This month we’ve been busy working on the development of our new Elite plan, a highly anticipated addition to our platform. There were many enhancements to additional features that Elite has to offer, along with continually improving other features of the FYI platform such as New Collaborate, Practice Syncs and more.
For practices on the Elite Plan, there were several updates to the migration steps and features including:
- When migrating from Xero Practice Manager, Job categories are now imported to FYI. This allows practices to maintain Job Categories directly in FYI, and view, filter and sort jobs by categories in the Jobs List. Refer to Managing Job Categories and Adding, Removing and Moving Columns in the Jobs Lists.
- From the Jobs Lists, users can now easily identify when an FYI Job Template has been applied to a job by filtering the new Template column. Refer to Adding, Removing and Moving Columns in the Jobs Lists.
- In addition to Standard Jobs, Workflow Jobs was introduced to the Elite plan this month, allowing practices to create Billing and Workflow Jobs in a "main job" and "sub-job" structure, especially useful where clients require one bill to be prepared. Refer to Workflow Jobs.
For more information on Elite, refer to fyi.app/fyi-elite.
This month saw additional updates to our New Collaborate feature, increasing the efficiency and simplicity when upgrading and sharing documents with clients.
For practices that are upgrading from Legacy Collaborate to New Collaborate, the selected OneDrive Admin account permissions will be verified to ensure they have the required Microsoft access and permissions enabled. If the OneDrive Admin account is not the user performing the upgrade, the user will be asked to log back in with the OneDrive Admin before being prompted to accept the new permissions and continue with the upgrade. Refer to Set up and Create a New Collaborate Site.
When adding and removing users from New Collaborate, a 15-minute lock has been put in place after adding a client. This lock allows time for the client to be propagated as a Guest User on the Microsoft Tenant successfully. To ensure that a user can’t be removed during this time, the X button will be disabled. After 15 minutes, the client can be removed if required. Refer to Removing Access to the Shared Folders.
In addition, New Collaborate Status Checks have been introduced to easily identify errors, and where possible, automatically rectify them. New Checks have been added for user permissions when trying to share a document with an FYI test user, and where the Practice OneDrive User is not the owner of the SharePoint site. A “Fix” button will be displayed, and when clicked will attempt to automatically update Microsoft and SharePoint to resolve any identified issues. Additionally, links to help articles will be displayed for users to access and perform any manual steps required to resolve issues.
In the Sharing Settings window, a New Collaborate User Status Check has been introduced to automatically validate the client permissions. This check allows you to promptly and easily identify by the coloured Status Check bars if there are any issues with a client's permissions. An alert will also be added to Practice Activity to ensure that FYI Admins and users with relevant permissions are aware of any issues. Refer to Checking your New Collaborate Status and Practice Activity.
We have continued to improve the Practice Sync functionality for our different practice sync integrations.
- For our UK practices that utilise CCH Central, the synchronisation time for Custom Fields has been improved to ensure this information is synced promptly to FYI. Refer to Practice Sync Integration with CCH Central (United Kingdom only).
- For practices using the Practice Sync app for APS, the Home Address and Business Address fields can now be mapped as part of the APS sync. It’s important to note that this does not impact your current synchronisation, but allows you to select your preferred address field, for example, Registered Address. Refer to Practice Sync Integration with APS (Australia and New Zealand).
For practices using Xero Practice Manager, the following enhancements have been applied this month:
- If an error occurs when synchronising Tax Returns and Custom Fields, an alert is now added to Practice Activity. This will ensure that FYI Admins and users with Practice Activity permissions enabled will be able to easily identify if these errors occur, and run a manual synchronization if required. Note that the sync will be retired if a request becomes available within one minute.
- If there is a limited number of requests available due to XPM rate limiting, jobs older than 24 months will be skipped to conserver the available requests for higher priority synchronizations.
For further information on these updates refer to Xero Practice Manager Rate Limiting and Practice Activity.
For further details on the features mentioned above and more updates from this month, refer to February 2024 Release Notes.