Overview
The following article covers what's new in our Barolo release beginning in December 2021 to provide a detailed understanding of what has changed, how new features work, how to enable them and any additional factors that teams should consider. If you are new to Practifi or our release notes, we highly recommend first reviewing our article on the best practices of Using Practifi Release Notes.
In Barolo, Practifi focuses on upgrading the overall Entity experience for teams by providing some key additions that have been heavily requested by our clients to improve the ability of organizations to announce high-priority notices, make firm-specific decisions about the naming conventions for Households, and capacity to include revenue records, among many more.
Read on to learn more about various features of the release, and remember that if you have any questions, your Client Success Manager will be happy to help you learn more.
- Noticeboard
- Mailing Labels
- Enhanced Addresses
- Custom Household Names
- Servicing Teams
- Record List Enhancements
- Enhanced Directory Structure
- Stage History Enhancements
- Expanded Annual Revenue Calculations
- Other Features
- Minor Enhancements
- Resolved Issues
Noticeboard
All clients are different, and there are often critical pieces of information you should know when communicating with them. We've introduced the Noticeboard for creating eye-catching custom Client alerts. Important client information now has a proper place to live within the Noticeboard, appearing at the top of the Client's record page as you open it.
Once your organization has received the Barolo release, the Noticeboard will automatically appear in the Key Records tab, part of the Overview at the top of the Client record page. If a firm determines users should not have access to critical toast notifications at the top of the Client record page, Admin users can easily apply the Disable Critical Alert Level permission included in this release to users. Once applied, users will no longer see Critical as an option when setting Alert Levels or will be unable to save posts with that level assigned, depending on the context within your organization.
🔧 Customizations to the Client record page in Lightning App Builder will not affect the enablement process for this feature, provided the Key Records tab is still on the page and contains the Household Client Overview Page, Individual Client Overview Page and Organization Client Overview Page components.
📚 For additional information about using the Noticeboard within your organization, please consult our Using the Noticeboard article.
Mailing Labels
Physical mail is still a critical channel for client communications, particularly for a firm's service personalization. However, creating mailing labels with up-to-date addresses and suitably personalized mailing names can be a significant time investment.
Our pre-formatted Mailing Label fields solve this problem by allowing your organization complete control over mailing name formatting and the ability to configure label settings on a record-by-record basis. Once you've set up your records, use Mailing Lists from the Directory page to quickly generate a CSV file for use with mail merge tools like Microsoft Word. The Mailing Label fields are available as a section in the Basics tab on all Household, Organization, Individual and Contact record pages.
The first line of the label is the record's Mailing Name, which varies based on context:
-
Individuals & Contacts show the Full Name.
-
Organizations show their Organization Name and the name and title of their Primary Member.
-
Households show a formatted string containing the names of the Primary Member and their Spouse while also catering to additional scenarios such as surname differences and single-parent households.
The record's Postal Address is displayed beneath the Mailing Name value, including their country if the Display Country field checkbox is checked.
📚 For additional information about using mailing labels within your organization, please consult our Using Mailing Labels article.
Enhanced Addresses
It's often the case that the people included in a Household or Organization have the same addresses as their related entity. However, maintaining these addresses in the event of a change can be a time-consuming process. With this release, newly-created Households and Organizations will now synchronize their Location and Postal Address values by default with the fields of the same name on their members. This means team members will only need to update it once to have that change appear everywhere it should.
The limitless data capture capabilities of 📚 Contact Points have been introduced for Household and Organization addresses, making it possible to get a truly complete picture of complex residency scenarios, such as seasonal homes. As with Individuals and Contacts, you can add these addresses from the Specifics tab of their record page and use the Map to Record feature to link selected addresses to the Postal and Location fields used in the sync feature.
🛠️ For existing Entities, syncing fields will need to be checked manually. To add them to multiple Entities at once, add them as list columns using Select Fields to Display, and use the mass Edit action to complete the setup. To access all the Entity records in your organization at once, use the Entities tab in the Data Management app.
⚠️ Please note that Address Sync takes priority over any Contact Point Addresses that a member has mapped to their Contact or Individual by using the 📚 Map to Record feature. If you sync an address to a member with Contact Points mapped, those mappings will be removed.
📚 For additional information about using the address sync within your organization, please consult our Understanding Address Sync Settings and Using Address Sync Settings articles.
Custom Household Names
Practifi preformats the names of Households you create to ensure they accurately reflect the names of household members and cater to scenarios such as surname differences and single-parent households. In this release, we've made it possible to create a custom 📚formula field that replaces the default name with one chosen by your firm specifically.
📚 For additional information about using custom Household names within your organization, please consult our Understanding and Using Entity Name Formatting article.
Servicing Teams
The Role field denotes a Team Member's relationship to a client regarding their servicing needs. However, users cannot customize the Team Role field, which often proves to be an inexact description for more complex team structures. We've introduced the Business Role field to allow firms to apply an entirely custom set of descriptors to their team members.
The Business Role field is a 📚multi-select picklist, which allows you to select multiple Business Roles for a single team member. This is particularly important with Servicing Teams, as we use Salesforce's Account Teams feature to deliver this capability. A limitation of that feature is that you cannot add the same team member to a team multiple times. Our Process Tasks support Business Role as an Assignment Type option, so your new custom roles can be seamlessly incorporated into your existing business processes.
🔧 To enable the Business Role field on the Add Team Members window of a Client record, teams need to use the Salesforce Setup gear icon to open the Object Manager and use the Quick Find search bar to select the Entity Team Member menu. After selecting the Page Layouts menu, and editing the Account Team Member Layout. Once on the edit page, you will select the Edit Multi-Line Layout hyperlink to then move the Business Role field from the Selected Fields section. The Business Role field will also need to be added to the Servicing Team page on the Key Entity record page in order to have the information displayed after creation. For detailed steps on adding these to your organization, please consult our Managing Servicing Teams article.
📚 For additional information about using the Business Role functionality within your organization, please consult our Managing Servicing Teams and Using Servicing Teams articles.
Record List Enhancements
When selecting fields to display within your record list, you can now add lookup fields, meaning they "look up" to records in another Salesforce object. Administrators can control which fields can be accessed for these lookup fields within your organization.
With our last release, we introduced sticky record list settings that persisted between sessions and devices. We've now expanded the suite of settings that are saved to better complete the customization picture. The following aspects of record lists are now included in your saved settings:
- The active item in a list page's selection menu
- Fields used for sorting and their sorting direction
- Text display settings
- The display state of filters appearing in accordion sections on list pages
If you've applied multiple filters to a list, it can be time-consuming to undo all those changes and start again. We've added a Reset button that turns this into a quick process. This appears above the accordion sections on record list pages and as a Reset Filter Values option in other contexts under the Settings ⚙️ menu. We've also smoothed out the rough edges of the list filtering experience. Lists now reload behind a loading animation with no on-screen jumpiness.
Enhanced Directory Structure
When we released People Types in Dolcetto, it introduced the idea of people existing in Practifi as either a Contact or as an Individual. Accessing lists of People, which include both Contacts and Individuals, is hugely valuable when performing engagement-related activities. Now, additional People lists appear in the Directory to support these use cases.
Alongside these new lists, we've renamed the existing ones. Where we previously used the word Directory in a list's name in the Page View Selector menu, it now says Key Entities instead. Key Entities are the Households, Organizations and Individuals with whom your firm maintains key relationships.
Stage History Enhancements
Reporting on stage velocity and yield effectively means knowing what stages represent completion and in what order stages should be completed. We've introduced several fields to Stage History that provide the information you need to generate meaningful insights:
- Stage Category groups Stage values into a small handful of categories such as Active & Inactive or Open & Closed.
- Stage Position captures the position the Stage had in the picklist menu at the time the history record was created.
- Number of Stages displays a count of the total number of values in the picklist, treating all Completed & Closed values as a single stage.
- Progress calculates how far the record has progressed along the stage path by dividing Stage Position by Number of Stages and displaying it as a percentage.
- 💡 Progress proves most useful when sorting Stage History records, as it will ensure that display in the correct order even if the number of Stages changed mid-way through the record's life cycle.
Profitability
Tracking servicing costs using Tasks & Events has been a long-standing feature in Practifi, but now with the enhanced historical revenue tracking and revenue projection capabilities included in this release, it becomes possible to understand precisely who your most and least profitable clients are.
We've included some enhancements to better bring these disparate data points closer together:
- A dedicated section on Client record pages includes each set of profitability inputs as its own tab, meaning you can quickly switch between them.
- A new report takes full advantage of Salesforce's powerful Report Builder to bring costs, historical revenue and projected revenue across your client book into a single chart or table.
Considerations
🛠️ To activate the Profitability record page section, administrators will need to add the Additional Features - Profitability permission set to your permission set groups, and users in those groups will see Profitability appear as a section in the navigation panel on Client record pages.
Using the Installments object
Logging revenue against the assets you manage is the missing piece in the profitability puzzle for many, and with the Installments object, these revenue deposits now have a place to call home in Practifi. Installments can be created directly using the New Installment action on Services & Assets or synchronized directly using an integration. Add the Additional Features - Installments permission set to your permission set groups. Users in those groups will see Installments appear as a tab on Asset & Service record pages, and New Installment appears in their action menu.
🔧 Installments are compatible with Orion Connect, so firms using Orion can immediately start syncing their Receivables with Practifi. You'll need to customize Orion Connect's 📚Enhanced Sync settings (requires an Orion login) to enable this feature.
📚 For additional information about using profitability and the Installments object in your Practifi organization, please consult our Understanding Profitability and Understanding Installments articles.
Expanded Annual Revenue Calculations
Revenue information typically becomes less relevant the older it is, so projecting revenue based on the most useful inputs your firm has available can often be preferable to historical analysis. To ensure your firm has an accurate set of revenue projections to work with, we've enabled multiple calculation options for the Annual Revenue fields on Assets & Services:
|
Calculation Method |
Asset field |
Service field |
|---|---|---|
|
Service based on Service Fees & AUM, Asset-based on the percentage share |
A percentage of the Service's Annual Revenue that's equivalent to the Asset Value as a percentage of the Service AUM, e.g.: If a Service has an AUM of $5M, and an AR of $5k, then an Asset in that Service with a Current Value of $1M would have an AR of $1k; 20% of the overall Service value. |
Using the AUM value captured on the Service record, apply the fee structure defined in the Service Type Takes the AUM for the record and applies the Service Fees structure to it, as we do today both for itself and for Deals. |
|
Asset-based on Last Installment & Multiplier, Service based on Asset rollup |
Takes the Installment record related to it which has the most recent Installment Date, and multiplies its Final Value by the number stored in the Annual Revenue Multiplier custom setting. |
The sum of Annual Revenue from all related Assets which are marked as Under Advice. |
|
Asset sourced via integration, Service based on Asset rollup |
The field value is not calculated automatically. Instead, it's provided separately by a bespoke integration, which populates the field directly. |
The sum of Annual Revenue from all related Assets which are marked as Under Advice. |
Considerations
There are some easy guidelines to follow when making your choice of calculation method:
- If you're using an integration that populates the Annual Revenue field on Assets directly, use Asset sourced via integration, Service based on Asset rollup.
- If you're actively tracking Installments, use Asset based on Last Installment & Multiplier, Service based on Asset rollup.
- If you've set up your Service Types with Fees, use Service based on Service Fees & AUM, Asset-based on percentage share.
Campaigns
Please note: To access the Campaign Salesforce object and the functionality to create campaigns, your firm must have a Practifi Promote subscription. You will not be able to access this functionality without this add-on enabled in your organization. For more information about Practifi Promote, please consult our Understanding Practifi Promote article or reach out to your firm's CSM.
It's now easier than ever to include Key Entities & People in your firm's campaigns as 📚Campaign Members. We've introduced Add to Campaign to more places in Practifi - record pages and record lists - giving you quick access to this functionality.
Salesforce recently introduced support for Household and Organization records to be tracked as Campaign Members, and we're leveraging that feature as a part of this enhancement. When using the Add to Campaign action, you'll be asked whether you want to add the members of any selected Households and Organizations to the Campaign as well. You can choose either to include all or to include all with the exception of Dependents & Employees.
You'll see Add to Campaign appear in lots of different places above and beyond its existing location on the Campaign record page itself:
- In the section menu of the Campaigns page section on all Key Entity record pages.
- In the action menu on all Contact record pages.
- In the mass actions and row actions menus for all lists of Key Entities & People.
View a record's complete marketing history directly from their record page by using the Campaigns section. In this record page section, Individuals and Contacts see every Campaign they've directly participated in. Households and Organizations see every Campaign they've participated in alongside the campaign history of their members to provide a comprehensive timeline. This Campaign section appears in the navigation panel for Households, Organizations and Individuals and as a page tab for Contacts.
Considerations
🔧 Customized record lists will not receive this update automatically. To add these filters, you can copy their configuration from the standard record table components, which are accessible from the Components page.
🔧 Customized Household, Organization, Individual and Contact record pages will not receive the above layout change automatically. To add them, refer to the standard Lightning record page as needed to understand the layout, then replicate it using the Lightning App Builder.
🛠️ If you have issues adding Household and Organization records as Campaign Members, check your Account Settings in Salesforce Setup and ensure that the Accounts as Campaign Members feature is enabled.
Other Features
Change Log
Customizations made to pages, fields and other elements of Practifi can now be tracked within the Change Log. The Change Log exists as a space to keep track of customizations, including the date they occurred, who performed them and what kind of change occurred. The Change Log supports adding notes and related files to track all customizations in detail. When you request customizations from Practifi, we will ensure the changes made by our team are captured within your organization's Change Log.
📚 For additional information about using the Change Log within your organization, please consult our Using the Change Log article.
Additional Fields
Multiple calculated fields are added to the Entity, Process, Service & Task objects to make reporting on core areas of your business easier. These fields are added to the Basics sections of their respective record pages and are available when building reports. To effectively group all these calculated fields on Client and Prospect record pages, we've introduced the Key Measures field section to their Basics sections.
The new fields are detailed in the below table:
| Object | Field Name | Calculation Logic |
|---|---|---|
| Entity |
Effective Fee Rate |
Annual Revenue / AUM. |
|
Potential Annual Revenue |
Rolled up from Annual Revenue on Deals related to the Entity. |
|
|
Referrer |
Automatically populated the first time the Entity is the From Entity in a Referrer relationship. Populated with the value of the To Entity. |
|
| Process |
Duration (days) |
Completed Date - Started Date. |
|
Time Logged (hours) |
Rolled up from the Time Logged (minutes) field on Tasks related to the Process, and divided by 60. |
|
|
Cost |
Rolled up from the Cost on Activity field on Tasks related to the Process. |
|
|
Service |
Effective Fee Rate |
Annual Revenue / AUM. |
|
Task |
Duration (days) |
Completed Date - Started Date. |
🔧 Customized page layouts and Lightning record pages will not receive the field layout changes automatically. To add them, refer to the standard page layout or Lightning record page as needed to understand the layout, then replicate it using Salesforce's drag-and-drop builder tools.
Compliance Tiles
To help make compliance part of the day-to-day work, we've introduced a series of Home Page tiles from our Compliance app to our Advisor, Client Service and Team Member apps. These tiles give users real-time insights into their:
- Clients not contacted in 90 or more days
- Clients who plan to retire this year
- Meetings with missing notes
To better use screen space, we've added these tiles to the Key Dates row and renamed the tile row as My Alerts & Exceptions.
🔧 Customized Home Pages may not receive the tile changes automatically, depending on the customizations that have been made. To add them, refer to the standard Home Page as needed to understand the layout and then replicate it using the Lightning App Builder.
Task's Started Date
Task completion is currently tracked in Practifi with a dedicated Completed Date field that's populated automatically. This is now complemented by a Started Date field, populated with the date on which the Task's Status was first updated.
Defer Automation Enhancements
We introduced the Defer Automation feature in our last release, Trebbiano, to provide the option of processing automation outside business hours when uploading records, sidestepping real-time performance concerns and platform limitations.
Taking advantage of this feature required the manual step of populating the Defer Automation field as a part of the upload process. Now, if Practifi's automation has been disabled in your instance, all Asset/Liability, Contact, Deal, Entity, Holding, Process, Relationship and Service records created during that time will be flagged for deferred processing automatically, saving you the hassle.
Minor Enhancements
- Assets: Additional default Types (Cryptocurrency and Precious Metal).
- Contact record page (mobile): Use the Call action to start a phone call with that person via your phone's calling app, then be redirected to Practifi for call logging afterward.
- Deals: A new tooltip for the Stage field informs users how to mark the record as Closed Won correctly with the Mark as Closed Won action.
- New Deal & Promote to Prospect actions: Rating and Description have been added to the field layout.
- New Task action: Comments have been added to the field layout.
- Other Definitions: Appears as a filtering option in Entity record lists.
- Portals: Use the Structure component to visually represent the logged-in user's relationships and entities.
- Processes & Tasks: Now available as a record page section on undefined Key Entities, meaning you can start Processes for any household, organization or individual regardless of its definitions.
- Task Templates: Take advantage of the same dynamic assignment logic used on Process Tasks with support for the Assignment Type field.
- ⚠️ The Assign to Process Owner option is available for selection as an Assignment Type; however, Task Templates do not support this option. If you try to save a Task Template with this option selected, you will receive an error message.
Resolved Issues
- Deep Delete action: The Entity's related Deliverables, Risk Profiles and Reference Documents are not deleted as part of Deep Delete.
- Events: Repeat field is missing from the field layout
- Feed for Key Entities: Posts made to the Feed on related Deliverables, Risk Profiles and Reference Documents aren't appearing in the Key Entity's Feed
- New/Add to Entity actions: Salutation incorrectly appears as a mandatory field
- Notes & Files: If these are stored on a Deliverable, Risk Profile or Reference Document record, it isn't automatically linked to that record's related Entity
- Record lists: Blank values in number fields appear blank rather than as a zero, causing issues when sorting and filtering
- Services: Termination Date does not populate with today's date when the Service Stage is updated to Terminated
- Tasks: When relating a Task to a Deliverable, it isn't automatically related to that Deliverable's Related Entity
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