Syrah - November 2020

We’re excited to share with you new product features and integration capabilities as part of our recent release, Practifi Syrah. 

Full-bodied and with plenty of dark fruity flavors, Syrah wines are known to pack a punch. Strong hints of sweet blackberry, licorice or black olive hit first, with the flavors slowly tapering off to leave you with light, memorable notes of spice and pepper. With such a bold front approach, Syrah wines are often blended with other grapes to level out the mid-palate.

Similarly, Practifi Syrah is full of bold and memorable flavors. With exciting enhancements and new features from both product and integrations, the final result will leave a lasting impression.

If you have any questions or would like to learn more, your Client Success Manager will be happy to help.

Release Highlights

Track the Private Investments and Retirement funds your firm offers with Financial Products

Financial Products are an optional feature that allows you to associate clients and prospects with the product offerings your firm provides. For this release, we’ve introduced two common types of products among RIA firms: private investments such as a real estate development project, and retirement plans such as a 401(k).

• Financial Product record pages contain several sections: Overview (record fields & field history), Investments (Assets linked to the Product), Pipeline (Deals linked to the Product) and Feed. Notes and Files are available in the record page’s side pane.

  • Retirement plans contain additional fields unique to their product’s requirements, such as Plan Type and Qualified Default Investment Alternative (QDIA).

• Each Financial Product is linked with a Service Type, which allows them to be subsequently linked with Deals and Services. Investments in financial products begin as a Deal, are closed and converted into Services once the prospect/client commits to the investment, and an Asset is created once the funds have been deposited.

  • When creating a new Deal record from a Client or Prospect record page, if you select a Service Type with one or more Financial Products related to it, then you’ll be presented with a list of compatible products to select from.

    • Deals created from the Financial Product record page do not support this feature and instead use a standard Salesforce form.

  • Assets are created using either the New Funding Deposit button found on the Financial Product record page or the New Asset button on the client record page. Each requires the user to manually specify either the Client or the Financial Product respectively when creating the record.

• Private investments can be accessed from the Financial Products page, which can be added to your app’s navigation menu by a system administrator and will contain other types of financial products introduced in future releases. Retirement Plans have a dedicated page of their own, which can be added in the same way.

New Record Table Actions Add Seamless Efficiency to Your Workflow

Record table actions unlock powerful capabilities without navigating away from the table, so you can manage your network efficiently and at scale. The Gamay release included the Open in New Tabs action for all tables, and in this release, we’ve drastically expanded the set of actions available across our tables, with a focus on those that display clients, prospects, deals, processes and tasks. Included in this release are:

• Create Tasks: Create a new task related to each of the records selected. Available as a mass and single-record action in all the record tables found on the Directory, Clients, Pipeline, Influence and Services pages.

• Complete Tasks: Updates the status to Complete. Available on all “My Task”-related record tables, including app pages and tiles. If one or more of the selected tasks requires an outcome to be selected, then the action is not completed and an error message is displayed.

• Change Close Date: Updates the Close Date to the selected picklist value. Available on all Deal record tables.

• Change Due Date: Updates the Due Date to the selected picklist value. Available on all Process record tables, and all “My Task”-related record tables.

• Change Influencer Segment: Updates the Influencer Segment to the selected picklist value. Available on all Client, Prospect and Influencer record tables.

• Change Stage: Updates the Client Stage to the selected picklist value. Available on all Client and Prospect record tables. This action does not provide any additional automation, e.g. closing a Deal when promoting a Prospect to a Client.

• Mark as Closed Won: Updates the Stage to Closed Won, and performs related automation to link and create Services and update the Client Stage as-needed. Available on the “My Open Deals” and “My Closed Deals” record tables.

• Start a Process: Accessible as a row-level action in addition to the existing mass action. Available on all record tables related to active Clients and Prospects.

Visualize your client’s relationships with the Structure diagram

Accessed from the Structure tab in the Overview on the Client record page, this diagram displays the client’s household/organization members (if applicable), relationships with third parties, referrals and business entities as a connected and categorized network, making it easy to understand key relationships at a glance.

• Structure diagrams are currently only available on client records.

• Clicking on a related household, organization or individual opens their record in a new workspace tab.

• An export option is available in the diagram’s settings menu in the top-right corner. Diagram icons are currently not supported in the exported image, and there may be some layout differences compared to the version seen on the record page.

• To adjust the layout of the diagram, each node can be dragged using the mouse cursor.

• The Structure diagram adds a new tab to the Overview section on Client and Prospect record pages, containing the new Entity Structure component. If your firm has modified these pages, then you will need to introduce these same changes manually to see the diagram.

Envestnet Integration

Envestnet is a strategic technology partner to Practifi and provides unified wealth management technology and products to financial advisors and institutions. Envestnet’s flagship product is an advisory platform that integrates the services and software used by financial advisors in wealth management. Practifi now integrates with that flagship product via the Envestnet OpenENV APIs and Single Sign On (SSO) deeplinks to the Envestnet UMP webportal.

MoneyGuide Integration

Envestnet MoneyGuide provide easy-to-use financial planning tools that help advisors of all sizes customize their planning services to meet the unique needs of their clients. Practifi now integrates with MoneyGuide in a seamless Single Sign On (SSO) flow in which an advisor can go into any client record and deeplink to the relevant My Plans page within the MoneyGuide advisor portal.

Features and enhancements

Overall Experience

Use the Team Member app to access key analytics and record tables regardless of what your role is within a client or prospect servicing team.

• This app should be used by anyone with a custom role assigned to them on servicing teams. Currently, the product includes Financial Advisor and Client Service as the default roles, however, custom roles can be added to this list, and the Team Member app will work for all of them.
• Access is granted either by assigning the Team Member profile to the user to give them access to that app alone or by assigning the All Apps permission set to give them access to all Practifi apps, including Team Member.

A dedicated mobile experience for Salesforce’s Android and iOS apps provides access to critical information while on the go.

• The mobile experience is built using standard Salesforce components, which provide basic record information and access, activity logging, search, calendar, Chatter, reports and dashboards.
• Tiles, charts and various record page elements aren’t available, and record tables are instead replaced by Salesforce list views. List views can't display records based on your servicing team role; instead, they show them based on record ownership alone by default, and you or your administrator can create your own list views to access more precisely-targeted lists of records if required. To get a detailed understanding of how list views can be configured, refer to this Salesforce Trailhead unit.
• Also due to limitations with list views, navigation items are slightly different between the mobile and desktop experiences. Directory, Clients, Pipeline and Influence aren’t available in the mobile app; instead use Entities to access lists of clients, prospects, influencers and other households, organizations and individuals, and use Deals for lists of deal records.
• To gain access to the mobile experience, users need to be granted permission to the Team Member mobile app. A permission set has been included for ease of assignment, however, it must be manually added to users to grant them access.

Get instant access to the most important information about your clients and prospects with Key Fields, now visible in the Overview section on their record pages.

• The default fields are AUM, Potential AUM and Last Contacted (days since last phone call or meeting, e.g. “7 days ago”) for clients, and Potential AUM, Potential Revenue and Last Contacted for prospects.
• Visible fields can be configured easily by using Lightning App Builder, Salesforce’s point-and-click page editor.

Activities

After a call, meeting or email, take care of any action items with ease using Follow-Up Activities. Buttons in the record header on the Task, Event and Email Message record pages allow you to easily create Tasks and Events as related follow-up activities, as well as view a list of existing follow-ups related to the record.

• The Related Activity field has been added to each of these record pages to allow you to navigate from a follow-up activity back to its originating Task, Event or Email Message. This is not a lookup field due to Salesforce limitations, and is therefore not editable from the standard edit page, however it can be modified by updating the Related Activity Id field, which is not included in page layouts by default, but can be either added to them, or updated by using other tools such as Data Loader.

Engagement charts appear as a new row on the home page of the Advisor, Client Service and Management apps, and they group clients and prospects into bands based on the number of days since their last contact, where a contact is a logged call or event record.

• The band sizes and definition of a contact cannot be modified in this release.

Use the Send List Email button - found in the top-right of the Directory - to access mass email capabilities from a Salesforce list view. You can select one or more Individuals from the list and send them either a templated or ad-hoc email using the built-in email composer, including support for merge fields, email signatures and rich content.

• By default, Advisor, Client Service and Marketing users see a list of the individuals they own directly, while Management users see all individual records in the org. However, users can select other lists from the selector menu, and create their own easily. To get a detailed understanding of how list views can be configured, refer to this Salesforce Trailhead unit.
• Email templates can be created directly in Practifi using the Email Template Builder, or imported as HTML files. Creating and managing email templates is a significant undertaking, and Salesforce provides a comprehensive help section on the topic.

Processes and Tasks

The Process Stage Path - visible below the header on the Process record page - displays the stages of a process as a linear sequence, making it easier to visualize how far you’ve progressed and what remains.

• To determine the stage order, the path looks at the recorded Order values in the Process Stages of the Process Type related to the Process itself.
• Clicking stages in the path does not affect the recorded Stage value of the Process record, as stage progression is driven by task completion.

Other Process and Task Enhancements

• Whenever someone is automatically assigned a task as part of an active process, they’ll receive a notification, accessible from the notification bell .
• Open Tasks and Task History record tables have been added to the Deal, Asset and Service record pages, providing easy access to the tasks related to those particular records.
• Add general commentary to Tasks while creating them using the Comments field in the New Task global action.

Households, Organizations and Individuals

• Conditional rendering for relationship roles in the New Relationship and New Member record actions means you’ll always have the right roles available.

  • Role availability is based on whether the record is a household, organization or individual, and whether it was the New Relationship or New Member action that the user launched.

  • These settings are captured in the Entity Type and Action Type fields of a Relationship Type record.

• Track the total value of business someone has referred to you using the Referred AUM field. The value is calculated based on the total current AUM of all clients where the active household, organization or individual is marked as a referrer.

• Additional automation for the Mark as Lost Client and Mark as Lost Prospect actions closes or completes any active Services, Deals and Tasks related to the client or prospect.

• The New Relationship action is available on Client Entity and Member record pages, found in the record header.

• The Assistant and Assistant Phone fields have been replaced with a Relationship Type of Assistant, to enable richer data capture for that person and align with how other relationships are captured.

Outlook and Gmail Integration

Two enhancements have been delivered in this release to improve the experience of using the Outlook and Gmail side pane provided by Salesforce:

• When logging an email from Outlook or Gmail against an Individual in Practifi, if they have a Primary Entity - a household or organization - the email is also logged against them automatically.

• When browsing emails, the side pane displays Individuals with email addresses matching those found in the email itself. We’ve added the Primary Entity as a field underneath their name, which provides one-click access to Household and Organization records for email logging, which is done using the Log button at the top of the record in the side pane.

Despite these enhancements, there remain some considerations and constraints users should be aware of when logging emails:

• Emails in Salesforce can be logged against multiple Individuals, but only one other record. Primary Entities fall into the “other record” category, and so only one of them can be logged against each email.

• If you log an email against two or more Individuals, when the system tries to determine which of those it should derive the Primary Entity from for logging reasons, it checks the To, Cc and Bcc address fields in that order, but cannot check the From address field due to a limitation with the Salesforce platform.

As a result, we recommend the following approach to logging emails:

• If you're logging an email against one individual, you can do from the side pane's suggestions page by clicking the Log Email button at the top.

• If you're logging an email against two or more individuals... 

  • First, log it against the Primary Entity by either clicking their record name (which appears underneath the name of a suggested individual) or searching for them in the side pane’s search bar, then clicking the Log button on their record page once it appears.

  • Then, use the Back button to return to the suggestions page and log the email against as many Individuals as you wish by clicking the Edit Logged Email button at the top of the side pane.

Other Features and Enhancements

• Use the Role feature on Asset and Liability records to track ownership at the individual level, including percentages. A list of current roles can be accessed from the tab of the same name on the record page, and new ones created with the New Role button in the record header.

  • Whenever a record is created, a role is automatically created for it unless the “Suppress Automatic Role Creation" is checked. The created role is either the parent individual/organization, or the household's primary contact, and has 100% ownership of the asset.

  • Ownership percentages aren’t validated by the system; they can add up to greater or less than 100% if captured that way.

• A suite of reports and dashboards built using Salesforce’s point-and-click builder tools is included to allow firms to get up and running with their analytics quickly. Use these reports and dashboards as-is, or customise them to meet your firm’s needs.

• The Super User permission set group is a new predefined set of user permissions that adds record deletion and report, dashboard and Chatter management capabilities to the set of permissions allocated to Standard Users. Alongside the Administrator permission set group, this provides three tiers of user access by default, each of which can be customised to suit the firm’s needs.

• Use the New Campaign button on the Campaigns page in the Marketing app to create new campaigns.

Resolved Issues

This section describes the issues which have been resolved in this release.

Financials

• On the Asset record page, the New Holding button is situated within the Holdings tab itself, instead of the button bar in the record header.

• The AUM summary field found on households, organizations and individuals displays a blank value instead of a zero.

Households, Organizations and Individuals

• Relationships captured on a member record aren’t appearing on the record page of the parent household or organization.

Processes & Tasks

• Available Servicing Team Roles when creating a Process Type aren’t aligned with those found in the Servicing Team itself.

• If a custom Status value for a Task is marked as a Closed Status, this is not reflected in record tables such as My Open Tasks.

• Record tables displaying tasks are ordered by Due Date (most to least recent), instead of by Subject (A to Z).

Record Actions and Pages

• In the Add to Household and Organization actions, the Individual’s Source field value is not migrated to newly-created households or organizations.

• The Service Type picklists in the New Deal and Promote to Prospect actions are ordered differently from each other.

• Items sometimes appear out of order in the Entity navigation panel.

• General improvements to error message and success notification handling in record actions to reduce false positives and negatives.

Record Table

• Attempting to search within a record table which contains a long text field - such as a Task Description - results in an error. To resolve this, sorting the record table using long text fields has been deprecated.

• Improved consistency of the availability of the existing Complete Task row action and Start a Process mass action across record tables in all pages and apps.