While You Were Working: June’s Dubsado and Flodesk updates worth your time

By Molli/8 min read

June was loud. A lot of the noise was tools announcing they now talk to AI. I’m usually the guarded one about new features, the person telling you to ignore most of it. This month surprised me, because a lot of what shipped is genuinely good. Once a month I read the release notes across your stack so you don’t have to, and this is the June one.

I’m usually the guarded one. This month surprised me.

Two tools carried it. Dubsado had the biggest run of releases I’ve seen from them in a single month, and Flodesk shipped two things people have been asking for out loud for a long time. A lot of the best updates have something in common. They either do a real job for you, or they let you cut a tool you were paying for.

Some of the AI that shipped does a real job. Most of it is a press release.

Here are the June business tool updates worth your time, and what you can ignore.

Dubsado will draft your forms for you now

Building a form from an empty screen is the tedious part of setting up in Dubsado. That part is mostly gone.

You now have three ways to start a form. Type a sentence describing what you need. Drop in a PDF you already use, up to 10MB. Or do both at once. The more specific the description, the better the draft. “A timeline questionnaire for wedding photographers with venue details, hair and makeup times, and special requests” gets you a lot further than “a photography form.”

The PDF import is the part I’m most interested in. I haven’t run a real client PDF through it yet, so this is a first read, not a review. On paper it’s the standout: take the intake or timeline you’ve been emailing clients as an attachment for years, drop it in, and Dubsado reads the structure and turns it into a working form. If the PDF is already filled in, there’s a checkbox that tells Dubsado to strip the answers and hand you reusable blank fields, so you get a template instead of a copy.

It works on all five form types: questionnaires, proposals, lead captures, contracts, and sub-agreements. Anything with legal weight, read it before you send it.

It also wires up smart fields on its own. Client names, dates, package selections, venue, budget, the standard data points get connected for you, so there’s no hunting for handlebars syntax to remember.

What Dubsado drafts is the structure. The brand, the colors, the voice, the parts that make a client know they’re working with you, that stays yours. Once the form generates, a chat sidebar opens on the right, and typing what you want changed is faster than clicking around the builder to do it by hand.

Two things worth knowing. This is on Dubsado 3.0 only. And the old blank-canvas builder is still there under “Start from scratch instead” if you’d rather work the way you always have.

Dubsado’s rundown on easy form creation walks through all three starting points.

Dubsado records and writes up your calls now

You know how a discovery call goes. You’re trying to actually listen and build that first bit of trust, while also writing down the date, the budget, and the three things they said they absolutely need. Then the call ends and you’re rebuilding it from half a page of messy notes.

The Dubsado Notetaker takes that off your plate. It joins the call, records it, and hands you back the recording, a full transcript with speaker labels, and a clean summary, all inside Dubsado. Who said what, what mattered, and what to do next.

There are two ways to run it. Turn on auto-join and it hops onto every call booked through your Dubsado scheduler. Or start it on the spot by pasting a Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams link, which covers the calls that never went through a scheduler. An on-the-spot recording can be attached to a project or client right away.

You can shape the summaries in settings too. Set the tone, choose the perspective, add a little business context, so the recap reads the way you’d write it. And you can deny the notetaker at the start of any call you’d rather keep off the record. Once denied, it leaves.

Honestly, as a notetaker it’s fine. What makes it worth turning on is that it’s one less tool to buy, because it already lives inside the CRM you’re paying for. If you’ve never run a notetaker on your calls, that makes this a low-friction way to start.

It’s on all plans right now while it’s new. A few things aren’t built yet. It doesn’t do in-person meetings. It won’t join everything on your calendar, only scheduler bookings or links you paste. And you can’t auto-send the summary to a client yet, though you can copy and send it yourself.

You can turn the Notetaker on in your Dubsado settings and read the full breakdown there.

Flodesk finally has a calendar view

Seeing your whole email schedule in one place used to mean keeping a separate spreadsheet next to Flodesk. Now it’s built in. The calendar shows your sent emails, scheduled campaigns, and saved drafts together, so you can plan ahead and spot the gaps in your cadence.

Toggle between month and week view depending on what you’re doing. Month is for planning, week shows exact send times. Drag an email to a new date to reschedule it without opening it. Hover any future date and click the plus to start a draft pinned to that day. Duplicate a past email from its three-dot menu to reuse it as a starting point. And if a Sunday-start week bothers you, set it to Monday in your account settings.

One limit to know. The calendar shows campaign emails only. Workflow emails, forms, and checkouts don’t appear here.

If you plan your sends more than a week out, this turns a spreadsheet chore into a glance.

Flodesk’s guide to calendar view covers rescheduling and the week-start setting.

Flodesk can A/B test your subject lines now

Guessing which subject line gets opened is over. You can now send two subject line variations to a slice of your list, and Flodesk sends the winner to everyone else.

It’s built right into the send flow. In the subject line step, click Add A/B test and write a second version. After 24 hours, whichever variation got the higher open rate goes out to the rest of your list on its own, with no manual follow-up from you.

It works for both send-now and scheduled campaigns. You can preview exactly how your audience gets split before it goes, and the results show up side by side in your email analytics with the winner marked. Flodesk emails you when the test starts and again when the results are in.

This was one of the real reasons people left Flodesk for other email tools. It’s in now.

Flodesk’s guide to subject line A/B testing has the setup steps.

Dubsado added a public checkout page, and it’s the one I’m most excited about

This is my favorite thing Dubsado shipped this month. The new public checkout page is a single payment link you can share anywhere. Someone pays, and the money and their client record land in Dubsado on their own. No invoice, no project, no portal required to get started.

Here’s why I love it. If all you need is to take payment for a call or a small thing, you don’t have to pay for a separate checkout tool like ThriveCart, and you don’t need a Calendly-style setup bolted on either. It’s one link, and the money lands where your bookkeeping already is. It takes card, ACH, or PayPal, and it flows into QuickBooks or Xero like any other Dubsado transaction. Good for a deposit to hold a date, a retainer from a repeat client, a quick add-on mid-project, tips, or selling in person.

One quirk for now: your client types the amount, so you tell them what to send. “Your deposit is $300, here’s the link.”

It’s the first feature in Dubsado Labs, their new early-access sandbox, and it’s on a very slow rollout, so you probably don’t have it yet. I like the Labs move. It used to be that only certified partners got to test new features, and opening it up means the people who’ll actually use these things get to shape them, which makes for a better product and more people bought in before it launches.

Where it’s going is the part to watch: preset-amount links, a payment step built into your forms, and checkouts that trigger a workflow, so buying a template or a small service could deliver it automatically. That’s a real checkout experience taking shape inside your CRM.

The one thing that would make me recommend Dubsado over Moxie or HoneyBook to nearly everyone is an open API, so we could automate past what it natively connects to. Not here yet. This is the direction that gets it closer.

Dubsado’s breakdown of the public checkout page covers how to turn it on and where it’s headed.

A few more worth a look

Worth knowing if you’re in the right tool:

Flodesk Studio is its own thing, and a bigger shift than a single line here can do justice. I’m giving it a full breakdown on its own soon. Short version: I like it.

Google Workspace shipped a few small things that touch a solo business. If you have Gemini in Sheets, it can now diagnose a formula error in one click, tell you in plain language what broke, and hand back a corrected version, which saves the usual trip to a forum. In Gmail, anyone who manages a delegated inbox can finally do it from the mobile app instead of only on desktop, which matters if you or a VA runs someone else’s inbox. And a funny little quality-of-life one: on an iPhone, someone can now join your Google Meet straight from Safari without installing the app. If you’ve ever gone to join a webinar or a call from your phone and hit the “download the app first” wall, the same trap Zoom springs on you at the worst moment, that wall is gone.

Airtable added form editing to record detail pages in interfaces. If you build client-facing views in Airtable, a record can now be edited through a proper modal form with validation and a single submit button, instead of clicking into fields one at a time. You decide which fields can change and set rules on what’s allowed, which keeps bad data out. Niche, but a real upgrade if you live in Airtable interfaces.

Stuff you don’t need to care about

Even in a good month there’s a skip pile, so here’s the short one.

Most of it is the rest of Google’s AI. AI note-taking landed in Google Voice. Google Vids got longer AI videos and more AI avatars. Gemini expanded across more of Chrome and added languages in Sheets. There are new admin controls for Gemini chats. Almost none of it changes your Tuesday, so you can keep scrolling.

I’ll flag the avatars specifically, because that one I’d actively avoid. Putting an AI avatar in place of your face on a sales call or a video breaks trust. The reason a Loom works is that it’s you, actually connecting with someone without making them hop on a call. Swap yourself out for a generated stand-in and you lose the exact thing that was working. Skip it.

Here’s how I sort the AI, because it’s the whole point of this section. AI is supposed to accelerate what you’re already doing. If a feature does a real task for you, like the Sheets formula fix, it earns a spot up top. If it just adds more to your plate or spits out slop, it doesn’t. Flodesk has been transparent about how they’re building their AI, and I appreciate that, because it’s the difference between a tool that helps and a tool that makes noise. I use AI and MCPs every day and I lean on them hard. I’m still not going to hand you the newest feature because it’s the newest, and you have my full permission to ignore anything that’s mostly an announcement.

One more for the skip pile. Google Drive added lightweight document approvals, but it’s built for teams routing a file for sign-off and it sits on the business plans, so if you’re a team of one you can leave it.

That’s the month. Mostly a list worth acting on, with a short pile you get to ignore.