Business Tool Updates Worth Your Time: May 2026

By Molli/8 min read

So, we need to chat a little bit about your inbox. If you’re like most of my clients (or my lovely followers on Threads), your inbox has approximately 75 unread emails telling you about those cool new tool updates that you don’t have time to dig into. And again, if you’re like them, you’re probably going to select all those emails right into the read folder because you, like most people, don’t have time to read the updates for everything that comes out.

Good. Most of it doesn’t matter.

The rare update that does matter is buried in the same pile as the 200th AI announcement. So you tune all of it out, and in doing so, you miss the one that would’ve saved you twenty minutes a day.

That’s the job I’m taking off your plate.

I’ve decided that once a month I’ll be the one reading the release notes across the tools you actually use, testing the stuff worth testing, and telling you the handful worth caring about. This is the first one. It’s a series I’m calling While You Were Working, because you were doing the actual work while these shipped.

Here are the business tool updates worth your time this May, and what you don’t need to worry about right now.

Dubsado finally fixed the invoice builder

Building an invoice in Dubsado used to mean clicking through menus to change one line item. The thing you wanted to edit was three clicks away from the thing you were looking at.

That’s fixed. The redesigned builder puts the details you actually edit in front of you, with inline editing on line items and the settings out in the open instead of buried.

I was part of the beta for this one, so I’ve been living in it for a while. It’s about 10x faster to move through an invoice, especially if you’re working with packages or custom builds. It finally matches the rest of the 3.0 experience.

The new builder is your default starting now. If you hate it, you can revert to the old one in your settings, but only until June 16. After that, the old builder is gone for good.

So if you’ve got a workflow built around the old layout, this is your two-week window to make peace with the new one.

Dubsado’s walkthrough on creating and sending invoices covers the new layout step by step.

Acuity built an appointment waitlist

A last-minute cancellation is lost money. Until now, the only way to fill it was a manual list, a second calendar, or a prayer.

Acuity built the waitlist into the booking page. Clients click “Join waitlist” and pick up to five times that work for them. When one of those times opens from a cancellation or reschedule, everyone who wanted that slot gets a text at the same time. First client to click the link and book gets it.

You’ll find a new Waitlist button next to “Add New” on your calendar page. Turn it on from Manage Settings. It’s on the Standard and Premium plans.

Two catches that I want to bring up: it’s web-admin only at launch, with mobile coming. And the confirmation email and SMS can’t be edited, so they won’t match your brand voice. If a slightly generic text is the price of winning back a booking, that’s a price worth paying (in my humble opinion anyways).

Acuity’s guide to offering an appointment waitlist walks through enabling it and setting your minimum hours.

Notion can finally merge cells

Have you ever needed to merge cells in a simple Notion table? If you have, you already know you couldn’t.

Now you can. Select the cells, open the cell menu, choose Merge cells. Headers that span columns, grouped rows, the spreadsheet stuff you’ve wanted forever.

This one won’t save you money or fix a workflow. It’s just been missing for years, and now it isn’t. My spreadsheet-loving heart is at peace.

Notion’s release note for merge cells has the exact steps.

Dubsado added template tags

If I’ve done a Dubsado build for you, or if you’re truly just an organized queeeeen, you probably name an intake form something like “Intake Form – Service Name.” Annnnd then the name gets cut off, but you have three of them, so you have to open each one to figure out which is which, then repeat until you find the right form.

Dubsado just killed that whole dance (hopefully). You can now add color-coded tags to any template: forms, workflows, packages, schedulers. Filter a template list by tag and only the relevant ones show up. When you’re inside a project, Dubsado even surfaces the templates whose tags match the project at the top of the list.

Dubsado’s walkthrough on template tags and archiving has the steps for tagging, filtering, and smart matching.

Tally upgraded its form insights

If you’ve worked with me, I’ve probably talked you out of Google Forms and into Tally. This update is part of why.

Making sense of your form responses used to mean exporting everything to a spreadsheet and building the view yourself. Now the Insights tab does it for you: bar and pie charts, averages, medians, and automatic NPS and CSAT scores.

Open any form, click the Insights tab, and your data is already visualized.

If you use forms to gather feedback and you’re a visual processor, this turns a chore into a glance.

Tally’s guide to Answer Insights shows what you can pull from the tab.

A few more worth a look

Not headline material, but useful if you’re in the right tool:

Flodesk added a “don’t send after this date” toggle to workflow emails. You set a cutoff date, and anyone who reaches that step afterward skips the email and keeps moving through the sequence. This is the one to know if you run launches — it stops the early-bird email from going to someone who joins your workflow after the cart already closed.

Dubsado had a busy month. There’s a manual calendar re-sync button now, so you can fix an out-of-date calendar without disconnecting and losing your settings. Invoices created through the scheduler can be assigned to a project instead of floating around orphaned. Recording a cash or check payment now triggers your workflow actions the same way an online payment does, so your automations don’t stall on offline payments. And when you’re inside a project, the templates section is hidden from the sidebar, so you stop accidentally editing a master template when you meant to tweak one client’s copy.

Notion shipped Plan Mode, where the AI shows you its plan and asks questions before it rewrites your pages or bulk-edits a database. Useful if you’ve been nervous about letting AI touch your workspace. Rollups can display as currency and percent now, which kills a lot of formula workarounds. The mobile app also got a new home tab that puts your chats, meetings, and inbox one swipe away.

Acuity added Venmo at checkout (through PayPal Complete Payments, US accounts only) and a custom discount field on invoices for one-off adjustments.

Circle launched public webinars, where non-members can RSVP with just a name and email, then join and chat live. If you run a community or membership, this turns a webinar into a top-of-funnel lead capture without a separate sign-up tool. Circle also added biennial and bimonthly billing intervals, so you can offer a discounted two-year commitment or a lower-priced two-month cycle on your paywalls. One of my clients and Circle guru, Rachel, did a video about it here.

Stuff you don’t need to care about

Here’s where I save you the most time.

Half the updates this month were tools shouting about AI agents and MCPs.

Notion launched external agents.
ClickUp put itself inside ChatGPT.
Kit and a few others shipped MCP servers.
Circle added an AI agent analytics dashboard.

But the fact of the matter is you can keep scrolling past every one of these.

I’ll be honest about one thing, because the honesty is the point. MCPs are genuinely useful to some people! I use MCPs on the regular — I think they’re great to add context into when you want to use AI so you’re not wasting resources. However, I won’t be featuring them in these roundups unless it’s genuinely groundbreaking and I’ve seen it prove useful. In today’s age of everyone screaming that you NEED to care about the newest AI feature, I think we need to take a step back and recognize when we can use them intentionally, rather than being like those start-up bros competing to burn the most AI tokens (and killing the environment while they’re at it). When you see the next “we now connect to AI” email, that’s a me problem, not a you problem.

Flodesk also added a way to design emails in Canva and import them. This shipped at the end of April but I wanted to flag it — I genuinely thought it would speed up a lot of people’s processes for emails, including mine, but I find myself doing what I’ve been doing for a while, which is designing in Flodesk directly. I’m finding most others I talk to are doing the same too — so if you haven’t experimented with it yet, I have a YouTube video about how to do it here, but don’t stress about it.

I want to note this too: this section is proof. Proof of what changed that genuinely wasn’t worth your time, and permission to ignore most of what lands in your inbox so the rare good update gets through.