Overview
The following article covers what's new in our Cinsault release (beginning in September 2022) to provide a detailed understanding of what's changing, how new features work, how to enable them and any additional factors your team should consider. If you're new to Practifi or our release documentation, please review our best practices for 📚 Using Practifi Release Notes.
With Cinsault, we're rolling out Practifi Propel, our world-class analytics solution, adding calendar sync to our Microsoft 365 integration, introducing several enhancements to workflows and more.
- Practifi Propel
- Microsoft 365 Calendar Sync
- Quik! Forms Integration
- Workflow Enhancements
- Campaign Revenue Attribution for Deals
- RMD Tracking and Reminders
- Security Check for Key Entity Access
- Other Features and Enhancements
- Resolved Issues
💡Tip: You can click highlighted section headings like the one below to access detailed documentation about a feature.
Practifi Propel
Practifi Propel is our new premium analytics solution, powered by Salesforce CRM Analytics. Offering new and improved ways to visualize and interact with your data, our power dashboards allow you to transform data into insight, action and excellence at scale. The data processing service included with Propel takes daily performance snapshots of your firm's Practifi organization, giving you greater visibility than ever before.
Propel provides whole-of-firm analytics rather than those tied to a specific division, advisor or client. As such, it is targeted at executives and senior leaders of advisory firms and is part of the new Practifi Executive app. To learn more about how it works, please see our Enabling Practifi Propel article.
Please note: Practifi Propel is an add-on service. If you'd like to learn more, feel free to reach out to your Client Success Manager.
Microsoft 365 Calendar Sync
Our Albariño release saw the debut of Microsoft 365 Email Sync, which manages the continuous import of your firm's Microsoft 365 emails into Practifi to ensure you have a comprehensive engagement history on hand. This release extends our Microsoft 365 integration to add a two-way sync between calendar events, meaning you can manage your calendar in Microsoft 365 or Practifi and be confident you're seeing your entire schedule.
You can even use our Create an Event workflow action to make appointment-setting a seamless part of the process or use the built-in Teams meeting capabilities to set up conferencing with a single click.
📚 For more information, please see our Enabling Microsoft 365 Sync article.
| 🛠 Implementation Details This feature has modified the following items. If your firm has customized these pages, you'll need to either copy the changes into your customized version or switch to the default version and redo your changes:
|
Please note: Microsoft 365 Sync is a paid feature, so if your team is interested in learning more, feel free to contact your Client Success Manager.
Quik! Forms Integration
Paperwork is a necessary element of any advisory firm. All too often, it's also a time-consuming one, as the data you've captured in your business systems needs to be painstakingly re-entered into multiple forms. We've partnered with Quik!, an industry-leading forms automation solution, to ease that burden.
Using our new Active Forms, it's now possible to capture everything you need for your paperwork as part of a workflow, update the Client record in Practifi and send the information to Quik! 's comprehensive form library.
Please note: Your firm will need a subscription to the Quik! app to utilize this integration.
Account Opening and Maintenance Workflows
Between the enhanced workflow experience introduced in Albariño and the expanded suite of capabilities in this release, you can do much more with our workflow engine to run your business efficiently and effectively. To make these powerful tools easier to use, we've built three new workflows—New Account Opening, Move Money and Update Beneficiaries—that bring these capabilities to life and make taking advantage of them a turnkey process.
These workflows are designed to work hand-in-glove with our Quik! integration, helping you collect information for comprehensive form-filling, pass the information across to Quik! for generation and signing and confirm everything that happens afterward is managed.
Please note: Your firm will need a subscription to the Quik! app to utilize these workflows.
For dealing with multiple custodians, the New Account Opening workflow can be configured for each custodian using Task Setup Bundles that each contain all the Active Form Fields and mappings required to send the data successfully to Quik!.
If you need help understanding these options or setting up workflows, please reach out to your Client Success Manager.
Workflow Enhancements
New Action Types
Our Active Forms feature, introduced in Albariño, made it possible to capture information entered in workflows and use it to create and update records in the system. In this release, we're giving you the ability to create more records than ever before with the following actions:
-
Create an Asset/Liability
-
Create a Person
-
Create a Client Entity
-
Create a Reference Document
-
Create an Asset/Liability Role
-
Create a Relationship
📚 To learn more, please see our Understanding Action Types article.
Checklists for Process Tasks
A task can be much more than a single instruction; it's often a collection of individual items that add up to a complete workflow step. These items now have a natural home in the Checklist, which prevents the need for complicated task instructions or multiple steps where a single step would be simpler to manage.
Checklists can accommodate two types of items:
-
A manual item is considered complete when the task owner checks its box.
-
An automatic item is considered complete when its criteria have been fulfilled. Criteria logic is handled by a checkbox field located elsewhere, which gets automatically checked using either formula logic or other automation; the automatic checklist item simply reflects the status of that field.
We've added options for Checklist items to the setup page for task templates and process tasks.
📚 To learn more about configuring Checklists, please see our Creating Processes article.
Display Criteria for Active Forms
A workflow task might have different information to capture depending on the situation. For example, you might need to upload a Reference Document for a client or may have already done so. Display criteria allow Practifi Administrators to define when to show fields and field sections, meaning the form shows users the fields they need to complete and hides the ones they don't.
Prefill Logic for Active Form Fields
Sometimes the information you want to capture in an Active Form already exists in Practifi, and you need to confirm it's still correct or update it if it isn't. For example, you might want to double-check a client's contact information. Prefill logic allows administrators to specify lookup values for form fields and enable prefilling if data exists.
Task Setup Bundles
Even with all the functionality in our workflows, manually creating tasks can still be time-consuming. To help make task setup easily repeatable, we've introduced Task Setup Bundles, which bring together all the configuration items involved in a particular use case, such as creating an Event or making a Noticeboard post.
All the configuration elements available within a Task Template or Process Task are available, including:
- Actions
- Active Form Display Criteria
- Active Form Fields
- Active Form Sections
- Active Form Field Assignments
- Outcomes
- Preset Checklist Items
You can build a Task Setup Bundle from scratch or import it from an existing Task Template or Process Task. Once created, the Add Setup Bundle action appears on the Process Task and Task Template record pages, which manages the adding of bundled items into the workflow for you.
Repeating Form Field Sections
Sometimes users need to repeat a workflow action several times, such as when filling out a Client record with multiple Client Entities and People. Repeating field sections allow administrators to place a field in an Active Form that defines how many times a field section should appear, with each field section running its own version of the workflow action.
In the scenario above, admins can create a field with the field type of Number to ask users "How many people do you want to create?" The number entered in that field determines how many additional field sections are displayed. This allows the form to grow dynamically based on what is needed at that point in time.
Start Multiple Instances of a Process
While processes are usually kicked off one at a time, there are also situations where you might want multiple instances of a process to be opened simultaneously, such as opening more than one account for a household or performing other account maintenance transactions.
The Start a Process action now allows you to choose how many occurrences of a process you want to create, saving you additional clicks. The number of processes defaults to one, so there are no extra steps if that's all you need.
Read-only Active Form Fields
Sometimes there's relevant information captured in the system you want to show a team member, but you don't want them to be able to modify it. This information might be used to send notifications or create a Noticeboard post. In these situations, you can check the new Read-Only Field checkbox in the Field Settings section of the Active Form Field record page, and your field won't be available for editing within the workflow. To ensure users can always complete the form's requirements from within the form itself, read-only fields cannot be required fields.
Campaign Revenue Attribution for Deals
A primary objective of any marketing team is to quantify the value they bring to a firm, typically presented as the ROI of various marketing initiatives. We've introduced revenue attribution to connect your firm's pipeline to the campaigns tracked by its marketers, providing a clear line of sight from the initiative to its outcomes.
Please note: This feature requires our Practifi Promote add-on service. Speak to your Client Success Manager to find out more.
| 🛠 Implementation Details This feature has modified the following items. If your firm has customized them, you'll need to either copy the changes into your customized version or switch to the default version and redo your changes:
|
RMD Tracking and Reminders
Ensuring clients meet their regulatory obligations is an essential aspect of investment management. Once they turn 72, that means ensuring they take their required minimum distributions (RMDs) every calendar year. We've made staying on top of this compliance task easier with our comprehensive tracking and reminder-setting framework, allowing you to proactively engage your clients at key points during the year.
| 🛠 Implementation Details This feature has modified the following items. If your firm has customized them, you'll need to either copy the changes into your customized version or switch to the default version and redo your changes:
|
Security Check for Key Entity Access
Clients, prospects and centers of influence are the lifeblood of your firm. As such, placing strict access and logging controls around their records can be hugely beneficial from a security and audit perspective. Our Security Check feature makes this possible by presenting a pop-up window to users before they can access these records, providing a mechanism for them to ask verification questions of the person they're speaking to, or simply prompting them to select a reason for accessing the record.
Either way, the access request is recorded against the Entity's record, giving you total visibility over who's looked at what. When enabled, the Security Check appears whenever a Household, Organization or Individual record is opened.
| 🛠 Implementation Details This feature has modified the following items. If your firm has customized them, you'll need to either copy the changes into your customized version or switch to the default version and redo your changes:
|
Other Features and Enhancements
Missing Information Home Page Tile
While the information you collect from each client can vary, there's usually a handful of mission-critical data points, like phone numbers, addresses, SSNs and birthdates. Knowing which of these still need to be obtained can be time-consuming, as you need to check each field one by one. The Clients with missing information tile table on the Home page makes it easy by presenting them all as a single, comma-separated list.
| 🛠 Implementation Details This feature has modified the following items. If your firm has customized them, you'll need to either copy the changes into your customized version or switch to the default version and redo your changes:
|
Primary Campaigns for Key Entities, People and Deals
Identifying the most relevant marketing campaign related to specific records in Practifi makes it easier to produce reports for key stakeholders or filter your Directory to find the individuals, households and organizations you're looking for. The Primary Campaign field for Key Entities, People and Deals uses automation to populate this data in the background, meaning you get the discoverability and reporting benefits without any extra work required. The Primary Campaign field is only visible to Practifi Administrators and users with a Practifi Promote license.
Please note: This feature requires our Practifi Promote add-on service. Speak to your Client Success Manager to learn more.
| 🛠 Implementation Details This feature has modified the following items. If your firm has customized them, you'll need to either copy the changes into your customized version or switch to the default version and redo your changes:
|
Merge Assets Page Action
Our New Account Opening workflow walks you through creating a comprehensive account record and sending it to the relevant custodian via Quik!. However, once that account has been opened, your portfolio management tool creates it as a duplicate record in the system. To overcome this issue, we've introduced the Merge Assets action to make combining the two records—and completing the workflow—a simple and straightforward process.
| 🛠 Implementation Details This feature has modified the following items. If your firm has customized them, you'll need to either copy the changes into your customized version or switch to the default version and redo your changes:
|
Client Lifecycle Transition Dates
Recording the date on which Key Entities become clients and lost clients is vital to get right. Previously, these values were captured in the background based on the date the Promote to Client or Mark as Lost Client actions were processed. We've now surfaced these as date fields within the actions themselves, meaning your team members can easily modify transition dates if the real-world date differs from the date on which the action was performed. The field is prefilled with today's date, so there's no need for any additional data entry unless it's needed.
Team Member Object
Practifi uses Salesforce's Account Teams feature to manage the who's who of your servicing teams in Practifi. One limitation of this feature is it only tracks team members as they appear today, rather than keeping track of historical team members. To address this, the Team Member object now maintains a copy of all servicing team members, including past relationships, with timestamped start and end dates so you can get a clear sense of who was involved in the client relationship at any time. You can view team member history by creating a report based on the Team Member object.
New Deal and New Task (from template) Page Actions
We've made the New Deal and New Task (from template) page actions configurable in this release, meaning you can now extend them with additional fields using Salesforce's Flow Builder. Don't hesitate to contact your Client Success Manager if you need assistance configuring these actions.
| 🛠 Implementation Details This feature has modified the following items. If your firm has customized them, you'll need to either copy the changes into your customized version or switch to the default version and redo your changes:
|
Updated System Font
Salesforce's Lightning Experience initially used the Salesforce Sans font as the default in the user interface; however, this was recently changed to use the default system font provided by the device's operating system, which meant fewer rendering errors across browsers and devices.
With this release, we've applied the same change to Practifi's custom styling to inherit those same benefits and maintain consistency with other product areas, such as the dashboards introduced in Practifi Propel and apps bundled with AppExchange products.
Resolved Issues
The Cinsault release includes resolutions for the following issues:
-
Add to Household/Organization action: If the Individual's definition was moved to their new Primary Entity, and they became a Contact, their Tax ID Number was disappearing.
-
Addepar integration: The Account Number, Annual Revenue and Revenue Last Year (rolling) fields weren't syncing correctly.
-
Birthdays in the next 30 days Home page tile: The records shown in the list upon expanding the tile are now sorted by birth year rather than only by month and day. This means they're no longer sorted in terms of proximity to today's date.
-
Black Diamond integration:
-
Sync errors occurred when portfolio lists with 10,000+ items were updated.
-
Validation errors occurred when an existing portfolio was moved to a new client.
-
-
Deliverables: Fulfillment records weren't being created automatically when the Ongoing Calculation Basis was set to Based on Last Fulfillment Date, and the Last Fulfillment Date was missing.
-
Meetings with missing notes and Upcoming meetings Home screen tiles: These tiles displayed any meeting related to an Entity whose Servicing Team included the user, rather than showing only meetings where the user was explicitly named as an attendee.
-
Entity record side panel: The navigation panel was occasionally not visible when initially loading the page, requiring the user to click on a subtab and back again to see the panel.
-
Record lists: Users could not sort lists using lookup fields, such as Owner or Primary Entity.
-
Service fees: Errors occurred if the lowest fee band started at a value greater than $0. We added a validation rule to ensure the first band always commences at $0.
-
Task record page: The right sidebar was not scrolling vertically.
Comments
Article is closed for comments.