletter, the current situation leaves much to be desired compared to the state of the art. Considering the fact that our clients are typically non-technical, we recognize the need to be in a dialog with them and their integrators when it comes to evolving the APIs, especially when it comes to breaking changes. This is currently hard to achieve due to a combination of product and organizational factors.
We expect to build the next set of endpoints in a way that makes it extremely easy to build solutions integrating with our APIs. We look to the best practices of companies like MailChimp and Stripe for inspiration in documentation, status pages, incident management, etc.
Automated invoicing (Integration with ERP)
Problem: After sales person signs a deal, and creates a payment schedule in Realpad, invoice data are manually re-typed to ERP systems such as Microsoft Business Central for the purpose of invoicing.
Solution: An integration that automatically transfers complete invoicing data (buyer, unit, amount, due date, ...) from Realpad to your ERP system with one click.
Support
If you have any questions, please contact us on [email protected].
Would you like to receive an email notification about regular product updates?
We’re building a community of power users who can shape our decisions and get access to early releases in exchange for their feedback. Are you a Realpad champion? Let us know! Join Realpad Champions.
Last updated