Custom Processes using Views and Summary Notifications

You can set up Custom Processes that use a Documents, Jobs, Clients, Tasks or Practice Activity view in FYI to trigger the process.

If you want the process to trigger for all Documents, Jobs, Clients, Tasks or Practice Activity events you would select a view that shows "All". If you want the process to trigger for selected Documents, Jobs, Clients, Tasks or Practice Activity events you would use a saved view that has filters applied. This can be a system view, or you can set up your own views to use (refer to Saving Changes to the View Layout, Modifying and Deleting Views).

When using a view to trigger a Custom Process, you can set up a Summary Notification step so that the notifications are sent out automatically as a summary instead of as individual notifications.

This article contains the following sections:

• Examples of Custom Processes Using Views and Summary Notifications
• Determine the View to Use as the Filter or Set up the View
• Set up the Custom Process
  • Filter
• Add the Step for a Summary Notification
• Alter Document Step
• Sending Process Notification to other than Manager or Partner

Examples of Custom Processes Using Views and Summary Notifications

• Use the Document - View Filters to identify documents that are "Pending Approval". You set up the Custom Process to send out a notification to each of the relevant approvers, for example every 12 hours. Depending on the user's settings, this will get sent as an email with a link that the Approver can click to go directly to the Documents list automatically filtered to show only the emails/documents that are "Pending Approval" and where that user is selected as the Approver. A notification is also sent as a reminder. This can be sent out as a Summary Notification. For details of this, refer to Pending Approval Notification and Client Upload Notification.
  
  
• Use the Client - View Filters when sending out newsletters. For example, if you had Client Custom Fields of "Opt in" and "Newsletters", you can set up a Client view with the clients that have these selected. You can then select this view as the Custom Automation Client - View Filters so only those clients receive the newsletter created by the Custom Process. The Client view gives you an easy way to check the clients who will receive the newsletter before sending it.
  
  
• Use the Document - View Filters and a Summary Notification for the Tax Assessment process where you want to customise who gets notified. For example, if you have two offices with the different administration teams and would like the admin officer of the respective office to be notified of the Tax Assessments rather than the Manager or Partner. See below Sending Notification to other than Manager or Partner.
  
  
• Use the Job - View Filters and a Summary Notification to send out a daily Summary Notification if a critical change has been made to Jobs. For example, if a Job has moved to a certain State such as "Ready for Billing", or if the Due Date of a Job has changed. You can set up a Custom Process to send a Summary Notification to the people who need to be notified about the changes.
  
  
• Use the Task - View Filters and a Summary Notification to send out a daily Summary Notification of overdue tasks. Refer to Daily Summary Notification of Overdue Tasks.
  
  
• Use the Practice Activity - View Filters to send out a scheduled Summary Notification, for example, to an FYI administrator of any events that have a Status of "Failure" or "Action Required". Refer also to Practice Activity.

Video Walkthrough
For a video walkthrough on this feature, refer to Creating a Document-driven Custom Process (4 min) and Creating a Job-driven Custom Process (8 min).

The following explains in general how to set up a Custom Process using a view and a Summary Notification. Refer also to the examples in Examples of Custom Processes using Views and Summary Notification.

Determine the View to Use as the Filter or Set up the View

Make sure you have the view in place to do the filter. This needs to be a view in the Documents, Jobs, Clients or Tasks list.

An FYI administrator, or a user in a User Group that has Permissions enabled for Views (refer to Managing User Groups) can set up a view that isolates the scenario you are looking to monitor or to send reminder notifications on. Depending on what you want the view to trigger in the process, the view can also include filters and search criteria. Refer to Saving Changes to the View Layout, Modifying and Deleting Views.

Note: When saving a new view, you can specify Automations only so it only appears in Custom Processes and is not included as a standard view in the Documents, Jobs, Clients or Tasks lists.

Set up the Custom Process

The following is the Custom Process set up to show the example of sending a Summary Notification for documents Pending Approval.

Name
Ensure the name describes the process. The Name is included in the Notification in FYI and, depending on the user's settings, in the email notification that is sent.

Trigger
You can use a View as the Filter when the Trigger is "Manual" or "Schedule". For details, refer to Trigger in Setting up Custom Processes.

Filter

The Filter determines what information is monitored or included in the process.
Click the edit icon to display the Filter Items.

In the Filter Items, the Filter Type of "Client - Select Filters" does not use a view. For details of the Client filter refer to Setting up Custom Processes.

The other options are to filter using a view.

To filter using a View for the Documents, Jobs, Clients or Tasks list, set the Filter Type as "Document - View Filters", "Job - View Filters",  "Client - View Filters" or "Task - View Filters".

View
Select the View you want the process to monitor or to send reminder notifications on. A View must be selected. The following is an example of selecting a "Document - View Filters" and the view has been selected.

Run Only Once Per Document/Job/Client/Task
This option determines whether or not the automation sends the notification about a Document, Job, Client or Task only once.

For example, when sending notifications of documents that needs to be approved, you would usually set this so Approvers will be sent further emails or notifications if a document is still pending approval. This means the Approvers only have to refer to the last notification to see what they currently need to approve. So for this example, you would remove the checkmark for Run Only Once Per Document.

If you want to send a notification to approvers only once that a document needs approval (that is, when it is initially set to "Pending Approval") you would checkmark Run Only Once Per Document.

In the same way, if the Process was sending notifications when a document has come back from digital signing, you would checkmark Run Only Once Per Document.

If a Job has the Job State set to a specific value, you would usually only want to send the notification once, so you would checkmark Run Only Once Per Job.

When the Filter Type is set as Client View, this is shows as Run Only One Per Client.

Where a Process is sending, for example, a daily Summary Notification of Tasks that are overdue, you would usually remove the checkmark for Run Only One Per Task so that further emails or notifications are sent if the Task is still not completed.

When the Filter Type is set as Practice Activity View, this is shows as Run Only One Per Document (that is, Run Once Per Practice Activity Event).

Note: There is a limit of 5000 set on the number of Documents. Jobs, Clients, Tasks or Practice Activity Events that a process will run for. If there are more than this limit of 5000 that you need to run the process on (for example more than 5000 documents) you need to run the process again to run it for the items that were not included in the initial run. Setting Run Only Once Per Document/Job/Client/Job runs the process but excludes the items it has already run for.

Inherit Job on the Custom Process
When the Filter Type is set as Document or Task View Filters, the Inherit Job option is included in the process.

When this is checkmarked to enable it, and a process step is set up to use the relative Partner or Manager for the Sender of an email, for the workflow Owner or Approver or for a Task Assignee, the Partner or Manager is taken from the Job selected for the Document or from the Task. If the Job does not have a Partner/Manager, then this is picked up from the Client settings.

When Inherit Job is disabled, this picks up the client’s Partner/Manager’s value in the “Sender” field.

In the example above of sending a Summary Notification for documents that are "Pending Approval", no documents are created for this process so Inherit Job is uncheckmarked.

Add the Step for a Summary Notification

Summary Notification when an FYI view is used to trigger the process. The Summary Notification Action in a Step is only available when "Document - View Filters" has been selected as the Filter. When setting up a Custom Process triggered by a Job or Client view, this would trigger individual notifications.

To set up the step for the Summary Notification:

1. Click Add Step.
2. Select FYI.
3. Select Summary Notification.
4. For Notify User, select who you want to send the Summary Notification to. This can be set to a specific person in your user list. Or it can be set as "Manager" to set the owner as the relative client or job's manager, or as "Partner" to set the owner as the relative client or job's partner (as held in Xero Practice Manager).
   
   
   • For a process that is run for a Client, the Manager or Partner is taken from the Client Details.
   • For a process that is run in the context of a Job, the Manager or Partner is taken from the Job Details.
   
   Where, for example, the Document Owner or Document Approver column has been included in the selected view, you will see these as selection for the Notify User to send the notification to the relative "Document Owner" or the person set as the "Document Approver.
   
   
   
   
5. You can optionally add a Custom Message to the Summary Notification.
   In the email and Notification in FYI, the message will display below the link that is sent.
   Click Custom Message to set this to "Yes" and enter the text you want to include.
   
   
   
   The following is an example of a step added to send the Summary Notification to the "Document Approver".
   
   

When the Summary Notification is triggered, the relevant users as specified as the Notify User receive a notification.  Depending on the user's settings, this will also get sent as an email. The notification and the email show the relevant number of emails and documents that triggered the process.

For examples of the notification and the email for a notification of documents that are pending approval, and how the link is used, refer to Summary Notification in Reviewing and Approving Emails and Documents.

Alter Document Step

Another option that is available for a Custom Process using a View is the Alter Document step.

The Alter Document step is useful for Custom Processes that are filtered with a Document view. When using a Document view to retrieve a collection of documents you can then use Alter Document to update any key fields. You can also add a Task or a Comment to the document which can be used as notifications.

In the Alter Document step, in the Filing section, the Name of the document is set as a default as the Original Filename. Where relevant, setting the fields as "Don't Update" will leave what is already selected for the document.

In the Workflow section the options for Owner, Approver and Workflow status can be changed. Where any of these has been set with a default, and the value is not required, delete the default to set these as "Don't Update".

An example of when the Alter Document can be used is documents that have been sent from the client with Client Uploads (refer to Sharing the Uploads Folder with the Client). When the documents are imported, a Custom Process with the Alter Document step can be used to file the documents, for example, as "Workpapers".

Sending Process Notification to other than Manager or Partner

The following explains how to set up a Custom Process for sending out a notification of a Tax Assessment automation to users other than a Manager or Partner, for example, to the administrator of one of two different offices.

1. Save two document views with the filters set as a combination of:
   The respective partners of each of the two offices
      and
   The Name search containing the relevant words such as "Tax Assessment"
   
   
2. Within each of the Tax Assessment automations, in the create step for the Word or the Email, set the Approver to be the "Partner".
   
   
3. Configure scheduled Custom Process automations with the filter based on each of the document views.
   
   
4. Within each of these Custom Process automations enable a step "Summary Notification" which is directed to the appropriate administrator for each office.