With only five months to go until the end of the calendar year, we've continued this month to add substantial enhancements to the platform. These improvements include updates to client data visibility, new ways to create jobs using Zapier, and additional checks to the New Collaborate feature.
We're excited to launch a new version of the FYI app in Zapier. For practices that use Ignition in their app stack, this update introduces new functionality that enables you to create jobs directly in FYI. Triggered from a signed proposal in Ignition, dependent on the FYI plan you can:
- Elite Plan: create Billing, Workflow and Standard jobs
- Pro Plan: create Billing and Standard Jobs
This integration streamlines and improves efficiency when managing your jobs and proposals, directly in FYI. For more information on this integration and how to build out your Zap refer to Integration with Ignition using Zapier.
This month, we've enhanced the user functionality to automatically set the Default Timesheet Status in My Settings. Users can now choose whether they want their time entries to be automatically created as Draft or Submitted. When set as Submitted, each time entry will automatically be marked as such, eliminating the need for manual submission by the user. Refer to Setting Defaults and Filing Defaults for your Own Login - My Settings for more information on how to set your default.
The Clients List was improved this month to display several new optional columns, helping practices easily manage additional data regarding their client's information. The following columns have been added to the Clients List workspace:
- Contact name
- Salutation
- Date of Birth
This information is relevant to your Primary Contact that has synchronised from your integrated practice management system. Once you have added these columns to your Client Lists, a user with Export Client List permissions can export to CSV to assist with reporting functionality. Refer to Using the Clients Lists.
For our UK Practices integrated with IRIS, we've made streamlining their data even more efficient by enabling Contacts to be synced through. This is controlled by a toggle called 'Contacts' in the IRIS app. When enabled, Contacts will synchronise to FYI, enhancing the integration experience, improving data accuracy, and streamlining operations. To find out how to enable this, refer to Practice Sync Integration with IRIS (United Kingdom only).
We continue to introduce additional checks to the New Collaborate feature, to ensure that practices can easily and efficiently resolve any issues with permissions for their New Collaborate SharePoint site. The following additional checks were made this month:
- Microsoft Group is applied on Collaborate site: this check confirms that the selected group has the correct permissions and is properly added to the Members Group on the Collaborate site in SharePoint
- Guest User added to SharePoint: this check verifies that the guest user's email is in the SharePoint site's Visitor Group, with New Collaborate automatically attempting to add them to the correct group and logging the result in Practice Activity.
We recommend always running the Status Check when troubleshooting any errors received when setting up New Collaborate. Refer to Troubleshooting New Collaborate using Status Check.
For practices on the Elite plan, we've made some exciting enhancements to the platform, including the following:
- Converting Legacy Workflow jobs to Workflow jobs: when a practice enables FYI as their PM source, all Legacy workflow jobs will be converted to Workflow Jobs, allowing you to maintain these directly in FYI. Changes will not be synced back to XPM, however, this enhancement means that a practice can maintain workflow job data more efficiently directly in FYI such as updating workflow job name. Refer to Workflow Jobs.
- Split Time Feature: users now have the ability to Split Time when creating Invoices in FYI. This means a user can split an existing time entry, to partially invoice WIP, with a new time entry created for the remaining value and subsequently can be carried forward to a later invoice. Refer to Create an Invoice.
- Where FYI as Primary for Client Maintenance has been enabled:
- Create Client Relationships: Client Relationships can now be added or removed directly in FYI, on the Client - Relationships tab. Once a relationship has been created, FYI will automatically create the corresponding client relationship. Refer to Creating and Editing Client Relationships.
- Delete Contacts: Client Contacts can now be deleted directly in FYI from the Client - Contacts tab. A practice no longer has to manage this in their practice management source. For practices integrated with XPM, this means that when a Client Contact is deleted in FYI, the contact will also be removed from the client in XPM. Refer to Client Contacts.
For our practices that are on the Universal Merge Field Beta, many updates were made to this feature this month. Our favourite enhancements to UMF were:
- Merge Fields for Companies House, BGL and NowInfinity are now available. This means a practice can include a merge field such as Confirmation Statement Due Date in their templates. These new fields will be available in dedicated sections on the Merge Field picker window.
- A Merge Field Validation Check has been introduced to Templates, the Automation - Details tab, and the drawer when managing Automation Steps. The validation check will ensure that the merge field inserted is correct, before activating your template or automation.
- An Automation Initiator section was introduced, as a new Merge field. This is used to insert the details of the user who manually triggered the automation. Practices, as an example, can create and assign a task to the user responsible for initiating the automation.
Refer to Universal Merge Fields (Beta) for more information on this feature.
Check out many more enhancements made this month, refer to August 2024 Release Notes.