Socket Release Log

✔️ Engage Quickstart AI-suggested Service Schedule templates: Setting up your service schedule templates is now quicker than ever with our new AI powered quick start feature. This tool assess your pricing menu and suggests the relevant Engage service schedule templates that may be a good fit.

✔️ Dedicated Service Schedule mapping page: We’ve redesigned our Services & Pricing settings to remove complexity and create a clearer, more intuitive flow. Your settings for Service Schedule Mapping now has it’s own dedicated page, meaning the billing settings page serves a single purpose and will only be displayed for those with a Xero or Quickbooks billing integration connected.

✔️ Toggle visibility of custom processes for price overrides: You now have a visibility toggle when you add a custom process to proposal services in Socket, so you can remove price drivers from your client’s view when overriding prices.

✔️ Billing plan client link improvement: We’ve made a small improvement to the billing area. Your links to client records are easier to see, plus, client record will now open on a new page, so you don’t need to navigate back to the billing plan.

✔️ XPM integration is now available to all users: Connect Socket with Xero Practice Manager to keep client data perfectly in sync 🔄 match existing records, create proposals using your XPM client list, and automatically push new clients and contacts to XPM when proposals are marked as Won.

✔️ Onboarding wayfinder: This one is for our new users that trial Socket: you’ll now see an onboarding helper asking you which areas of Socket you’re interested in trying. The options you select will allow us to turn on the modules you’ll want to trial, and sets your default homepage.

✔️ Notes are now visible in the proposal activity timeline: When a proposal is marked as won, lost, or closed, the proposal notes will now be stored and visible to all team members in the proposal activity timeline.

✔️ Setting up a Karbon integration is now easier: We’ve streamlined the Karbon set up process so there are now less steps to complete, incorrect credentials are handled better, and we’re able to access all your available Contact Types right away.

✔️ Preview Socket Engage service schedule templates: With the new service schedule preview screen for Socket Engage, you can take a quick look at the service schedules and make sure you’ve selected the right content before adding them to your practice.

✔️ Attach document PDF to "document sent" practice notifications: When a new document is sent to a client, a PDF copy of the pending engagement letter is now included in your practice notification emails.

✔️ Optimised client search: Improved search and filter responsiveness across screen sizes for a smoother experience on your Client pages, 🔍 plus new visual colour highlights to your client data.

✔️ Custom invoice descriptions: You can now customise invoice descriptions when completing and submitting invoices with one-off jobs that need tailored details.

✔️ Pricing Template descriptions for Proposal Options: You can now use preset template descriptions directly in your Proposal Options, so there’s no need to rewrite them each time you build a new proposal. Streamlined, consistent, and time-saving.

✔️ Performance improvements to the proposal wizard: We’ve made the Customise step of the proposal wizard faster to improve overall performance during proposal set-up.

✔️ Improved Xero integration handling: If Xero is temporarily unavailable, your integration will remain connected and automatically re-sync once service is restored.

✔️ABN integration for Australia: We’ve added ABN Lookup integration for our Aussie users 🇦🇺 Working like our UK Companies House integration, you can now search by company name to automatically pull in the business listing, contact details, address, and ABN number of new leads and clients.

✔️ Sample Pricing Menu for Australia: Introducing a tailored sample pricing menu for Australian users with localised pricing examples to help you set up your proposal templates faster.

✔️ Improved experience for non-UK customers: We’ve made several updates to make Socket smoother for international practices 🌍 You can now select your operating country, subscribe in your local currency (in selected regions), and enjoy improved handling for regional document templates.

✔️ Improved team invites: When in safe mode, Socket now prevents invites being sent to invalid email addresses, making it clearer when an invite won’t go anywhere.

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• The brand new colour theme that we introduced last month has now become the default colour scheme of Socket 🥳
• We’ve released two new Audit Service Schedule Templates for Socket Engage users: Audit Company and Audit LLP Service Schedule Templates.
• You can now track the sources of your Leads, including filter by source and add additional notes where required.
• We’ve designed Socket to make billing easy, reliable, and accurate, and now, we’ve gone a step further and released some additional billing settings that make sure we can serve all our customers workflows:
  • With our new ‘Auto-Approve’ billing setting, you can now set-and-forget, to automatically approve your billing plan without any manual clicks. With this feature enabled, you’ll still be able to view your billing plan and make edits throughout the month, however your invoices will be automatically approved and posted to Xero on the 1st of every month.
  • We know that some of our customer's workflows still require the use of repeating invoices, and while this might not be the ethos of Socket’s system, we can now support this by allowing invoices to be posted to Xero immediately at proposal acceptance.
• Due to popular demand we’ve enabled all billing methods for Projects. Projects are custom services in your proposals, allowing you to deviate from your standard services, and even include an estimated fee when pricing a project with some unknowns. Previously you could bill Projects on a Monthly recurring cycle, or On Completion, but now you can now also bill:
  • On Acceptance
  • Once in Advance
  • Quarterly in Advance
  • Quarterly on Acceptance
  • Annual in Advance
  • Annual on Acceptance
• For those larger projects, we’ve also increased the character limit for Project descriptions, from 500 characters to 5000 characters.
• To make it easier to review and update your prices we’ve enabled exporting of your pricing menu to an XLSX file, with the option for a granular view by including your price drivers.
• We’ve improved the page loading speed when editing larger pricing menus, and when selecting, adjusting, or removing services on the Services step of the proposal creation wizard.
• When starting minor adjustment and renewals, we’ve introduced a new warning message to highlight existing proposals open for that client - so you can quickly check their status and contents to make sure you’re amending the correct proposal.

• We now have public API docs: Developers can now access our public API documentation to build custom integrations and workflows. Whether you’re automating processes or connecting our platform with your existing tools, the docs give you everything you need to get started quickly.
• Embed Team Signatures: Personalise your proposals and documents with our new Embedded Signature feature images of your team’s signatures to documents. Find it under Practice Settings > Manage Team and use the new dynamic tags to customise where and who’s signature is used.
• Balance Sheet Account Codes: You can now apply Xero Liability GL account codes to your Services in Socket, so you can accurately report to your Balance Sheet.
• New Design Theme! We're rolling out some snazzy design changes. Enable the new theme from the top right on your menu bar.
• By popular request, we now have new dynamic tags for Managers and Owners now available in documents and proposals:
  • Client Owner First Name
  • Client Owner Email
  • Client Manager First Name
  • Client Manager Email
  • Proposal Owner First Name
  • Proposal Owner Email
  • Document Owner First Name
  • Document Owner Email
• Plus, a cool new update to the Billing Plan to now show the previous month's total beside the current month's total.

• Link Leads to existing draft, pending, and won Proposals 🎉 Link them directly from the Leads dashboard, or from the Proposal itself. Once the Lead and Proposal are linked, we'll also save the Lead activity history to the Proposal, so you can always access the prospect timeline and notes when a Proposal goes active.‍
• Customisable titles for Leads: Update the name of each deal, an optional feature that is especially useful if you have multiple opportunities with one client.‍
• Lead temperature icons: Gauge, track and filter your client pipeline by level of interest and engagement. Mark leads as Hot, Warm, or Cold, and easily update the status as leads moves through the temperature levels.‍
• Filter Leads by prospect/client: Easily filter between your two types of lead opportunities: New business (prospects), and upsells & expansions with existing clients.
• Hide service sections in your Pricing Templates: Pricing templates let you define a pre-selected set of services, and now you can show only the services you want by hiding irrelevant sections. Find Proposal Pricing Templates under Practice Settings > Pricing Templates.‍
• Consolidate multi-entity invoice lines: If you send multi-entity proposals and consolidate your invoice lines, then this is for you. This new setting merges all services in a proposal to one invoice line, find it under Practice Settings > Billing.‍
• Client-facing titles for Documents: You’re now able to edit the names of your Documents and Document Templates: Great if you issue Dis-engagement Letters! You can also set different internal and external titles for each doc too, useful if you have internal version or naming conventions to follow. ‍
• New filter and sorting options for Clients: We’ve added two new filters and sorting options on the Client Dashboard View. Alongside existing filters of Client Status and Entity Type, you can now filter and sort your clients by the Client Owner and Client Manager.‍
• In-app subscription management: We’ve made it possible for customers to manage their module add-ons right from the app, head to https://app.usesocket.com/subscription to manage your subscription.‍
• Export your LoEs as XLSX: Download a summary of your Engagement Letters, Document Templates, and Service Schedule Templates as an excel file.‍
• Add tables to text content: You can now format data into tables in your editable text. Handy when you want to summarise benefits and pricing structures for your clients! This feature addition is available in the Proposal wizard, in your Default Proposal Content, Engagement Letters and Document Templates, and also in your Pricing Menu.

• Two new templates for Socket Engage: If you’re an Engage user, check your Service Schedule templates for the new Combined Annual Accounts and Corporation Tax templates.
• We’ve improved the Proposal Options feature: You can now revisit all of the options you've sent to clients in pending and won proposals, not just the option selected by the client. Plus we’ve made the options button visible in all sections in the proposal wizard.
• Import client testimonials from your website: You can now automatically gather testimonials from your website and save them in your ‘Testimonials’ section under ‘Practice Settings’.
• Notifications update: We’ve made some design tweaks to important error warnings on the top menu bar, so that these notifications show more prominently.
• Adfin is in closed beta testing: The much awaited news is here, Adfin is set to launch soon! Contact support to get involved in the beta testing.

• Default Homepage: You can now choose your homepage in Socket, so you always start where you do most of your work. This update is part of a broader move to offer more customisation around default settings. Check out your Practice Settings to set the default homepage at a practice level, or your Account Settings to customise your personal homepage. You'll find the update under a new section called App Settings, because we have more customisation improvements on the way!
• Re-pricing your services for Pro Feature users: We know many of our users are thinking about price uplifts later this year, so we’ve created Bulk Adjust Pricing under Services and Pricing, so you can update your pricing menu with just a few clicks.
• Approval Workflow for Pro Feature users: if you have an internal review process before sending proposals out, this one's for you. Find this under your Manage Team settings.
• External Links page: This new tab on the Clients page gives you a centralised view of how your clients are linked to your external systems, making it easy to see matches and fix any missing links.
• Approve & Send with Xero: This update under Billing Settings means you don't have to send invoices to Xero as draft copies. You can now approve them directly in Socket, and Xero will invoice your clients on your billing date, with no extra approvals.

• Check your Practice settings for Proposal & Engagement Letter Reminders, enabling you to set-up automatic gentle nudges to clients waiting to sign.
• We’ve made it even easier for all Socket users to send proposals and documents from a custom email address, because sending from your own domain boosts the deliverability of your emails, and makes them look more professional too.

• General bug fixes and speed improvements

• With our new feature Proposal Options you can present multiple service tiers, suggest add-ons, or upsell extras all in a single proposal. Clients select the option that suits them best and sign instantly, with no need to send multiple proposals or go back and forth with updates.

• Dynamic Tags V2 lets you personalise documents created from templates by auto-filling the most up-to-date data from your settings and client records.

• Design templates are live in the app, making proposals even more speedy to create.
• Multiple marketing brochures - Allowing you to customise proposals for different client types: https://help.usesocket.com/en/articles/10494879-pricing-and-design-proposal-templates ?
• Twice a week frequency driver option - Taking us to 11 different options for ‘Frequency’, which is just 1 of our 6 different driver types.
• Resending proposals - They can now be resent with just 1 click.
• Include or exclude VAT - On per proposal basis for any VAT exempt clients.
• Nifty calculator image on error page - The one we hope you’ll never get to see!
• Pricing menu redesign - We listened to feedback and made this easier to use.

• Sending Proposals from your own email address is live! If you’ve ever had the frustration of your proposals landing in junk folders, this update is for you! You can now send Socket emails from your own domain, improving deliverability and making them look more professional too.
• Proposal Templates are live, because we often propose the same services for certain types of clients. You can now pre-define a list of services and pricing to quickly generate a proposal or ‘quick quote’ for similar prospects or clients.
• Example data has launched. If you’re looking to refresh your pricing but aren’t sure where to begin, our Example Data is the perfect starting point. Having a foundation to work from can make the process so much easier

• Annual Billing has been added alongside existing billing options of Once - On Completion and Monthly. Any of these can be selected as a default for each service AND you can also change the option when drafting a proposal. We’ve added not one, but two annual billing options:
  
  • Annual - on completion. For those bill on completion jobs.
  • Annual - in advance. Where you invoice ahead of delivering the work.

• Our new integration with Xero Practice Manager XPM is now live! Import your contacts and start creating Proposals.
• Our new Invoice View has launched, for those using Xero and repeating invoices, you can now create, review, and approve all your invoices in Socket before pushing them to Xero!
• Schedule future pricing changes, so you never have to worry about missing out on revenue from delayed price increases.