FYI Product Update | August 2021

This special-edition webinar introduces some of the exciting new features making the FYI platform even more robust and boosting productivity in FYI practices, thanks to new tools to help manage your email inbox, and new functionality for automated processes. We’ve even lifted the lid on our product roadmap to give you a look into some of the most exciting new features on the horizon – Workflow Jobs, Custom User Roles and Capacity Planning.

You can watch the full 60-minute recording here

For those short on time, here’s a quick recap

1. New tools to help manage your email inbox

We are continually doing work to improve FYI’s feature-set related to email management, because it’s a fundamental area in which FYI can save you time.

You will soon be able to use the ‘My Partner’ toggle in the Documents list to easily access auto-filed emails in FYI and effectively create a shared email inbox for your team. ​These emails will be instantly available to your nominated team, so that they can be actioned immediately – they’re not stuck in individual partner email inboxes, waiting for the partner to find time to read and delegate each one.​

We’ve also introduced more options when filing email attachments.  You now have the flexibility to file all attachments with the same details as the original email, or file the attachments one at a time, or even as a batch together.​ You can also update the attachment name right from the FYI Drawer without having to navigate to the document in FYI – which is just another way to ensure you can file documents quickly and consistently.​

2. New functionality for process automations

Process automations are a fundamental part of what makes FYI unique, and how we believe you can achieve huge productivity gains in any typical accounting practice.​

The true power of our new Partner and Manager columns lies in the automations it allows you to create – such as automatic reminders for a Partner to contact a ‘top-tier’ client every three months, or according to whatever client service KPI’s are set in your practice.

More new features recently released are the new checklists for automations, allowing you to see at a glance what steps in the process have been completed, and the option to stop an automation mid-flight if the additional steps are no longer required.

And it doesn’t stop there. We’re going to keep adding example processes to our Help Centre and even start making them available in product. ​So, you will have access to a growing library of examples to help you schedule recurring work to repeat automatically, and automate any repetitive, multi-step task in your practice.​

We’re also going to start hosting Automation Inspiration Workshops in the coming months to guide practices through the creation of a variety of automated processes.​ So, if you’re ready to step up to the next level, you can come along to these workshops to learn, get some inspiration, and start using more automations in your practice.​

3. New ways to maintain practice data

Integration with XPM is an integral part of the FYI platform – allowing practices to use XPM as their practice management system and underlying source of client and job data, but then making use of this data in a multitude of ways in FYI. And practice data that is accurate, up-to-date and easy to maintain is a necessity in any practice. So, we’re very excited to be able to introduce a new way to maintain XPM client and jobs data in FYI.​ This new feature is currently in beta, and will be completely optional, but gives you an easy way to maintain your data and ensure changes are immediately available for use in templates, reporting and automated processes in FYI.

4. New ways to save and edit documents

As part of our continued enhancements to the FYI platform, we’re excited to reveal new ways to save and edit documents in FYI.  Our new browser extension now available from the Google Chrome store is a great time-saver, for example, when you have a PDF inside of Xero Tax that you want to save in FYI. ​It means you no longer have to export the PDF and save locally before uploading into FYI – you can simply save to FYI from the online PDF tab.

The new FYI desktop app allows you to check documents in and out of FYI seamlessly and sync to your desktop for editing.​ It provides an alternative to OneDrive for Windows users, with the same features you get today with OneDrive, plus some enhancements, for example, related to the editing of PDF documents.​ The app can be deployed as a practice, or as an individual user, and users can even choose how they want to edit on a case-by-case basis.​ It is currently in Beta and we expect it to be available to all users within a few weeks.​

5. On the horizon

In the past, practices may have set up both billing jobs and workflow jobs in XPM in order to track workflow while still billing from a single job. Our upcoming workflow jobs feature removes the need for unnecessary jobs – meaning your jobs list will be significantly reduced. Your XPM tasks will be synced to FYI as workflow jobs. They can easily be separated in FYI from your XPM Jobs, and you have the added bonus of using job states to move these workflow jobs through your workflow cycle, the Kanban board and bulk update. This will make your workflow management that much simpler!

Custom user roles will give you flexibility to reflect the roles in your practice. These new custom fields allow you to set standard roles, such as accountant and bookkeeper, and then select an active FYI user to fill that role against the client. The big win here is that these roles will be available in workflows and automations. Within an automation, you will be able to assign tasks to the accountant listed against the client in the exact same way Partner and Manager fields works today.

A long-term vision of ours has been capacity planning and the ability to deliver a flexible, easy to use, dynamic report that holds reliable results. And we can deliver on all of this through the power of our automations, workflow jobs and custom user roles. The end result will be a report that is easy-to-read and shows your team’s availability and allocated workload. Use this to match against your client demands, deadlines and deliverables. And because it is dynamic, you can simply adjust the allocations and re-run for updated results. And yes, leave and productivity percentages are taken into effect! Being able to genuinely look into the future and forecast the exact requirements of your team without a huge amount of effort is a gamechanger in this industry.