Features
Feature requests across all Ridgeway products
Bigger Text OptionDepot managerOur drivers are reading a run sheet through a windscreen in daylight, often over fifty. The text is about as small as the phone allows and there is no way to change it in the app.Carmen Ruiz The app should be following the phone's own text size setting and it clearly is not, so this may be a bug we can fix rather than a feature to build. Checking which it is.Replan Mid-RouteOperationsWhen a drop fails or a customer moves a slot at 11am, we rebuild the whole run by hand. The optimiser only helps at the point we plan, which is the point we know least.Carmen Ruiz Agreed that the planning moment is the moment you know least. Being honest about the hard part: a replan has to respect what the driver has already done and where the vehicle actually is, so it needs live position rather than the morning's plan. Scoping that before we promise a date.Hold Seats for PressA box office managerWe keep a handful of seats back for press and guests on every show and currently do it by buying them ourselves and refunding later, which makes our sales figures nonsense.Ben Ito Buying your own seats to work around us is also quietly corrupting the numbers you report, so this is worth more than its vote count. Scoping proper holds that sit outside the sales figures.Idempotent RefundsAn integration leadPayments take an idempotency key. Refunds do not, so a timeout on our side means we genuinely cannot tell whether the customer has been refunded once or twice without going to look.Dmitri Novak That is an inconsistency in our API rather than a gap in yours, and refunds are the worse half to have left out. Checking whether anything downstream assumes refunds are unkeyed before we commit to a date.Save a ViewA finance managerI build the same three filtered views every Monday morning: failures by reason, refunds by product, and settlements for the week. Ten minutes each week rebuilding something I have built forty times.Carmen Ruiz Ten minutes a week rebuilding the same three things is the sort of cost that never gets reported because everybody assumes it is normal. Thank you for reporting it. Looking at saved views that can be shared with the rest of your team, so this is set up once rather than once per person.Export for BookkeepingBusiness bankingOur business customers download a CSV and then spend an hour reshaping it for Xero or QuickBooks. Their accountants have asked us about this more than once.Dmitri Novak Worth doing, and the shape matters more than the effort: both of those want a specific column order and date format, so a generic export just moves the reshaping rather than removing it. Checking what each expects before we commit to a date.Seat Map on PhonesA venue managerFour fifths of our tickets are bought on a phone and the seat map is built for a desktop. People pinch and drag for a minute and then ring us to book instead, which rather defeats the point.Carmen Ruiz In progress. Rather than shrinking the plan, a phone gets the sections first and the seats within one section second, which is how people choose anyway. The full plan is still there for anyone who wants it.Treeline WarningsA customerI lose about twenty minutes a session realising Andromeda has gone behind the oaks. The app knows my location and the altitude, so it could just tell me.Dmitri Novak Planned. Nice example of the app knowing enough to be useful without being asked: you'll set a horizon once and get told before it matters, not after.Queue When OfflineDepot managerDrivers are in yards and loading bays with no signal at all. A signed sheet with no bars is just gone, so they photograph it on their own phones and type it in again later.Carmen Ruiz Drivers keeping a second camera roll to work around us is the clearest sign this is broken rather than missing. In progress: sheets queue on the phone and upload when there's signal, with the count on screen so nobody has to take it on trust.Retention per DepotComplianceOur German depot has to delete route data after 90 days. The UK one keeps it two years for insurance. One account-wide setting means one of them is always wrong, and it's usually Germany.Carmen Ruiz Planned. One setting can't serve two jurisdictions, and telling you to run two accounts would be us handing you our problem to carry. Retention moves to the depot. The account value stays as the default for any depot that hasn't set its own.Set Up a TermA studio ownerWe run eight-week courses. At the moment that means creating eight separate classes and hoping I have not fat-fingered a date, and if a student wants the whole course they book eight times.Ben Ito In progress. You will build the run once and Kiln will generate the dates, skipping any you exclude for a bank holiday. Students book the course as one thing, and a single missed week does not release their place in the rest of it, which is the part that would have caught people out.Upload Stops in BulkA partner integration teamWe push about 3,000 stops each morning, one call each, and it takes nine minutes. A single call with the lot would take seconds.Carmen Ruiz Planned. It will be asynchronous rather than one long request, so you post the batch, get an id back straight away, and either poll it or take the webhook. Partial success is reported per row, because a batch of 3,000 that fails entirely on one bad stop is not much better than what you have now.Face ID on PaymentsProduct teamOur fraud team want a second check on payments over £500. At the moment Face ID happens once when the app opens, so a payment twenty minutes later needs nothing at all. Our compliance officer has now raised it in two audits.Ada Whitfield The twenty-minute gap is the finding here, not the amount. A session that authenticates once and then stays trusted indefinitely is the thing an auditor objects to, and they're right to. We're scoping a re-auth prompt on the confirmation step with a configurable threshold, so your fraud team can move it without waiting for a release.A Test ClockA platform engineerWe bill monthly and cannot test a renewal without waiting a month or faking our own dates, which means the retry path has never been tested end to end. That is the path that handles money.Ada Whitfield The untested path being the one that handles money is a fair way to put it, and it is our fault it is hard to reach. Planned: a clock you can move forward in the sandbox, which advances renewals, retries and expiries together rather than one at a time.Plan by WeatherAn imagerI set a target list on Sunday for the week. By Wednesday the forecast has changed and half of it is pointless, so I redo it by hand every night.Dmitri Novak In progress. Pallas will re-order your list each evening against cloud cover, moon phase and how high each target actually gets from your site, and tell you what changed and why rather than silently rearranging it. You can pin anything you want left alone.Sandbox With DataA partner integration teamThe sandbox is empty, so testing anything real means creating fifty depots and three hundred stops by hand every time we reset it.Dmitri Novak Planned. A sandbox you have to populate before it is useful is a sandbox people test against once and then stop using. It will come seeded with a fictional operator big enough to be interesting, and reset on request rather than on a schedule, so a reset never lands in the middle of your test run.Alerts on FailuresA finance managerOur failure rate went from 2% to 11% for most of a Thursday and we found out on the Friday from a customer. The number was on the dashboard the whole time and nobody was looking at it.Carmen Ruiz A number nobody is looking at is not monitoring, so this is a fair criticism of the dashboard rather than of your team. Planned. Thresholds will be set against your own recent baseline rather than a fixed percentage, because 11% is an emergency for you and a normal Tuesday for somebody selling to a different market.A Waiting ListA studio ownerOur Saturday pottery class fills in about four minutes and then twenty people email me asking to be told if somebody drops out. I keep that list in a notebook.Ada Whitfield A notebook is a good sign that the product is missing something rather than that you are doing it wrong. Planned for the next quarter. When a place frees up, the first person on the list gets a window to take it before it passes on, so a cancellation at midnight does not go to whoever happens to be awake.Larger Type SettingAccessibility groupBrowser zoom breaks the payments layout past about 150%, which is where several of our older customers sit. They end up ringing the branch instead.Carmen Ruiz Planned, and we are treating it as a layout fault rather than a preference: a page that breaks at 150% zoom is a page that has assumed everyone reads at the same size. The payments area is being rebuilt to reflow rather than scale, so it holds at 200%.Door List on PhonesA venue managerOur door staff use a laptop on a stool because the scanning view assumes a big screen. In a 120-capacity room that is most of a table gone.Ada Whitfield A laptop on a stool is a good description of a product being used somewhere it was not designed for. Planned. It will work offline as well, because half the small venues we deal with have thick walls and no signal at the door, and a door list that needs a connection is not a door list.Round Up SavingsProduct teamEvery challenger bank does this and it is the single most common thing our customers ask for in branch. Round each card payment to the nearest pound and move the difference into a savings pot.Carmen Ruiz Planned for the summer. Two things worth agreeing before we build rather than after. Rounding up has to stop on its own if the current account would go below an amount the customer sets, otherwise you are charging overdraft interest to help somebody save, which is the sort of thing that ends up in a newspaper. And the pot needs to be withdrawable instantly and without penalty, or it is not really theirs. Both are in the spec. Tell us if your product team wants either drawn differently.Stay Signed InAnonymoussigning in every single time on my own laptop is tediousCarmen Ruiz We're going to say no, and it's worth being straight about why rather than leaving it open. This is online banking. A thirty-day session on a shared or stolen laptop is someone else's money, and the people most likely to switch it on are the least likely to have a passcode on the machine. What we've done instead is make signing in quicker: one Face ID prompt rather than a password, so about two seconds. If that's still slow for you, tell us where and we'll look again.Keep v1 AvailableA partner integration teamWe've got a lot built on v1 and would rather not move it.Ada Whitfield We won't commit to that, and it's better to say so than leave it open and let you plan around a maybe. What we do commit to: eighteen months from the v2 release, so the earliest switch-off is March next year, and we have never shortened that window. You get a migration guide, a compatibility mode so you can move endpoint by endpoint, and an engineer on a call if you want one. Indefinitely is the one thing we cannot promise, because every v2 decision would then be constrained by a shape chosen in 2019.Store Card NumbersA customerWe would like to hold the full card number so we can move our customers to another provider later without asking them to enter it again.Carmen Ruiz No, and this one is not a judgement call. Holding full card numbers puts you into the highest level of PCI obligation, which means an annual on-site assessment and a quarterly scan, and it means a breach at your end is a card breach rather than a bad afternoon. Almost nobody who asks for this wants what it actually costs. The real need underneath it is portability, and that is fair. Larkspur supports a network token migration: your provider and ours exchange tokens directly, your customers enter nothing, and no card number ever sits in your database. Ask us and we will start one.Track Between StopsOperationsWe would like to see where every vehicle is at all times, not only at the stops. It would help us answer customers asking where their delivery is.Ada Whitfield We are going to say no to continuous tracking, and it is worth setting out why rather than quietly not building it. Continuous position on a named driver, held indefinitely, is a record of where a person was every minute of their working day. That needs a purpose you can point at, a retention period, and a conversation with the people it is about. Most operators who ask for it want to answer one question, which is where is this delivery, and that does not need it. So: position at each stop plus an estimate for the next one, which answers the customer question, and a live position for the current run only, cleared at the end of the shift. If you have a case that genuinely needs more, we will build it against a documented purpose rather than as a default.Charge for No-ShowsA studio ownerAbout one booking in eight does not turn up. We would like to keep the card on file and charge a fee automatically when somebody misses a class.Ada Whitfield We are not going to build automatic charging, and we would rather explain than leave it open. Charging a card after the fact, for something the customer did not do, is a chargeback in most cases and a complaint in the rest. The studio wins the argument and loses the student. It also needs the card stored in a way that raises what your compliance obligations look like, which is a real cost to you for a fee of a few pounds. What does work, and what we are building instead: a deposit taken at booking and released when they attend, which is agreed in advance and disputed far less often. That sits behind the waiting list on the roadmap.Dynamic Ticket PricingA promoterRaise the price automatically as a show sells. The big platforms all do it and it is money we are leaving on the table.Ada Whitfield No, and it is a deliberate no rather than a not-yet. Fen is used by small venues whose audiences are local and come back every month. Dynamic pricing works on a one-off stadium show where nobody compares notes. In a 200-capacity room, two people at the same gig who paid £14 and £22 will find out, and what you gain on the night you lose on the next three. What we will build is the thing underneath the request: proper tiered pricing you set in advance, so early tickets are genuinely cheaper and everybody can see the ladder. Open that as its own request and we will put it on the roadmap.Replay a WebhookAn integration leadOur endpoint was down for about forty minutes during a deploy. Those events are simply gone and we had to reconcile by hand against a CSV.Ada Whitfield Reconciling by hand after a routine deploy is not a reasonable outcome. Building the replay.Focus Between FramesA customerTemperature drops through the night and the focus drifts with it. By the last hour everything is soft and the frames are wasted.Dmitri Novak A whole night's work going soft in the last hour is the kind of loss you only notice the next morning. Worth doing properly.Statements as PDFSupport deskCustomers need a stamped PDF for a mortgage application or a visa. At the moment they ring us and we post one, which takes four days and costs us about £6 a time.Ada Whitfield Four days and £6 to produce something the app already holds. Agreed, and it should pay for itself quickly.