Please find a summary below of some recent updates to Glide, made since our last blog entry, which you may not currently be aware of. If you would like further information, or assistance in implementing any changes in your system, please do not hesitate to contact the team via the blue help widget.
Companies House monitoring
Last summer we released our Companies House monitoring facility. This is relevant to UK based customers, or customers with UK based clients, where the official Glide ‘Company registration number’ field is used solely to hold the Company registration numbers.
If you have any Charity / FCA (etc) number lurking in here, please cleanse these to a dedicated field in advance of activating this feature.
The purpose of this new functionality is to ensure that the ‘Next Year End’ trigger field on the summary tab of the client card, the Year End of any relevant jobs (i.e. the job dates) and the deadlines representing the filing of Accounts at Companies House, remain accurate at all times.
On activation, the system shall work through validating all of your relevant client data. Whenever data changes, either in the Glide system or a change at Companies House, then your data shall be re-checked. Errors are listed for your attention with suggested changes.
Errors in Year End are flagged for your attention. Where a Year End is in agreement, or is within 7 days of the value at Companies House, then we shall also validate the deadline. Deadlines are automatically kept in alignment (helpful for extensions etc) and error would be created where the ‘filed’ status varies between systems.
We shall be rolling a similar system out to Confirmation Statements and any other annual flows that may be triggered based on the Company’s official Year End, such as a dedicated audit flow.
Please get in touch if you have any queries on this highly requested feature.
View Dashboards as other users
You can now view your dashboards as if you were another user. You can toggle between users, with the entire dashboard being updated, or you can pin specific widgets to be permanently shown from the perspective of other users. The latter approach might be useful for the ‘jobs held’ widgets where you might have several versions of the widget pinned as different users.
This was another highly requested feature and we hope this further improves the workflow transparency created through the office.
To gain this ability, you need to be in the newly created permissions list ‘Users with the ability to see dashboards/widgets as other users’.
More detailed ‘linked’ filtering options on dashboard widgets
Many Glide user’s will have their dashboard widgets set to a ‘Linked’ view to provide a filtered view of jobs that are relevant to them, as opposed to the entire practice’s jobs.
Occasionally, where a user wears more than one hat in the practice, this can filter in too many jobs. An example would be where a manager with a ‘manager portfolio’ starts to build their own client portfolio as a director of the practice. They will be linked to all of these jobs, some via the manager position and some via the director position. Previously, there would have been no way to filter the widget to one position or the other.
With this change, you can optionally decide to view a widget as ‘Linked’ (with the existing meaning) or ‘Linked as Manager (etc)’. You could then have multiple widgets set up filtering to different positions, or different dashboards for each role.
Revamped Office filtering on the dashboards
Again referring to the spanner icon on the widgets, we have historically had the ‘Office’ option, where the multi-office concept is active, to allow for filtering of the results to those linked to the office you belong to.
This caused limitations where users required visibility over more than one office.
If you have the multi-office concept active, then you shall now see a building icon (alongside the spanner icon) which will allow you to filter the widget either to ‘your office’ or to any office you choose. As with the job positions above, this will allow you have different widgets on the dashboard focussed on different offices, or to have different dashboards set up for specific offices.
Use of the ‘my office’ setting is recommended where you are creating a dashboard template because this will then continue to behave as before, filtering to the office to which the user belongs.
Fee info – monthly projection report
For those customers that use our Fee info functionality, you can now see the projected fees for a 1 year period broken down by month. As with the existing fee info projection report, this can be filtered by workflow system, office, partner and manager.
Integration with Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD)
For those customers that use Microsoft’s Entra ID product, you can now establish Glide as an enterprise app facilitating single sign on (SSO) to Glide.
This would remove entirely the concept of logging into Glide and would allow customers to benefit from any existing security policies set up in Entra ID.
This is typically suited to practices that are already leveraging this technology within the practice and who are familiar with the setup process. Please contact us if you would like more information.
Integration with Workiro
For customers using the Workiro product, you can now view your folders on the Glide client screen. Head to the ‘Config’ menu to set this up.
Use AI to re-phrase your email/SMS templates
If you enable the setting (found in the advanced config settings) then you’ll see a new option in the template editor to ask AI to re-phrase your email/SMS templates. This current options include rewriting in a more casual, professional, humorous or urgent tone.
Traffic light boost
For every type of statutory deadline configured within your Glide system, you can now set when jobs should enter the yellow and orange traffic lights. By default, these will be set to 60 and 14 days. To further advance the usefulness of the traffic lights, each user can also now decide whether their traffic lights should be showing an ‘overall’ or ‘linked’ perspective. Additionally, we have revamped the ‘Traffic lights summary’ to show the analysis of traffic lights by job type.
Use AI to create a workflow system from a list of stages
We have a new workflow system creation tool that can take a basic list of stages and convert this into a Glide workflow system. The benefit of AI is felt where the milestones can be converted automatically into appropriate stage descriptions. This is in beta release, please contact us if you would like to have a go.
Glide Time: Date picker on the ‘today’s timesheet’ page
We have added the ability to navigate to a specific date instead of using the back and forwards buttons. This could be handy if you wish to pre-record a future holiday.
Optimisations
We have completed a project to optimise some of our dashboard widgets to ensure they load quickly. Combined with recent upgrades to our infrastructure, this should be providing a noticeable improvement to end users. This project is ongoing.
Coming soon
Keep an eye out soon for our revamped Glide Scheduler tool, with a whole host of much requested new features.
Additionally, after a lot of work behind the scenes over the past few years, we are gradually moving towards the next major iteration of the entire Glide system. We’ve made the ‘back end’ changes and during 2024 you should start to see the fruits of these efforts in the shape of newly designed screen and experiences. Please do get in touch if you would like to discuss this major project or get early access to the new features.
