Vanilla News - January 2021 Edition!
Hi Vanilla!
Welcome to the latest edition of Vanilla News. The previous post is available here.
Finance
After months of hard work our new accounting system, Sage Intacct, is now live! We also made the hard decision to stop using Nexonia for expense reports as it did not fit our needs. We will be sending out more information about how to submit expense reports, directly in Sage Intacct, in the next couple of weeks. I personally want to thank Carolina and Sussan for all their hard work getting this up and running. Great job!
It's that time of the year again. Personal income tax season... my favourite... not really. You will be receiving your T4 and RL1 (QC only) through ADP sometime in February, I will send a message when they are available.
COVID-19 WFH Deduction Update: This year you will also be provided a T2200S & TP-64.3 (QC only) via email. Please be patient with us regarding these forms as they are tedious to fill out. I will be sending more instructions on the options you have this year to either choose the simplified $400 deduction or to use the forms that will be provided.
Marketing
Community Manager Appreciation Day is January 25th. It's a day to recognize and celebrate the efforts of community managers around the world. The week of January 25th, Vanilla has a whole bunch of programming involving recognizing top community manager MVPs, two webinars with 6 thought leaders, and office hours with Adrian. Mark your calendars for all the fun!
If you haven't seen it yet, our 2021 Predictions ebook is out and you can get yours here: https://vanillaforums.com/en/predictions.
Sales
With mixed emotions I announce that Joe has decided to accept a position in an exciting start up and will be leaving Vanilla. Joe joined Vanilla in May 2015 and has contributed to much of our sales success over the past six years. His knowledge of our offering and the Community space will be difficult to replace. In his time with Vanilla, Joe added such labels as Zynga, Acer, Qualtrics, Tesla, King, Nokia, Bose, Arrow, Smartsheet, MSE, Asus and IBM. Joe, from all of us at Vanilla, we thank you for your efforts over the past six years and wish you all the best! Good Luck.
Customer Experience
An exciting start to the year for CX — reminder, that's Success and Support, integral players in an existing customer's journey with us — with two familiar faces in new chairs*:
Patrick Kelly makes the move from R&D into Success as our new Solution Consultant. In his luggage can be found years of technical knowledge and a bunch of client-friendly answers, too! The goal is for new CSM technical inquiries to travel through Patrick, not directly to other devs, so everyone can be more efficient in how we handle the sometimes overlapping and duplicated requests.
We also welcome Faten into the Support team, supporting North American business hour clients alongside Andrew, and helping us build even stronger support as our client case grows in size and expectations.
Next up in Q1: data and documentation cleanups, reporting and churn prevention, and adding some more bench strength for the CSM team!
* new chairs not included
Human Resources
We have many, many open positions to fill! As our company grows, this is going to become the norm, so it's increasingly important for everyone to help with spreading the word about these opportunities. If you know someone who might be a good fit for a position we have posted, please refer them to our application page here: https://hire.lever.co/referrals/new
As a reminder, the current list of open positions can be found on our careers page as well as directly in Lever. The careers page has all kinds of interesting information about Vanilla that is certain to be of value to a prospective applicant, so definitely refer people there if possible! We continue to offer a healthy referral bonus of $2,000 when a candidate you refer is hired and passes probation, so feel free to share our job openings with your network on social media and elsewhere!
Operations
The Operations team continues to work with R&D to ensure that we can support the new search features that will be rolled out this quarter. These changes should allow our message queue to process upwards of 20 million jobs per day!
We're also working on the logging and monitoring systems in order to improve our insights when things go wrong. We expect to be able to transition much of our Console to Kibana soon, eliminating a good chunk of proprietary code that we've had to maintain over the years.
Finally, we continue to prepare for the large server migration that we're anticipating in mid March.
Thank you for reading!