What changed: Clients, Sign, one sign-in
A new Clients app for the people behind the cases, a lot more in Sign, and one sign-in that now carries across every BeforeMay product, passkey included.
You open a client's file to send a quick invoice and discover the email you need is in someone's Outlook, the carried-forward losses are in a spreadsheet called losses FINAL 2, and the engagement letter is in a folder nobody remembers naming. None of that is a tax problem. It is a filing problem, and it eats a surprising amount of the week.
This fortnight's work was mostly about that layer: the client, as a person, and everything the practice holds for them. Here is what is live now.
BeforeMay Clients: the client list, without needing a case
Each client page now shows the lot in one place: their files, filed by year and category, and a single timeline of email, signing, identity checks, invoices and case work. A Carry forward tab holds what next year's accounts will need from this year's, such as holdings at cost, depreciation balances and losses, so the answer stops living in someone's head.
You can also raise an invoice against a client with no case attached. Pick the client, type the lines straight onto the invoice, choose one of five layouts, and send it from your own Outlook with the PDF attached. Sent, reminded and paid are recorded against the client. There is no time tracking and no WIP; this is invoicing, not practice management.
Email works the same way. Connect more than one mailbox, read a client's mail from the client page, and save the message to the client's record. Email templates now take on the practice's own branding too, and can go to one client or many.
Sign: letters that start from your own wording
For a group, a letter now says who signs for what. People and entities named on it are created as clients when you send, grouped with the client they belong to, and given the email addresses you typed, only where their record had none. You no longer re-key a family of five into the client list after the letter has gone. Signers can sign at the same time, and a letter you reword saves itself to My letters.
There are sixteen branded letter layouts to start from, a letter style per type, and 30 June trust minutes live in the library as a template instead of a separate tab.
One sign-in across every product, and a passkey that works in each
If your account is protected by a passkey, it now works as the second step in every product, not just Workpapers. Before, Sign, Verify, Clients and BAS Review would tell a passkey-protected account to go and set up an authenticator app instead. If you use a passkey, you may notice the others now ask for it; that is the change.