July 19, 2023

💎 You can now add new customers to your customer list!

Notice something shiny and blue in the top right corner of your Customers table? That’s the brand new button you have to add new customers to your publication! When you add a new customer, they’ll appear in the your Customers list and their information will auto-fill whenever you place a notice on their behalf. You can also look them up by name, email, or organization. This feature will help you ensure that your customers’ information is accurate, plus allow you to proactively set custom rates and other settings before a customer even places notices through Column! Check out more details here.

🗑️ You can now delete customers from your customer list!

In the spirit of giving you more control over managing your customers in Column, you can now remove customers by clicking on the little trashcan under “Actions.” Before you delete them for good, don’t worry: a box will pop up asking you to confirm. Hopefully this function will let you keep your customer list clean and up-to-date. And don’t worry, the customer you delete won’t get a notification when you delete them. Our Help Center article gives you more info on how to do this. 

😉 Check out your rates table. It’s looking sharp…

You can now review and update your rates with way more control. That’s right — we redesigned the rates table! Here are all the new fun things you can do:

• Create additional fees that are charged once, per mailed affidavit, or per publication date. These fees can be for specific rates, or for the whole paper!
• Decide whether a rate charges the same or different amounts for each publication date
• Allow rates to apply to display ads or liners only
• Change your paper’s default display and liner rates
• Filter the table based on rate type and price to find what you’re looking for

Check out this Help Center article for more deets on how to get the most out of this!

🍕You can grant early access to affidavits for a whole organization!

Previously, you could allow only specific customers to receive affidavits before payment. Now, you can set this preference on an entire customer organization, so that it applies to everyone in that organization. This will hopefully reduce some manual labor on your part — now, you won’t have to remember to go through and grant access to members one by one. More info on this here. 

💅Another small but sparkly design change!

That’s right. Your notice details page got a facelift. All functionality should be exactly the same — things just look slightly different, and hopefully better! Now, when a publication date passes, the date turns green! The activity log is also no longer hidden, but visible on the side! And your affidavit buttons should make more sense, too.

June 20, 2023

💅 Makeover Alert! Our new design simplifies notice placement! 

Next time you place a notice in Column, you’ll see a brand-new look with easier steps and a more intuitive design. We can’t wait for you to check it out. We redesigned the look of our app for a few reasons:

1. Make Column easier to use. We’ve rearranged the order of steps a customer takes to place a notice to make Column more intuitive!
2. Improve the way Column looks. We wanted Column to look better for when you place a notice, so that it’s a simpler and more pleasing aesthetic experience.
3. Reduce errors and pave the way for new features. As part of this redesign, we made technical improvements that might not be visible to you, but they make the process of placing a notice in Column better and less prone to errors. These technical improvements also make it easier for us to improve the app and add exciting new features in the future!

We hope you like our new look. So far, 82% of users have reviewed our new design as “easy” or “very easy” to use! Log in to Column to start placing notices now. And let us know what you think! Questions? Check out these FAQs.

May 22, 2023

💸 A friendly reminder for publishers to update your invoice after editing!

Sometimes when you edit a notice, the price or publication dates change. In these cases, you might want to update the invoice, so we’ve added a nifty reminder at the end of your editing process. We hope this reminder helps ensure that the line items and amounts of your invoices stay correct, so you can always collect accurate payments.

🧩 Does Column integrate with your other ad management platform? We’ve made it better for publishers!

It’s important that Column plays well with your existing ad management system like AdPoint or VisionData. While some platforms automatically sync changes made to notices, others require manual syncing. To ensure smooth coordination between Column and your other systems, we’ve added a helpful reminder to manually sync your notices after editing if you make changes after the deadline. It’s all about making sure every puzzle piece fits together nicely for a hassle-free experience!

💌 A more comprehensive Customers table for publishers!

Previously, customers would only appear in your Customers list after you confirmed their first notice. But not anymore! As soon as someone places a notice in your newspaper for the first time, they’ll be instantly linked to your newspaper and added to your Customers table. Hopefully, this feature helps make your customer management more efficient!

May 11, 2023

🐠 You can now include images in liner ads!

Click on the new button in your text box toolbar to add images to your liner ads, or upload your ad and its image directly from your computer into the text box. Everything should show up swimmingly! You can even move the image around, add text above or below it, make it bigger and smaller… We hope this will make things a lot easier for you. Read our Help Center article for more information on how to use this new feature!

March 20, 2023

💌 Customers can leave formatting notes on notices!

We’ve given you and your customers the option to leave notes on notices that might be a little bit more high-maintenance, aka require more complex formatting. That way, if it’s too tricky for your customers to use our text editor to format their larger files, they can still communicate with you via Column about how their notice should be handled. For now, notes are only available for notices submitted without formatting — check the Help Center to learn more about this flow.

🏡 Making customers feel at home in Column, right away.

It used to be that when you uploaded notices on behalf of certain customers, they were automatically registered in Column as individuals. They didn’t get the chance to join organizations, even if their colleagues were already part of organizations on Column. Now, these customers will have the option to join their existing organization from the get-go, so they can access the right affidavits, invoices, and shared notice history right away. Or, if they’re the first to the party, these customers can create a new organization and invite new members to join.

🪶 Notices of a feather can now folder together.

We heard from you that it was difficult to organize your notices after you downloaded them from Column. Now, when you download your notices into a folder from Column, you can choose to group them in folders by notice type! Yep — your pagination process just sped up a notch. This update applies for publishers with custom notice types who download notices manually from Column.