HubSpot’s December releases: A manager’s guide

Features released last month offer customizable reporting, improved collaboration, enhanced payment functionality and ROI-boosting API to Facebook. Check out the details below.  

HubSpot Reporting now supports customizable fiscal years, dashboard property filters and parent-child calculated properties

Is your fiscal year different from the calendar year? HubSpot for fiscal year forecasting and goals now lets you customize reporting for your fiscal year, eliminating the need to download forecasts and goals and manipulate them manually. 

Without asking your admin for custom reporting changes, you can see the info you need for specific properties and segments of your CRM on dashboards using the new property filters (in beta). Previously, the date range was the only filter available for the entire dashboard.

If you target multi-location businesses or have other parent-child company profiles, you can now get a more accurate view of the parent company’s entire business in your reports, saved views and more using calculated properties for parent-child companies (in beta). For example, the sum of the revenue for all the parent’s child companies could be a calculated property used in a report. 

Internal communication improvements for team efficiency and centralization

Managers can make sure the most important information is stored on the HubSpot records for contacts, companies, deals and tickets by using the new feature to convert Slack messages to Notes. 

This is especially helpful for teams using Slack’s free plan, where older messages disappear and for important transaction-related communications between teams that need a date-stamped record, e.g., when a client cancels a contract. Previously, HubSpot supported sending notes to Slack channels via workflow, not sending from Slack to HubSpot. 

Remote team members can more easily contact other team members from their phones, sending you to relevant records to quickly solve a customer or internal issue, using the new internal “@” mention notifications in the HubSpot mobile app. 

Previously this feature was only available for desktops or laptops, causing a lag in communication time for team members working from mobile devices. 

To improve internal communication and customer experiences, non-admin team members can quickly and efficiently find, share or clone each other’s meeting links. In addition, managers or team leads without Super Admin access can now be given permission to create, edit and delete these meeting links on behalf of other users.

HubSpot Payments updates increase sales and adoption potential

Reduce friction for customers to increase upsells and cross-sells with the new optional products featured in HubSpot payment links. This feature eliminates the previously manual, time-consuming and confusing process of creating payment links for each product or product bundle you offer. This release may make using HubSpot Payments more effective than issuing invoices or quotes and attributing additional revenue to a specific sales, marketing or customer success activity.

Increase sales, decrease the sales cycle and reduce manual work for your team by using the new release to sell multiple subscriptions on different frequencies in one checkout experience. This feature is especially helpful for professional services firms with recurring client payments on different billing frequencies or different term lengths in one contract.

Previously, your team had to create multiple quotes and invoices that could potentially confuse customers. This functionality could increase the likelihood of your company using HubSpot subscriptions, which allows you to monitor recurring revenue from different products.

Does your finance team use QuickBooks? HubSpot Payments now supports the creation of refund receipts in QuickBooks, increasing the chance of financial approval to use HubSpot Payments to enable non-finance managers to report on revenue in HubSpot. 

Improve marketing accessibility, conversions and campaign insights

Improve your Facebook advertising performance, personalization and measurement with the new Facebook Conversions API for Forms (in beta). This functionality may lower your ad spend by linking your website and Meta’s marketing data, which yields increased control of content and times for sharing. 

Gain more visibility and efficiency into event and campaign performance by storing your marketing event data as an object in HubSpot, which you can now associate with your HubSpot campaigns. Offline events data association is not supported. 

Make your content more accessible and comply with regulations for hearing-impaired access using the new video subtitles feature.