Follow this guide to set up for success with Advanced Data Health & Insights.
Set up Data Health & Insights to monitor and improve the quality of your financial data effortlessly. Connect with your accounting software and it will help you identify opportunities, track trends, and keep your records accurate and actionable.
Once your clients are added to your Dext account, take the following steps to make the most of Data health & Insights.
- Connecting a Client to Xero or QuickBooks Online for Data Health & Insights
- Set Up Integrations
- Creating Tags
- Reviewing Lock Dates
- Client Health Score
- Workflows
- Practice Level Features
- Client Level Features
Connecting a Client to Xero or QuickBooks Online for Data Health & Insights
Connect your Xero or QuickBooks Online account to Dext to automatically sync the data from your accounting software to the Data Health & Insights area in your Dext account.
To Connect to Xero or QuickBooks Online:
- Go to Business settings, then Connections
- On the Connections page, go to the ‘If you also have Data Health…’ section and click Connect.
- Select Xero or QuickBooks Online, then click Connect.
- You will then be directed to the selected accounting software login page. Enter your account login details and follow the steps provided to log in and connect your account to Dext.
See this article for more information on connecting a client to Xero or QuickBooks Online for Data Health & Insights.
Set Up Integrations
HMRC (UK Only)
Data Health & Insights connects to HMRC to pull back important information on your clients’ VAT filings, current connection status and obligations.
To connect to HMRC:
- Go to Practice Settings and then Integrations.
- Click the HMRC option to expand it, then click Connect to HMRC and connect to your MTD Agent Account.
See more information about connecting to HMRC here.
Once connected you can find the MTD for VAT Insight by going to Insights, then MTD for VAT.
Senta
Data Health & Insights integrates with Senta Practice Management Software to allow you to pull Data Health & Insights health scores into Senta to display in your client lists and records. You’ll then be able to use Data Health & Insights health scores in custom views, and to filter or trigger jobs in Senta.
Follow the steps in this guide to integrate with Senta.
Go Proposal (All Regions)
Dext integrates with GoProposal pricing software to allow you to pull health scores and activity metrics into GoProposal to inform your clients’ pricing for more up-to-date data and insights than ever before.
To set up the integration you will need to generate an API key to plug into GoProposal.
- Go to Practice Settings, then Data Health.
- Then go to API tokens.
Follow this guide to complete the connection.
Creating Tags
Use tags to easily group and categorise your clients for reports and workflows. Tags are visible on the Client List, Client Overview and in the Practice Insight. You can use tags to search and filter your clients in both the Client List and the Practice Dashboard.
You could tag your practice clients by:
- Industry
- GST/VAT Quarters
- End of Year only
- Monthly vs Quarterly Bookkeeping
- Non GST/VAT registered clients
To set up Tags:
- Go to Workflows, then Tags.
- Enter the name of the tag and click the + button.
See more about tags here.
Reviewing Lock Dates
Lock Dates (in Xero) or Closing Dates (in QuickBooks Online) prevent changes to records in periods that have already been reported on or filed.
Dext Data Health & Insights combines Companies House account filing information (where available) from within these set dates to prevent changes in data in your accounting software and help you keep your financial data stable.
The Lock Date History page will highlight when these dates get out of sync with filing dates, encouraging active maintenance of monthly reporting period closing or lock dates, enabling you to reduce the number of data inconsistencies between your accounting software and third parties.
See more about using lock dates here.
Client Health Score
Dext Data Health & Insights calculates an overall health score for each client, giving you an overview of the health of their books. The health score can be seen on the client list and on a client’s overview page.
The health score is derived from various cleanup tools and insights and enables you to focus on improving the data quality of your clients and easily see that progress on a daily basis.
You can also customise the health score, by selecting the cleanup tools and insights used to generate the score.
See this article to learn more about the health score and how it can be customised.
Workflows
Your Advanced account gives you access to basic workflows, enabling you to build out workflows that bring all the desired checks or tasks from across Dext into a single place. Giving you and your team one place where theses checks and tasks can be examined, actioned and finally approved.
See how to create a workflow here.
Practice Level Features
Bookkeeping Insight
The Bookkeeping Insight gives a summary of your practice’s performance that can be filtered and broken down in two lower-lever drilldowns, enabling you to spot opportunities to optimise capacity, and make decisions backed by actionable insight.
See more about the Bookkeeping insight here.
Data Health Insight
The Data Health Insight provides a summary of key metrics providing visibility over our most valuable insights to help you advise your clients and to support the productivity of your team and practice.
See more about the Data Health insight here.
Practice Insight
The Practice Insight provides an overview of KPIs across all of your clients and contains the data from the Client List, including all of your client metrics, for you to compare data across clients or account managers.
This is a drag and drop report-builder, with spreadsheet-like functionality. You can choose the columns you want to see, group-by, sort, collapse and expand. If you’re a fan of Excel’s pivot tables, you’ll find that option too in the columns panel on the right.
See more about the Practice insight here.
Deadlines Insight (UK only)
Use the Deadlines Insight to stay in control of HMRC & Companies House submission deadlines across all your team and their clients. With a traffic light warning system, see deadlines that are due soon or overdue at a glance, so your firm can proactively manage all deadlines and avoid penalties.
See more about the Deadlines Insight here.
MTD for VAT Insight (UK clients only)
For UK clients using our HMRC integration this insight is your location for all things MTD in your practice. Each row is a VAT period detected by Precision for each client, including the filing period, due dates, status, amount and outstanding values.
See more about the MTD Insight here.
Activity Insight
Designed for accountancy firms utilising Proposal tools to determine pricing for their clients, the Activity Stats page gives a breakdown of the key trading statistics of a company, with a focus on volume, e.g. number of bank transactions for the period. These figures can then be input directly into Proposal tools to quickly calculate pricing when a client is up for renewal.
This insight calculates statistics for a rolling 12 month period, starting from the last complete month, and working back from there.
See more about the Activity Insight here.
Workflows Insight
The workflows insight shows all workflows at all stages of completion. This includes Workflow details such as the assigned team member, account managers 1 & 2, reviewers, reporting period, number of checks completed and total number of checks. Use this insight to keep up to date on the progress for your team members workflows.
See more about the Workflows Insight here.
Custom Insights
Create, customise, and save reports tailored to your needs with custom insights. Access reports shared by your team or explore pre-made examples to see the full potential of custom reporting.
From the various insight and sandbox views, you’ll find that you can build your own reports by customising the grid, showing/hiding columns, filtering, grouping and sorting until you get it just how you want.
See more about Custom Insights here.
Client Level Features
Client Overview
The client overview page gives a summary of all of a client’s data in one place, giving you a clear and simple view of their current status.
The overview includes an overall snapshot of the status of a client’s documents, including costs and sales, as well as the client’s health score, activity stats and insights.
See more about the Client Overview here.
Data Quality Checks & Clean Up Tools
Identify and resolve issues like duplicate contacts, miscoded transactions, and outdated data to ensure your clients’ records are accurate, clean, and reliable.
These checks and tools can be accessed by going to Data Health in the sidebar.
VAT Checks & Clean Up Tools
Identify and resolve issues like incorrect VAT rates, and transactions coded to non-VAT accounts.
For Xero & QuickBooks Online clients only.
These checks and tools can be accessed by going to Data health in the sidebar, then to the Tax section.
Sales & Cost Analysis
Analyse your clients’ costs and sales across their supplier and customer bases over time, with AI detecting amounts that deviate from typical spending and income patterns.
These checks and tools can be accessed by going to Insights in the sidebar, then Cost analysis or Sales analysis.
See these articles for more information on cost analysis & sales analysis.
Aged Balances
The Aged balances insight reviews aged Debtors and Creditors, providing a snapshot of outstanding invoices at any point in time.
These checks and tools can be accessed by going to Insights in the sidebar, then Aged balances.
See more about Aged Balances here.
Activity Stats & Benchmarking
Use the Activity stats insight to track key KPIs and assess business performance, then use the Benchmarking insight to compare clients’ turnover and expenses against industry, regional, or practice standards.
These checks and tools can be accessed by going to Insights in the sidebar, then Activity stats or Benchmarking.
See more about Activity stats here & Benchmarking here.
