Roadmap
What is built, and what is not
This is the only page on the site that describes things which do not exist yet, and it says so at the top rather than in a footnote. Everything marked as built is running now. Everything else is a plan, and plans move.
On every plan
The core, built and running
This is what a free organisation gets, permanently. Not a sample of it, and not a version with the useful parts removed.
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Built
Relationships, and everything hanging off them
People and organisations as one family of records with configurable types, the connections between them, a full timeline, files held against the record they belong to, and consent recorded as a fact with a date and a source rather than as a tick box.
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Built
Leads, from where they came from to what they became
Capture with a source, qualification in your own words, conversion into a relationship and a piece of work in one step, and reporting that tells you which sources actually produce customers rather than which produce enquiries.
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Built
Sales, with your stages and an honest forecast
Pipelines with the stages your business actually uses, opportunities you move between them, a record of how long each one sat where, and a forecast weighted by stage rather than by optimism.
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Built
Work, the calendar, and knowing what is late
Tasks against any record, a daily view of what is due and what has slipped, and appointments that report a clash instead of refusing to make one, because the person booking usually knows something the calendar does not.
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Built
Search, import, export and the dashboard
Search across everything you are allowed to see and nothing you are not. Import with a preview you approve before a row is written. A complete export at any time on any plan. A dashboard of the measures a small organisation looks at on a Monday, scoped to each person.
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Built
Permissions, ownership, sensitivity and the audit trail
Roles defined in your own words, record ownership, a grant for sensitive records that is separate from the role, sharing, and a record of who changed what and when that nobody can tidy up, including us.
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Built
Signing in, and proving who you are
Passkeys, two factor codes, recovery codes, and SAML single sign on for organisations whose identity provider needs to be the source of truth. Two factor is on every plan, because it is an obligation rather than an upsell.
Bought rather than absent
The modules, also built and running
These are bought rather than absent from the product. Some arrive with a plan and some are modules bought beside one, which is a second decision at purchase rather than a step up the ladder, and which needs a plan of Standard or above underneath it. Which is which is on the pricing page, stated as a list rather than as a grid of ticks you have to interpret.
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Built
Email, conversations and a shared inbox
Messages held against the relationship they concern, so a thread is part of the record rather than in one person's mailbox. What was agreed survives the person who agreed it going on leave.
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Built
Follow ups, sequences and booking
Sequences that stop the moment someone replies, which is the single behaviour that separates a follow up from a nuisance. A booking page that writes into the same calendar your colleagues are already in.
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Built
Marketing, audiences and automation
Audiences that keep themselves current as records change, campaigns that check consent for every individual person at the moment of sending rather than at the moment of building the list, and rules that cannot run away because they are bounded by design.
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Built
Service, matters and the customer portal
Matters with targets counted in working hours rather than elapsed ones, so a Friday afternoon enquiry is not breached by Monday morning. A portal where a customer signs in and sees their own enquiries and nothing else.
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Built
Quotations, products and price lists
A catalogue of what you sell, quotations built from it, and a link a customer can open to read one without an account.
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Built
Projects, invoices, credit notes and contracts
Work planned and delivered, in phases with their own dates. Invoices numbered at the moment they are sent, so an abandoned draft leaves no gap, and settled by recorded payments. Credit notes that cannot exceed what remains uncredited on the invoice they correct. Contracts an organisation can insist a second person approves before they are sent.
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Built
A knowledge base customers can search
Articles marked for customers appear in the portal, searchable, each asking whether it helped. The same article your colleagues read, published to a different audience, so there is one thing to keep current rather than two.
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Built
Custom record types, web pages and connectors
Record types you define for the things your trade has that ours does not. A small set of public pages and forms that feed leads directly. Google and Microsoft calendars connected both ways, so a meeting booked here appears there and busy time there blocks a slot here. Accounting is still an export rather than a connection.
Describing software you intend to write as though it already exists produces signups that leave within a fortnight, and a reader who checks one claim and finds it false stops believing the true ones.
Which is why this page names the gaps rather than describing them as coming soon.
Not built
What is missing, and what is deliberate
Two different things, kept apart. Something being built is a gap. Something decided against is a boundary, and a boundary is more useful to you than a promise.
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Being built
More systems to connect to
The connector framework is built and a handful of systems are wired to it. The list is shorter than it will be. If the one you need is missing, saying so is the fastest way to move it up.
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Being built
Reports you build, save, schedule and share
Three quarters of this is built. Writing your own question, keeping the answer and sharing it with colleagues is what a saved view already is, on every plan. The missing quarter is the schedule: a kept question cannot be put on a timer, so nobody gets a number by email on the first of the month without opening the product to look.
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Not started
Deeper reporting on the service module
Matters record what happened and when they were due. Reporting across them, by team and by target, is not written.
Decided against
Six things that are not coming
Permanently, or for long enough that treating them as coming would be dishonest. A boundary you can rely on is worth more to a buyer than a promise nobody has costed.
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Decided against
Accounting, payroll and tax filing
Payroll and tax filing carry obligations and testing regimes that would take over the product, and doing them adequately is worse than not doing them at all. Consonas reads from the systems that do them properly rather than keeping the number twice.
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Decided against
Billing from recorded time
Time itself is recorded, against a project on the delivery module, with a view of what each person has put down against their capacity. What is declined is the half that turns it into money: rates, job costing and an invoice raised from a timesheet. If billing by recorded time is the core of your business, an agency or practice management product will serve you better and we would rather say so than build a worse version of it. This entry said the whole of time tracking was declined until an audit found the feature shipped and routed, which is the exact failure this page exists to prevent, in the direction nobody checks.
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Decided against
Stock, point of sale and ecommerce
The catalogue that exists is a price list for building quotations, and treating it as inventory would be a mistake. A product that has to be right about physical quantities is a different discipline with a different failure mode.
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Decided against
Cold outbound tooling
No contact database, no address finding, no automated multichannel prospecting. This is a position instead of a gap. The product records consent as a fact about a person and checks it at the moment of sending, and tooling designed for people who never consented sits badly beside that.
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Decided against
Sector specific editions
There is no recruitment edition and there will not be one. Seventeen sector pages describe how to model seventeen trades in one product. Editions fragment the thing everybody is testing and they let a supplier charge twice for the same software.
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Decided against
A native mobile application and offline mode
For now, and stated as a limitation rather than dressed up. It works on a phone as a web application. If your people regularly work in plant rooms and basements without signal, that is a genuine reason to choose something else, and the maintenance page says so on its own page rather than only here.
Reading this page
What the four states actually mean
Built
Running in production now, for customers, today. Not written and awaiting release, not working on somebody's machine, and not built in a reduced form we intend to finish. If an item says built and you cannot find it, that is a defect in this page and we would like to be told.
There is one qualification worth making because the security page makes it too: built and enabled are different words. Two protections are written and tested and not yet switched on in production, and that page names both rather than counting them as done.
Being built
Someone is working on it. There is no date, because a date from a company our size is a guess in a confident voice, and a missed date on a public page costs more credibility than the feature was ever going to buy.
Not started
We intend to and have not begun. This is the state most likely to change if you write to us, because nothing has been invested and the order is genuinely decided by what people say is stopping them.
Decided against
Not a gap. A boundary. These are things we have thought about and concluded we should not do, usually because doing them adequately would take over the product or because somebody else already does them properly. An item that finally gets sized and turns out to be one of those moves down into this state instead of ageing quietly under not started, where it would look like patience.
Keeping this state separate from not started is the whole reason it exists. Knowing that we will never do payroll is worth considerably more to a buyer than a vague assurance that it is coming, because the first is something you can plan around and the second is something you have to keep checking.
How we decide
What gets built next, and why
A described problem beats a named feature
The requests that move are the ones that say what is stopping somebody, in their own business, with enough detail to be sized. A feature request tells us your proposed solution. A problem tells us what the solution has to do, and often the answer turns out to be smaller and better than the feature that was asked for.
Custom record types exist because four separate trades needed the durable record to be something other than a person, and none of them could say so in the vocabulary the product had at the time. Nobody asked for custom record types. Four people described a building, a household, a case and a party.
Obligations go to the front
Anything that is an obligation on our customers rather than a convenience gets built before the convenience, and it lands on every plan including the free one. That is why the audit trail, consent records, subject access tooling and complete export are on a plan that costs nothing while quotations are not.
Anything that can lose data gets refused first and built second
Where a mistake is expensive, the first version refuses rather than guesses. An invoice number is never issued out of sequence. A credit note cannot exceed what remains uncredited. One person cannot approve their own contract. Those refusals were written before the surrounding features were finished, because a refusal added later has to be retrofitted against data that has already gone wrong.
We would rather build one thing properly than three adequately
Which is why the list of things decided against is as long as the list of things planned. Every item we take on is one we then have to keep working for as long as the product exists, and a feature no one maintains is worse than a gap somebody knows about.
Your decision
Whether to start on what is built, or wait for what is not
Four states are only useful if they change what you do. Here is what each one should change, including the case where the answer is to buy from someone else.
If the deciding feature is marked built
Start now, and test that specific thing in the first week instead of the sixth. Not by reading the product page about it, and not by watching somebody demonstrate it, but by doing the real job with real records and seeing what it does when your data is awkward rather than tidy.
The free plan exists so that this costs you an afternoon. If the thing is not there, or is not what you pictured, you have found that out at the cheapest possible moment and we would like to hear which item misled you, because a heading that reads as more than it delivers is a defect in exactly the same family as a page that is out of date.
Testing it yourself is also the only evidence available. We do not hold the certifications a formal procurement process will ask for, and the customers page says plainly that there is no one yet to put in the referenceable customers field.
If the deciding feature is being built or not started
You have three options and each has a cost worth naming. You can start anyway on the strength of everything else, treating the item as though it will never arrive, in which case you get a working system now and a pleasant surprise later or no surprise at all. You can wait, which sounds free and is not: waiting means another year of the spreadsheet, the shared inbox and the thing you already know is not working. Or you can buy elsewhere, which is a perfectly sound answer and one we would rather you reached now than in month six.
What you should not do is the fourth thing, which is to start on the assumption that it is nearly here. Nothing on this page is nearly here, because we do not use the word, and an item can sit in being built for a long time at a company our size when the person building it is also the person answering the address.
If the deciding feature is on the decided against list
Then the decision is made, and the useful part is that it is made now rather than after a migration. Buy the thing that does it properly. If billing by recorded time is the centre of your business, an agency or practice management product will serve you better. If you need to be right about physical quantities, that is an inventory discipline with a different failure mode. If the answer is payroll, it is a payroll product, kept in step with what HM Revenue and Customs asks of one, and no amount of asking will change that.
Write to us anyway if you are unsure which side of the line your requirement sits, and say what the requirement is. We will tell you honestly, and telling somebody we are the wrong supplier is a cheaper conversation for both of us than the alternative.
What makes any of this safe to be wrong about
The reason a decision taken from this page is recoverable is not on this page. It is that a complete export is free, on every plan, at any time, in a format that opens without our software. That is what caps the cost of being wrong about an unbuilt item at one afternoon of setup and one export, and it is the reason we would rather you tested us for a fortnight than read us for an hour.
The four states
Asked about the roadmap itself
Can we pay to have something built sooner?
No, and the refusal is in your interest as much as ours. A paid commitment to one organisation turns a product company into a consultancy for that organisation, everyone else's work stops while it is honoured, and the thing that gets built is shaped around one business rather than around the problem. What we will do is tell you honestly whether something is coming, which is the part you actually needed.
Will you commit to a delivery date in a contract?
No. A date from a company this size is a guess in a confident voice, and a contractual one is a guess with a penalty attached that we would then have to price into what you pay. If a date is genuinely the deciding factor, treat the item as though it will never exist and decide on that basis, which is the advice we would give about any supplier of our size.
An item says built and I cannot find it. What now?
Three usual causes, in order of likelihood. It is on a paid plan and you are on a different one, which the pricing page answers instead of this one. It exists under a name you did not search for, which the help centre usually resolves in a minute. Or this page is wrong, which happens and is a defect we would like to be told about, because it is the exact failure this page was rewritten to stop.
Does anything ever come off the decided against list?
Only if the reason stops being true, and the reason is different for each item. Payroll and tax filing are refused because of obligations and testing regimes that would take over the product, and no volume of requests changes that. Something refused because another system already does it properly could in principle move if that stopped being the case. Nothing moves because it was asked for often.
Is the order of each list the order things will be built in?
No. The lists are grouped by state and are not ranked within it. Publishing a rank would create a queue that readers plan around, and the order genuinely changes when somebody describes a problem well enough to be sized, which is not something a published position can survive.
Is there a beta programme or an early access list?
No. An early access programme is usually a way of shipping unfinished work while calling it something else, and it splits customers into people running the real product and people running the experiment. Everyone gets the same product on the same day, which is a simpler promise to keep and an easier one to check.
How will I know when something moves state?
This page, which is updated when something moves rather than on a quarterly cycle. If you wrote to us about a specific item, you get a reply to the address that wrote, because that is a conversation rather than an announcement.
We are on the free plan. Is any of this for us?
Yes, in both directions. A request from a free organisation is read the same way as any other, and several of the things in the built lists are there because someone who was paying us nothing explained a problem clearly. In the other direction, the obligations stay on the free plan permanently, so nothing on this page is working towards a day when they move up a tier.
How to change the order
Write to hello@consonas.com and tell us what is stopping you using Consonas. Not what you would like in general, but the specific thing that means you cannot move off what you have now.
At our size that genuinely changes the order, and it is the reason several of the items above moved from the bottom of this page to the top of it. There is no customer advisory board and no voting portal. There is an address, and someone who reads it.
This page is updated when something moves rather than on a quarterly cycle, so the date it was last touched is visible in the page history rather than being a claim we make about ourselves.