March 2024: What's New and Improved

March saw our UK and NZ clients gear up for a new financial year, and our Australian clients close out the third quarter. The FYI team were busy working on new features and enhancements to ensure all our practices continue to gain efficiencies through the platform.

With this month came a continued focus on the Elite Plan features and enhancements, as we drew closer to releasing this to our general client base. We also continued with improvements to the New Collaborate feature, and various other updates to our features.

For practices on our Elite plan, we introduced Client Maintenance to enable practices to choose FYI as the primary source for creating and editing clients. This means that practices will be able to maintain data from a single platform, and no longer have to wait for a sync from their integrated practice management source. Changes made to a client in FYI are instantaneous, and subsequently immediately available in Automations and Reporting. Refer to Enabling FYI as the Primary Source for Client Maintenance and the articles in the Client Maintenance section.

When using Client Maintenance to add a new client or updating an existing client's address, users will be able to use the new Address Search field to search for a valid address using the Google Maps API. If no match is found, the address can be manually entered as normal. Furthermore, if a client’s postal address is the same as street, users will simply be able to select the Same as Physical Address button. Refer to Creating Clients in FYI.

We also focused this month on adding new Time and Billing enhancements.

To ensure greater visibility when creating either a Progress or Final Invoice from FYI, additional lines for “Interim Amount” and “Total Invoiced” will display underneath Invoice Amount. Refer to Creating an Invoice.

We have also introduced the ability to map FYI Custom Fields to Xero Tracking Categories to allow for more detailed reporting within Xero. The Custom Fields can be selected when creating an Invoice in FYI, before being synchronised when the invoice is sent to Xero. Refer to Managing Invoices.

Furthermore, the following actions can now be performed during the Invoicing process:

• Users can edit an Invoice or Credit Note, and changes will only be saved when you click the Save button. This avoids any risk if you have made a mistake with an update, simply click cancel. Refer to Opening and Editing Draft Invoices.
  
  
• When creating or editing a Progress or Final Invoice for a Billing Job, the Invoice Value for each underlying Workflow Job can be manually updated. Refer to Creating an Invoice.
  
  
• We have added a new Disbursement Invoice Type when only invoicing disbursement entries in FYI. This allows for easier visibility of disbursement only invoices when you are invoicing clients the oncharges of third-party services only. Disbursement Rates can now also be customised to select a Tax Rate when invoicing the client. Tax rates are synchronised from the Xero Ledger account connected to FYI. Refer to Managing Rates for Time and Disbursements and Creating an Invoice and Process Step Details - Create Invoice.

When calculating Capacity Planning using the Backwards option, to ensure that practices can utilise data already in their platform, you can now map the Job Completed Date to a Custom Field instead of the Job Due Date. Refer to Managing Mappings.

Further, when creating Capacity Planning reports completed tasks for Automation Processes in progress will be excluded.

Additional Elite Enhancements

• We have added additional data fields and features to Automations for the Elite plan. This includes:
  
  
  • When creating an Invoice via an automation step, the merge field {{ TotalDisbursement }}  can be added to automatically calculate the total cost of all disbursements for the job. Refer to Process Step Details - Create Invoice.
    
    
  • You can now run Automations using the Filter type of Invoice or Time Views. This allows a practice to create an automation using this data, for example, a summary notification for all invoices currently in Draft. Refer to Setting up Custom Processes.
    
    
• When practices have migrated to Elite and selected FYI as their Practice Management Source, a new Financial Details section has been added to the Job – Summary tab. This section displays all financial details for the job such as WIP, Budget, Actual and Invoiced amounts and more. Refer to Job Summary.
  
  
• When creating Job Templates in FYI, the Job Reference field now has the option “Job Number” available, which allows users to populate the Job Number as the reference on Xero invoices. This feature is available for Standard and Billing Jobs only. Refer to Managing Job Templates.

For more information on the Elite Plan for FYI, refer to fyi.app/elite-plan.

Also this month, our team continued to update the New Collaborate settings and features to ensure a seamless and easy transition for practices. 

When receiving documents from a client’s Upload Folder that may have failed to upload, you can now easily select Import Uploads from the Options button making it easier to request the upload again. Refer to Receiving Documents from the Upload Folder.

When trying to add a user to the New Collaborate Sharing Settings if the user was previously removed from FYI, an error will display “Failed to Add User”. This also provides a link to a help article with steps to resolve the issue, along with an alert added to Practice Activity. Refer to We were unable to create the guest user in Microsoft 365.

To avoid confusion when configuring New Collaborate, it is no longer required to select an Email Template during setup. You will still be able to select a default email template within the Configuration window at any stage, ensuring when you share a document the correct template is selected. Refer to Set up and Create a New Collaborate Site (New Sites only) and Set up and Create a New Collaborate Site (Upgrade from Legacy Collaborate).

Other enhancements this month saw updates to the following features:

• A new alert has been added to Practice Activity when Practice Sync has not updated data in at least 24 hours. This ensures that an FYI Admin can identify when the Practice Sync is not running or potentially needs to be restarted. Refer to Practice Activity and Practice Sync Desktop App has stopped synchronising.
  
  
• For our UK Practices that are using IRIS as their Practice Sync integration, synchronised Jobs will now have Job Names created using the format of (Job Type Description) (End Date). Refer to Synchronising Clients, Jobs and Users with IRIS (United Kingdom only).
  
  
• For FYI Admins to easily identify where a view has been used, the General Settings – Views now includes additional columns for “List” and “Automation”. When reviewing lists, this means that an FYI Admin can easily identify if this list has been used in a process or not, before clearing the list. Note that for our Elite practices, there is also an additional column for “Report”. Refer to Managing Views.

For further details on the features enhanced this month and more refer to March 2024 Release Notes.