Welcome to AdvicePay’s quarterly release notes! After a break this winter to give our team the space to focus on some big projects, we’re ushering in spring with a full tour of the most popular new features. We’ve got updates all over our platform, so let’s get to the fun stuff!

What we're most excited about 🎉

Marking Invoices as Refunded (Outside AdvicePay)

When you’ve refunded a client’s payment outside AdvicePay (e.g. for payments older than 90 days or initially marked as paid by check), you can now maintain accurate records within your account by marking it as refunded.

You can refund a total or partial amount, select the custom date on which the refund took place, and even add notes to reflect details around the refund – all of which will display on the PDF invoice. 

Marking a one-time or subscription invoice as refunded will adjust your revenue figures on the Dashboard!

Editing the Default Description of Service on Subscriptions

We now support editing the Description of Services on a client's subscription so that all invoices generated in the future will have a new default description:

You can type in a brand new description, add one (or more) from your saved descriptions, remove any description, and/or edit the wording on the existing description attached.

Doing this will immediately change the payment description for all future invoices, including  Upcoming invoices that may already be generated and waiting to bill. 

Tip: Depending on the regulations in your state, you may need to edit past billed invoices to update in detail what services were performed during that service period. We also support editing the description of services for a specific invoice after your clients have paid! Here's what that process looks like from start to finish.

Recurring Overdue Invoice Reminders

We all know what it’s like to need a little helpful nudge, and our new option to send recurring reminders on overdue invoices does just that!

By default overdue invoice reminder emails are sent to a client just once – either 1 day or 3 days after the due date. When this isn’t enough, now you can set subsequent reminders to continue to go out at any interval between 1 and 31 days until the invoice is paid. 

By turning on subsequent reminders, we’ll begin sending reminder emails on your set schedule to all of your clients with past due invoices. :-)

Require Signers on DocuSign Documents

When using our Docusign integration for getting eSignatures on documents, all signer roles used to be optional (and therefore removable when sending). No longer! Now when you need the ability to require certain signing roles on a document, you have it. 

In your linked DocuSign account you can customize Advanced settings for each signer role on a template. When you select “Don’t allow senders to delete recipient,” we’ll honor that when sending out documents via AdvicePay.

Canceling Invoices and Subscriptions Won’t Void Attached Documents

To allow for more flexibility in collecting signed documents, we’ll no longer void a document when its attached one-time invoice or subscription is canceled. 

Since oftentimes changes need to be made on a client’s billing arrangement that don’t impact the status of the associated documents, this new behavior will allow you to make those adjustments without also setting up and sending an entirely new eSignature request. Huzzah!

(Oh, and in the event you do need to cancel a document that hasn’t been fully signed yet, you can still do so by visiting Documents > Cancel Document.)

Updated Client Payment Screens (with New Activate Auto-Billing Button for Clarity!) 

Both transparency and clarity are a fundamental part of our culture here at AdvicePay. They impact everything we do as a company, including how we’ve built the software! 

Over the years our payment screens have gone through a few redesigns to try to better achieve those two aims. With our latest iteration, we wanted to add more obvious detail for clients on when + how often their charge(s) would bill, who was invoicing them, and the billing breakdown between an upfront invoice and an ongoing subscription. 

By popular request, as part of this refresh we changed the copy on the payment button to “Activate Auto-Billing” if a client is authorizing a subscription in advance of its first bill date and there is no attached one-time invoice that will debit their account immediately. 

Many of you asked for this clarifying language in order to eliminate possible confusion for your clients, and we’re so happy you did! 

(While we’re here, did you know we have a client-facing Knowledge Base with tutorials and FAQs to help your clients successfully use the system? Here’s our step-by-step guide to making a payment.) 

Updated Advisor Screen to Segment Advisor Types (Enterprise)

While we were updating the design of certain pages, we went ahead and gave some love to the Advisor page that home office users see on our Enterprise plans. Since Enterprise accounts are designed to manage a large number of advisors, we needed to provide a more organized at-a-glance view for account administrators.

Advisor types – based on permission level – can now be segmented into separate tabs. There’s a unique tab for All Advisors, Managing, Standard, Read-only, and No-login.

Ability to Designate the Description of Services Available per Engagement Type (Enterprise)

When setting up engagement workflows in AdvicePay, Enterprise firms can now customize the service descriptions available on a per-engagement level so that advisors have a smaller list of services to choose from each time. We’re excited about this because it helps your advisors work more efficiently with reduced chance for error when setting up engagements for their clients! 

We saw a need for this feature because if your firm offers multiple engagement types – for example, Financial Planning and Business Consulting – you might have 15 potential services for Financial Planning and a different set of 15 for Business Consulting. This means that before, advisors would have had to sift through a list of 30 descriptions total (eek!) to find the handful that they needed for a particular client’s engagement.

Not only could this be tedious, it increased the likelihood an advisor would snag an irrelevant description by mistake. That just won’t do, so we knew we wanted to improve the experience.

Now, all you have to do is create/edit an Engagement workflow and select precisely which Service Descriptions will be available to the advisor when using the engagement:

When your advisors go to create the engagement, they can quickly choose which services they’re offering out of those they see available and add them to the invoice. 

Invoice Report Includes Rep Code/Advanced Split Rep Code Details (Enterprise)

The invoice Excel report now has a Rep Code column so that Enterprise firms using rep (or advisor/split) codes can easily access this information – even for unpaid invoices.

If you’re using the Standard rep code feature, your export will look something like this:

If you’re using Advanced rep codes, we’ll populate each advisor’s name, their percentage split, and – if applicable based on your setup – any relevant attribute information.

Ability to Disable Advisors from Receiving Account-Related Email Notifications (Enterprise)

By default, advisors added to AdvicePay will receive pertinent email notifications around their account -- including when you add or delete them.

If your Enterprise firm’s advisors will be accessing AdvicePay under a custom setup where they don't need an invitation email that enables them to set a password for direct login or otherwise know when actions are being done to their account, you can disable all emails under your Firm Settings.

Since disabling account-related email notifications from AdvicePay can impact your advisors’ experience and even prevent them from registering their account, we recommend first working with your dedicated Relationship Manager to make sure it’s the right fit for your firm!

Deliverable File Size Limit Increased to 10 MB (Enterprise)

Who wants to be restricted to submitting Deliverable files under 5 MB?! Sometimes rules are just meant to be broken, and we’re not afraid to break our own. Please enjoy the expanded 10 MB limit. ;-)

…And a Few Final Features Your Enterprise Firm Might Have Missed!

• If you'd like to make an Annual subscription frequency available for your Enterprise firm’s advisors, you can do so. 
• Work on your Engagement workflows in “draft mode,” then publish to advisors when you’re ready.
• Require that eSignature signers be AdvicePay users under your Enterprise account by disabling the ability to manually enter signer names and emails.

Before you go:

Have a feature you'd like to see?

Visit our idea submission page on our website anytime to share your thoughts with our team!