New ways to maintain client data 

We are continually increasing what can be maintained in FYI and minimising the need to jump back to Xero Practice Manager. We are excited to introduce new ways of maintaining Xero Practice Manager client and job data in FYI.  

Updating partner and manager has been available at a job level for some time, and you can now update the partner and manager for your clients, either individually in the client workspace or as part of a bulk update.  

In addition to this, we have introduced the ability to create and maintain custom fields for both clients and jobs directly in FYI with your changes syncing back to XPM. This is completely optional – you can still maintain your data from Xero Practice Manager, but this gives you flexibility and avoids any sync delays, ensuring you have accurate client data instantly available for use by your team and your automations.

​We have also introduced User Roles - these are roles that go beyond partner and manager. You can define user roles that reflect the way your practice works, allowing you a deeper level of granularity on jobs and clients. Simply define the accountant, senior accountant or bookkeeper on clients or jobs across your practice and sync back to Xero Practice Manager. These roles can be used to assign tasks and workflows in automation steps - making sure the right person is assigned the first time.

Best practice for Jobs and Workflow Jobs

Our recommended best practice for Jobs covers two scenarios - standard jobs (the current approach you are all familiar with) and our new Workflow Jobs, and the benefits of these approaches in FYI.

There are many ways to set up your jobs in Xero Practice Manager, and two of the more common are to create a job for each piece of work you complete or to have an annual billing job. Our scenarios cover both.

Standard jobs syncs only the Xero Practice Manager job. This is the approach that you are all working with today. For practices that want to monitor and track the interim pieces of work, the XPM Tasks, under an annual billing job, then Workflow Jobs is your solution.

All the details you need to know are covered in our Jobs Best Practice Guide.

We also recap some exciting new features when working with jobs with FYI. You can now create a job directly within FYI or as part of an automation. Upon creation, these new jobs are immediately available for use in FYI and sync back to Xero Practice Manager. Custom fields and user roles can be edited in FYI - use bulk update to quickly get your practice’s data up to date.

And soon, you will be able to update more details on a job - name, budget, start date and due date. These changes can be made to the individual job or in bulk and are tracked in the Activity tabs so you can always see the ‘what, who and when’ of any updates made. Rest assured, your team need to be given permission to these features by an FYI Admin giving you granular control on what features your practice wants to adopt.

More insights across your practice

Practice Insights give you a snapshot of where we are headed with new lists that will transform visibility on key job details and give you even more power to customise your practice data. You will have added functionality such as filter on blanks, selecting/deselecting filter options and expanding columns. And that is only the start. We will continue to build out our new lists in all FYI workspaces, with even more powerful functionality.

Using the power of automations and user roles we can deliver a flexible, easy to use capacity planning report. The end result is an easy-to-read report that shows your team's availability and allocated workload. Use this to compare with your client requirements, deadlines, and deliverables. And if you need to make a change, simply adjust the allocations and re-run for updated results. With leave and productivity percentages taken into account, and the ability to simply adjust and re-run - it cannot get much easier! Capacity Planning will be at beta within the next few weeks.

New ways to get more out of FYI

Learn, our new eLearning platform is now available and includes courses for new users and FYI admins. And we will continue to add new courses in the future. A great resource for new team members joining your practice, or as a refresher for your team.

We have got even more to share on Automations. In case you missed it, you can now import sample automations created by the FYI team straight into your platform from our Automations Library. And what's more, the templates are included too! And we also discuss the latest features on transparency - descriptions, step notes, process activity - and functionality - new filters, messages on summary notifications, user roles. And how you will soon be able to have tasks autocomplete for you!

Sometimes the best way to learn is to be able to put your hands on the keyboard and experience it for yourself. This is where Sample Clients can assist. Using a set of sample clients, you can safely test new features, new templates and explore automations. You have the full feature set of FYI available on a dummy client, so no harm can be done to real client data or your relationship with them.  

There are now even more ways you can engage with our team. Log a support ticket via our in-app support - and speed up resolution time as the system provides context to our team for you. Our Status Page has had a recent makeover with the addition of regions and the core services of the FYI platform. We recommend you sign up for email notifications, or if you use Teams, receive notifications through your chosen channel. And don't forget to join the FYI User Community on Facebook – a great way to keep up to date with new releases and tips from our team, plus a place to connect with other users.

And as we wrap up, a quick reminder that the FYI Desktop App is available as a great alternative to OneDrive, making editing PDF's a little easier.