2020 was a year that won’t be easily forgotten – coronavirus, lock downs, toilet paper shortages, home schooling, the list goes on... But one of the biggest highlights was the way the industry came together to help clients through these uncertain times. I truly hope that FYI made your 2020 just a little bit easier.
Sentiments aside, December was another big month including a release on Boxing Day – seemingly our engineering team don’t like to take holidays 🤷
My absolute favourite feature release this month (possibly since I joined the FYI team!) is the ability to now update Job Managers and Job Partners. I called this out in our FYI User Community Group when it was released and we had some great feedback. These fields can be updated in bulk from within FYI as an alternative to using your practice management software to do this – a massive time saving when a large number of jobs need to be updated. For practices integrated with Xero Practice Manager, once updated in FYI the change is immediately synced to Xero Practice Manager. Refer to Jobs Bulk Update for further details. Of course, we want you to be able to automate as much as possible, so we have also enhanced the Update Job step (previously Update Job State) to include both these fields. This will allow our savvier users to incorporate these changes into process automations. Refer to Automation Process Steps.
For those using our pre-configured Tax Assessment process automations, you can now include a Payable Date as a merge field in your client correspondence. Another time saving for your admin team as the information is generated from the ATO via Xero. Note that this field is only available as part of these processes as they are triggered by tax returns and assessments. Refer to Including Merge Fields in Email Templates and Signatures and Including Merge Fields in Word Templates and Stationery.
We’ve also listened to your feedback about the sync between XPM and FYI for deleted content not updating and causing confusion and inefficiencies for your team. Our engineering team have been working hard on this and made the following updates:
- Deleting the contents of a custom field in XPM now removes the content in FYI (and a null value is no longer required)
- Deleting a contact from a client in XPM now removes the contact from the client in FYI.
- Deleting a Client Group in XPM now removes the group in FYI.
We believe these improvements will boost user confidence in FYI’s sync integrity and remove unnecessary data from their FYI platform. Note that once made in XPM these updates will be synced in FYI at next sync run or when manual sync is performed.
Here are the rest of my highlights for this month.
Document Management:
- In the documents lists, the column Source Path can now be added to the list to show the source path of the migrated documents from Onboarding. Refer to Adding/Removing/Moving Columns in a List.
Search and Retrieval:
- The ability to sort and filter on Client or Jobs custom fields when added as a column in the respective lists.
- The introduction of a Relative date range. This gives you an alternative filter option to search by a date relative to today, for example search by documents you modified “Yesterday" or "Last Week". This is especially useful when saving views. For views used in Custom Processes it allows you to set views that will always have the date range relative to today. Refer to Filtering on a Date in Sorting and Filtering.
Task Management:
- The Subject column in Tasks list can now be expanded to show the full task name to match the functionality of the Name column in other lists.
New Integrations:
- We welcomed digital signature provider, FuseSign as an FYI app partner. Further details on this integration - Digital Signatures using FuseSign.
For further details on the features mentioned above, refer to December 2020 Release Notes.