Five alerts to supercharge your Practice Dashboard

Adding alert rules to your FreeAgent dashboard allows you to see the aspects of your clients’ accounts that you’re most interested in at a glance. Alerts can also help you gauge which clients may need a little more prompting from time to time to ensure they stay on top of their business finances.

Knowing which alerts will offer you the most useful insights into your clients’ accounts can be tricky so we’ve compiled a list of five alerts that could enhance your Practice Dashboard and help you determine which clients you may wish to contact.

Alert 1: client’s year end is within a number of days

Ensuring your clients are leaving enough time to prepare their accounts in advance of their accounting year end can be a challenge. If you want to know if a client’s year end deadline is approaching, you can establish an alert rule that highlights which clients have their year end within a selected time frame. You can then choose to send a quick reminder email to ensure the clients listed in this alert explain their transactions and reconcile their accounts in time.

Alert 2: client’s VAT return is due within a number of days

Another alert you may wish to add to your dashboard is ‘VAT return is due within a number of days’, which lists clients with an upcoming VAT return deadline within a selected time period. This can be a great way to help you stay on top of those clients who you’ll be filing VAT returns for between those dates.

Alert 3: number of client’s unexplained bank transactions is more than X

The ‘Number of unexplained bank transactions is more than’ alert tells you when a client’s total number of unexplained bank transactions exceeds a specified amount. You may wish to remind the listed clients of the importance of explaining their transactions, particularly if they are approaching their year end or VAT return deadline.

Many of your clients will now be using Open Banking bank feeds, which offer improved reliability and security. To ensure their feeds are kept active, your clients will need to reconnect and re-consent every 90 days as part of the Open Banking standard. You can make sure your clients are prepared for this by adding an alert to your dashboard that flags when their Open Banking re-consent expires within a selected time period. You may then decide to notify clients when they’ll need to re-consent.

Alert 5: client’s trade debtors account is above or below a certain amount

It’s useful for you to have an overview of all of your clients that have a certain sum total in their trade debtors account via your dashboard. The ‘Trade debtors account is above or below a certain amount’ alert allows you to identify clients that have a high number of outstanding invoices and advise them on ways to ensure their invoices are paid, such as setting up automated reminder emails.

Now you know a little more about the alerts that are available in FreeAgent, why not have a think about which ones might be most useful and then add them to your dashboard? You can find out how to do that in our handy Knowledge Base article.