Summary
The Firm Portal contains a system-wide view of all invoices, payments, clients, and more. It is linked to your practice management system in real time.
A question we often get is "Who at my firm should use the firm portal?" While it depends on your firm structure, in general those firm admins who should use the Firm Portal are those who may take client payments over the phone, setup payment plans on behalf of clients, issue refunds, those who reconcile payments, those who may want to review statements, and those who may receive questions from clients on how they can use their client portal.
By the end of this chapter, you will have a good idea of the appropriate firm staff who should have access and be trained on using the Firm Portal.
Included in this article:
- Accessing the firm portal
- Firm portal permissions
- Clients
- Invoices
- Payments
- Partner & manager roles in Aiwyn
- Quick Payment Links
Accessing the Firm Portal
Access to the Aiwyn Firm Portal is through your SSO user account, managed and maintained by your IT administrator. You do not create or add users directly to the Aiwyn Firm Portal.
Your IT administrator can limit the firm staff who can access the Aiwyn Firm Portal by creating SSO user groups and then granting members of a particular group to have access to the Aiwyn application.
Those firm staff granted access to Aiwyn will simply go to your Firm Portal URL.
Your Firm Portal URL will be in this format: https//FIRMNAME.aiwyn.ai/firm-portal
Your firm's exact URL to the Firm Portal is provided to you during Implementation and is located in the Important Links section of your Implementation Plan.
Provide the Firm Portal URL to those firm admins you would like to have access. We recommend bookmarking the Firm Portal URL in your browser for easy access.
Firm Portal permissions
If SSO user groups can be created in your SSO environment, you can refine the permissions granted to members of the groups. Create at least two SSO user groups and assign members according to their role and necessary permissions.
The table below defines the suggested permissions for two groups, defined as "users" and "admins". Individual members of the users group can be granted any admin permission on a user-by-user basis. Contact support@aiwyn.ai to request a permission update for a specific member of the users group.
During implementation, you will define your own firm's permissions settings for your groups.
Firm Portal modules
The Firm Portal is divided into various modules: clients, invoices, payments, and collections. If you subscribe to additional modules, once implemented those would be visible as well (with certain staff visibility restrictions available if desired).
Example of the Firm Portal enabled for Payments & Collections
Clients
The Clients tab of the Firm Portal shows you a view of all clients. These are all the clients in your practice management system. You do not "add" clients to Aiwyn, rather you create the client in your practice management system and that client will then appear in Aiwyn.
There are several columns of data, so please ensure you use the horizontal slide bar to scan through the various columns.
From this view you can do a multitude of actions, including:
- Change column order by dragging and dropping columns within this view
- Sort the data by clicking on any column to sort ascending or descending
- Remove columns from view
- Filter data by a data point within one of the columns
- Export the data on screen into CSV or Excel file
- Select any of the clients from the list to open their full details
- Access the Client Portal from any of the clients from this list
Configuration option: During implementation, we will help you determine appropriate field mapping from data in your practice management system to corresponding data in Aiwyn. For instance, we will help you determine which staff assignment field in the client record corresponds to the "client partner" field in Aiwyn Firm Portal.
During implementation and before your system is deployed, we can exclude from the Firm Portal clients list those clients you would like to exclude based on things such as their status. However, due to database structures and flow, it is not possible to exclude clients from this list who's status changed after your system was deployed.
Acquisition of new clients
After you have gone live with Aiwyn, if you ever acquire a new set of clients and are importing their data into your practice management system, you must contact support@aiwyn.ai before you import their data. Please review Acquisition of new clients for detailed instructions.
Note: Failure to communicate any plan to upload a large amount of new client data in your practice management system to Aiwyn support can result in data duplication or errors. It is imperative you inform Aiwyn support before an upload is to occur as certain safeguards must be put into place in order to ensure overall data efficacy.
Columns
The following columns are visible (by default) in the Clients section of the Firm Portal:
- Active payment plans
- Billing contact
- Billing contact email
- Client group
- Client key
- Client manager
- Client name
- Client number
- Client partner
- Engagements (if enabled)
- Payments to date
- Primary contact
- Total outstanding
- Total overdue
- Unpaid invoices
Note that the order displayed in your firm portal will be different than the alphabetical list above. Feel free to re-order or hide any of the columns.
Contacts
When viewing the details of a client, you can also toggle to view the contacts associated with the client.
Displayed are contacts who are associated with the client as they are input in your practice management system. Contacts enabled to receive invoices and/or statements will show with the respective tags. A contact without either flag can exist, and this means the contact would not receive the Aiwyn invoice or statement emails unless enabled for these within your practice management system.
During implementation, Aiwyn will help to map out the logic behind how a contact is enabled to receive invoices and/or statements as this varies between the numerous practice management systems we integrate with.
If you are unsure why a contact appears with or without a given flag, or would like to explore changing the logic behind the flag assignment, please contact support@aiwyn.ai.
Invoices
The Invoices tab of the firm portal allows you to view and search for invoices that are paid or unpaid and from this tab a firm admin can review the invoice PDF, resend unpaid invoices to clients, and access the client portal in order to pay the invoice.
From this list of invoices, you have all the same column sorting and filtering capabilities as previously described. You can sort the list, search for an invoice in the list by invoice or client number, and toggle the list between all invoices, outstanding invoices, or paid invoices, and export the on-screen data matching your search criteria.
You can view the "age" of the invoice based on the date it was posted/sent and "today".
If the invoice PDF was sent through the Aiwyn 1-click invoice email, and thus was ingested by Aiwyn, a downloadable PDF of the invoice is available from this section of the firm portal and it can be resent.
Steps to resend an invoice
- From the Invoices section, search for the invoice you would like to resend
- Under the action column, select the three small dots
- Select "resend invoice"
- A small window will appear displaying the client's contacts enabled for invoice emails
- Add, change, or remove contact emails as desired
- Select send
- Result: The contact(s) receive an Aiwyn 1-click invoice email with the PDF of the invoice attached
Columns
The following columns are visible (by default) in the Invoices section of the Firm Portal:
- Status: Overdue or Paid
- Invoice
- Bill amount
- Invoice Date
- Invoice Age: Number of days between invoice date and 'today'
- Client
- Client ID
- Due Date
- Outstanding
Note that the order displayed in your firm portal will be different than the list above. Feel free to re-order or hide any of the columns.
Payments
The payments tab of the firm portal is divided into three sections: Payment history, Payment plans (recurring and autopay) and Payment portal users. Select the payments tab then select the section you'd like to see.
Payment history
In this section you can pin columns, resize columns, reorder columns, remove columns, filter the data, sort the data, and export the data.
Select any column's three horizontal lines to open these options.
Click, hold, and drag columns to reorder the list. The changes you make to reorder, filter, and sort the data will save automatically for you. You can export the data to CSV or Excel.
Further reading:
Payment plans
All recurring payment and autopay plans are displayed in this section. From here you can edit an existing plan for a client, view existing payment plans, sort/filter/export the list just as you can in other sections.
Further reading:
Payment portal users
When a visitor creates a user account, their client account is associated to that user. Then, when they log into the client portal with their user information, invoices associated with the client account are seen. In the firm portal, you can view all payment portal users and see which account(s) they are linked to.
Client portal users can add additional client accounts to their client portal user, allowing them to see invoices and past payments (if enabled) for all of their linked accounts from within the single user.
Additionally, the firm can link these client accounts to existing client portal users on their behalf.
Only client portal users can have their accounts linked. In other words, the ability to see multiple client accounts in a single client portal is only for payment portal users. Firm staff going into a client portal from the firm portal will only ever see one client portal at a time. Guests not signed in will only see one account in the client portal.
To link an additional account to an existing user, click their name from the list, enter their client name or client ID, select the account and click add.
Partner and manager roles in Aiwyn
In your practice management system on the client record, there is a staff role or staff assignment function where you can select from a list a firm staff member for a given role in this section of the client record.
In some practice management systems, there is a near one-to-one match from the system to Aiwyn, and you may not have need to adjust the standard mapping.
While in other systems, you may have more staff role assignment options available or the staff role labels themselves are not called "partner" or "manager" when viewing that information on a client record in your system.
During implementation you must let Aiwyn know which staff roles or staff assignments on a client record in your system should be used for the partner and manager roles and functions in your Aiwyn system. We recommend to map your Aiwyn partner and manager roles to the corresponding staff roles as closely as possible.
We've found that how a firm uses a client's staff role in their practice management system is quite varied. A single boxed-in approach to the data mapping from your system to Aiwyn for staff roles may not be feasible.
Therefore, use the following definitions of the "partner" and "manager" Aiwyn staff roles to make your best judgment on how data from your practice management system maps to Aiwyn.
Jump to section:
Partner role in Aiwyn
The partner role in Aiwyn is shown to staff users in the Aiwyn firm portal.
In Aiwyn, the following functions can occur based on the "partner" role:
-
Payments: Partner can automatically receive payment receipt emails from all of their clients' payments made through Aiwyn. Generally, most firms do not use this option.
-
Collections: Partner can automatically be CC'd or BCC'd on Aiwyn generated/sent statement emails for their clients, based on the age of the AR. For example, you can copy the client's partner if they receive a statement from Aiwyn for an invoice that exceeds 90 days overdue. Click here to open User Guide: Collections for more information about Aiwyn smart statements.
Example of smart statement email generated by Aiwyn
- Clients: Partner can be used to sort or filter list of clients, can also allow firm portal user to see just their clients to whom they are assigned as partner or manager (my clients tab)
Manager role in Aiwyn
- Clients: Manager can be used to sort or filter list of clients, can also allow firm portal user to see just their clients to whom they are assigned as manager (my clients tab)
- Responsible staff in client portal: When a user/visitor is reviewing a single unpaid invoice in their Aiwyn client portal, they can see the full name and click to email, someone from your firm. This could be the client's assigned "manager". Client responsible staff is defined in more detail in the client portal chapter of this guide.
Quick Payment Links
Quick Payment Links is an optional feature that allows firms to securely collect payments from a payer without requiring them to access their Aiwyn client portal.
A visit to the link takes the payer to a clientless portal in order to make a fast payment. The payment can then be associated with a designated client entity of your choosing in your practice management system if desired.
This feature is ideal for:
- Collecting ad hoc payments (e.g., retainers, event fees, company swag)
- Quick and simplified payment collection without need for client and/or invoice generation
- Use cases that don’t require formal client onboarding in practice management system
To learn more about this specific feature or to request it be enabled for your firm, check out the article Quick Payment Links.
Further reading:
Up Next: Collections