Now, the first 6 months of the year were captured in our last product update blog where I covered off on a bunch of my favourites like the Birthday Dashboard, the Division 7a Tool, the Inter-Entity Loan grid and copy coding, simple Equipment Finance deferrals and our very special client notes. So I’ll leave these alone for now and instead leave you with a link to head back for a skim.

The Client Map

The last 12 months has seen a multitude of upgrades and refinements across the usability and visual options. But my absolute favourite would have to be the new auto-build functionality, which significantly reduces the clicks required to get a base diagram in place. From there, you can just carry out the finishing touches. A close second to this is the ability to create new themes that dramatically change the look of your diagrams - no more are you beholden to the pre-set visuals we’ve bestowed upon you.

Amortisation Scheduler out of Beta

This tool has been in Beta for the longest of times, but the wait has been worth it. I’m proud that we’ve managed to polish and release another brilliant tool that gives you the ability to capture and automate the amortisation of any financial amount - whether it be a lump sum of insurance you want to spread out over 12 months for management reporting purposes, or simply managing your borrowing expenses you would to spread over 3 or more years. Just another example of taking an every day function we carry out usually in Excel and centralising then automating it to create visibility and minimise the clicks!

Correspondence Register

The Correspondence Register has been around since the early days, but hot diggity, there’s some golden additions that we’ve brought online over the past few months. I’m hard pressed to pick just one favourite here, so I’m going to give you both!  Text templates are super flexible templates that can utilise your client information to customise standardised templates everything from meeting notes to client emails - all accessible also direct from within your email too!

That’s a logical segway into my other favourite enhancement: a total re-imagining of our Outlook and Gmail integrations. Beyond sending emails from your own email account without leaving AccountKit, you can now use AccountKit as an address book from within your email to insert client details AND any templates you’ve created. This solves a huge pain point of capturing client correspondence in the same place as the rest of our client interactions whilst leveraging of your client data from where you work - ie. your email. Much more to come here I’m pleased to say.

Security & User Settings

I shouldn’t need to say it, but it’s clear how dangerous the world is getting when it comes down to cyber security. We are all so very reliant upon our cloud based software stack, and the cyber criminals know it. With that in mind, we’ve spent a lot of time this year bolstering our security within AccountKit. At the foundation it’s AccountKit as an organisation achieving ISO27001 certification, but it’s also about giving power back to you to monitor key events relating to users accessing your systems. You can also take control of your users’ accounts with functionality like blocking and resetting of two-factor authentication (2FA) for your team or even just controlling which 2FA options they’re allowed to utilise.

The Road Ahead

That's a wrap for this product update, for more information, check out our latest releases here. Looking to the future we're head down pushing hard on the new feature sets for this year. We have some major announcements scheduled for later in the year as we roll out some new unannounced features that we'll be testing and evolving within our own practice, before making them available to a small group via a closed beta. We'll continue expanding our integrations with the likes of Class, FYI and Intuit whilst also delving into user permissions. All elements to save on the clicks and create visibility across your practice. Brace yourselves!

Thanks for your ongoing support, we're looking forward to continuing our practice evolution journey with you all throughout 2021.

‍Happy New Year!  Welcome to 2021, a year of new possibilities where we have an opportunity to reflect on the difficulties of 2020 and how this has impacted the world we work within and the uncertainties still in front of us. Perhaps this is the new normal that we need to adjust to, but let me give you a little assurance, something that is not going to change is the amount of cool stuff we’re going to deliver over this new year. I’m positively tingling about what the future entails!  I get ahead of myself though, for today is a day of reflection on my personal highlights from the many releases this past year. If you want the detail, head on over to the Latest Releases within the Help Centre where you can get a full update on all the releases for the year on a month by month basis.