Senta Advisory

With more and more practices offering advisory services, we wanted to give you some effective tools within Senta by IRIS to help you provide these services to your clients. Senta Advisory does the background work for you, analysing data across all of your clients and alerting you when things are changing.

Watch our Senta Advisory video here.

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.

To switch on the Advisory feature, go to Settings > General settings > Extras > Advisory and toggle the feature to On.

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 the client's 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 and a metric comparing the current and previous period. Each chart can also be expanded to a larger view using the arrows:

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. By default, notifications will appear on the notification globe in Senta however you can change these preferences via Your account > Your profile > Notifications. For more information on notification preferences, see our Notifications guide.

To set up a new notification, go to the client's Advisory tab and find the topic you would like to be notified about. Select the bell, tick Alert me about... and set up the alerts you would like to activate. Select Save once you are happy with these.

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, for example, 1d = 1 day, 1w = 1 week, 1m = 1 month.

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}