With more and more practices offering advisory services, we wanted to give you some effective tools within Senta to help you provide these services to your clients. Senta advisory does background work for you, analysing data across all of your clients and alerting you when things are changing.
Laurence from the support team shows you how to turn on Senta advisory, view a client's advisory topic charts and set up advisory notifications.
Switching on the Advisory features
Senta Advisory works by linking to Senta’s existing Xero and Quickbooks Online integrations, so you need to have at least one of these client level integrations switched on in order for Senta advisory to work.
Click here for guidance on switching on the Xero client level integration and connecting clients to your Xero account
You can also sync your clients in bulk from Xero or Quickbooks Online
To switch on the Senta Advisory feature:
- Open Settings > General Settings > Extras
- Switch on the ‘Advisory’ toggle
Once the Advisory feature is switched on, it will pull through data overnight, so you won't see any data for a day or so after you first switch it on.
Advisory Topics
Once you’ve switched on the Advisory feature, each client will have a new ‘Advisory’ tab showing on their client record.
Each day, Senta will query your bookkeeping package, analyse the client’s data going back a year and then generate a series of topics on their ‘Advisory’ tab:
Each topic is shown with an interactive chart (1) and a metric (2) comparing the current and previous period. Each chart can also be expanded to a larger view (3):
Quick ratio shows the ratio of readily liquidated current assets, such as cash, cash equivalents and short-term debtors to current liabilities.
Current ratio shows the ratio of current assets (such as cash, cash equivalents, short-term debtors, but also includes stock and prepayments) to current liabilities.
Debtor days shows the average debtor days, i.e. time for invoices to be paid.
Creditor days shows trade payables/cost of sales x 365 days.
Bank balance shows the current account balance.
Turnover shows the client’s turnover figure for a month.
Gross profit shows the gross profit figure for a month.
Net profit shows the net profit figure for a month.
Advisory notifications
Senta can trigger notifications for you when topics reach certain levels, or rise/fall for a given period of time.
These are evaluated every night and will be sent out if the criteria are met. Notifications will appear on the notification globe in Senta.
To set up a new notification:
- Open the client you wish to set up a notification for
- Click on their 'Advisory' tab
- Scroll to the topic you want to be notified about
- Click on the bell icon and tick Alert me about Turnover for...
- Tick the notifications you want to activate
There are currently four different notification types:
Rises to/falls to
These options will send a notification if a topic rises or falls beyond a given threshold. You will need to set an absolute figure here, for e.g. 3000.
Rises for/falls for
These options will send a notification if a topic rises consistently for a given period of time. These take a Date offset as input. (eg, 1d = 1 day, 1w = 1 week, 1m = 1 month).
- Click Save when you've set up your notification preferences
Advisory Placeholders
Advisory topics can be accessed as placeholders, much like other data in Senta.
The available placeholders are:
Quick ratio client.advisory.quickratio
Current ratio client.advisory.currentratio
Bank Balance client.advisory.bankbalance
Creditor Days client.advisory.creditordays
Debtor Days client.advisory.debtordays
Gross Profit client.advisory.grossprofit
Net Profit client.advisory.netprofit
Turnover client.advisory.monthlyturnover