Highlights from our February 2023 Glide release

We're delighted to bring you an update discussing the latest new features we've added to Glide, along with many improvements to our existing feature set.

Traffic Light Enhancements

Historically, the yellow traffic light has signified that a job has a deadline in less than 60 days, the orange traffic light 14 days and a job in red has an overdue deadline.

We have recently added the ability to customise the parameters for when jobs enter each traffic light. You can now tailor this for each type of deadline, read how to do this here.

So, for example, you might have your Accounts filings becoming yellow 120 days before the deadline, but your VAT returns going yellow only 7 days before the VAT filing deadline. This will help to draw attention to potential issues on larger jobs sooner, and will also avoid the situation where jobs such as VAT are instantly yellow on creation due to the short life cycle of those jobs.

We have also made the following two changes to the system to make the traffic lights even more useful.

• If you are simply interested in all deadlines in the business, you can opt to show the ‘global’ traffic light totals instead of the linked view that has historically been presented. This should avoid the need to ‘link’ yourself to all jobs, simply to get the numbers in the traffic lights. Read how to do this here.
• A new widget called ‘Traffic light summary’ has been created to show a count of jobs on all workflow systems, with a count for the number of jobs in the yellow, orange and red traffic lights. This is an evolution of the ‘System summary’ widget and as such will replace this widget on existing dashboards, if you would like the old version, this remains available in the widget menu.

Automatically progress jobs when alerts are sent

If you are sending email and/or SMS automatically via the alerts functionality, you can now get the alerts to automatically progress jobs.

Each alert can be configured to push a progress button on the workflow route. The job will need to be on the correct stage for the button, i.e. the stage that the button goes ‘from’.

This gives rise to an increase in automation opportunities, such as:

• Click the ‘Chased’ button when an alert chases information so that you get the actual date on the job card. You could even create a different button called ‘Chased automatically’, which you could hide from users, so as to differentiate between actual dates for manual and automated chasing.
• Click a different progress button on your final automated chaser. Supposing you have 5 automated chasers being sent to clients, asking them to provide their tax return information, you could get the 5th message to click a different button (e.g. ‘Final automated chaser’) – this button could progress the job to a different stage called ‘Awaiting information – manual chasing’. The main benefit here is that you can then clearly see the jobs that require manual chasing on the progress monitor on the dashboard. That final chaser might also email you to let you know.
• Click a ‘Reminder sent’ button to complete a VAT return job once you have reminded the client to pay the bill on say the 5th of the month. This means you no longer have to go in and complete those jobs that are only incomplete to facilitate the payment reminder.
• Similar to the above, for personal tax payments, you could:
• Have your main tax return flow progress a sub-job for the payments on account to a stage for the 31/1 payment.
• Have an alert send a reminder to clients to pay their 31/1 tax liability, use the new functionality to have that alert progress the job to a stage for the 31/7 reminder.
• Use the alerts to send another reminder before the 31st of July to remind clients of the second payment on account. This alert can now take a step to complete this sub-job.

When combining various automations, the entire process of reminding customers about their payments on account can be automated.

A new client field data type – formatted long text

You can now store client data as formatted text. This includes all of the formatting options we have in our email templates, such as lists, links, tables etc.

This has been designed to add further flexibility to the email templates. Take an example where you have an email template that requests the info you need for a set of Accounts. Currently, you may have a standard bullet point list in the email template but would prefer this to be client specific.

Historically, the data could be stored on the client record, but this would not allow you to incorporate formatting such as bullet points. This is now possible.

Furthermore, to avoid the need to set a record for all clients, you can also set default values for these fields, so that you only need to populate the fields on clients that differ from the default.

For a full list of changes, please see the change log in the Help menu

We have recently held a couple of webinars, you can watch these here:

• 25 Jan 2023: Master e-mail and SMS automation in Glide workflows. Watch here.
• 8 Feb 2023: Maximise the value of your Glide system. Watch here