Payments, accounting and more - Product News

This entry follows Referee requests and covers the changes since. Backed can now pay your grants, hand the bills to your accounting software, reach people by broadcast, text and Teams, and meet the Australian and New Zealand reporting rules. Screens use Backed's default words; if your organisation has renamed any of them under Settings > Organisation > Terminology, you see your own words instead.

Payments

• Payment batches. Gather Milestone, Application and Contact Payments into a batch, set each amount and date, pay part of a milestone, and come back to a draft batch later exactly as you left it. See Payments, Payment batches and Building a batch.
• Review and approval. Send a batch for review, return or reassign it, have finance approve flagged fields, and approve within each person's approval limit, with a second approver where your limits need one. See Review and approval and Permissions and separation of duties.
• Paying and exporting. Mark an approved batch as paid, export it as CSV or XLSX, or download an ABA or New Zealand Direct Credit bank file. See Marking paid and Exports and bank files.
• Single payments and GST. Add a payment straight from a milestone, edit or delete it, and see GST worked out once per payment for Australia or New Zealand. See Single payments and GST.
• Letters and tranches. Send payment letters by email, and see a tranche summary and Payment Status on each application and contract. Applicants see their own letters and what has been paid. See Payment letters and Payments, for applicants.

Accounting integrations: Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks

• Connect one accounting system. Connect Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks Online from Settings > Organisation, then choose the account code, tracking, sync points and who is emailed when a sync fails. See Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks.
• Bills for milestones and payments. An approved milestone or payment becomes a bill in your accounting system, with its GST, tracking and payee. The milestone's accounting panel shows the bill's link and lets you retry a failed sync. See Milestone accounting.
• Paid status comes back. Backed reads back when a bill is paid, and keeps each payee's bank account in step with your accounting contacts.
• Sync errors and logs. A failed bill says why, with Resync; every exchange is on Settings > Organisation > Integration logs, filterable by integration, outcome and date. See Accounting sync errors and Integration logs.

Operator console

• Your organisation's access. If your organisation is suspended, its trial or subscription ends, or it is in a grace period, a banner says so and explains what still works. See Subscription and access.
• Notices from Backed. General and maintenance notices appear as a band above the top bar, and you can dismiss them once.
• Getting help. A Support button sits at the bottom right of every page, with the support email, hours and a way to message support. See Getting help.
• Getting started. The Dashboard's Getting started panel lists the go-live checklists in order. See Getting started as an Administrator.
• Hosting and data protection. Settings > Organisation shows where your data is hosted and who holds your logs. See Organisation settings.

Communications

• Your own sending domain. Send your emails from your own domain, check its DNS records and see who each email came from on Email logs. See Sending domain and Email logs.
• Broadcasts. Email everyone behind a filtered list of applicants, applications, assessors, contracts or milestones, now or at a time you choose. Every broadcast carries an unsubscribe link that needs no sign-in. See Broadcasts.
• SMS. Send a text beside some emails, check each text's length, and see every text in SMS logs. People choose texts under My Profile > Notification channels and can reply to stop them. See SMS.
• Microsoft Teams. Post notifications, such as each submitted application, to a Teams channel. See Microsoft Teams.
• Calendar feeds. Under Calendar feed on your profile, create a link that puts your rounds, milestones and tasks in Outlook, Google Calendar or any other calendar. See Your account and Your profile.
• Inbound email. The groundwork for filing replies on the Application or Contract they answer is in place; the screens to turn it on follow in a later release.

Trust page and security.txt

• A public Trust page. /trust states where Backed hosts your data, how it protects it and how to report a security issue, and a Trust link sits in the sign-in, portal and admin footers.
• security.txt everywhere. Every Backed address, including your organisation's own, publishes a security.txt so researchers know where to report a vulnerability.

ANZ pack

• Business and charity registers. Turn on ABN, NZBN, ACNC and New Zealand Charities Register lookups, map what a register holds to your form fields, and require a registered entity on a round. Applicants look themselves up from the form. See Business and charity registers.
• Publishing awarded grants. Report approved grants to GrantConnect, the NSW Grants and Funding Finder or 360Giving, fix or exclude what stops a file, and keep every file you produce. See Publishing awarded grants and Round reporting.
• Probity checklists. Review a round's probity checks, attest the items only you can confirm, and download the dated checklist as a PDF. See Probity checklist.
• Imports from SmartyGrants and Blackbaud. Request an import from SmartyGrants, Blackbaud Grantmaking or CSV files, and sign off each load against its reconciliation summary. See Migration runs.
• Records packages. An Application's full lineage can now be packaged for your records system; the screens to download it follow in a later release.

Platform

• Hosting in Sydney. Backed's web apps now run in Sydney, and a new organisation's own web address is set up for it automatically.
• Status and maintenance. A Status link in the footers opens the public status page. During planned maintenance you see a maintenance page, or a read-only band, rather than an error.
• Clearer errors. Error pages carry a reference you can copy and send to support, and a feature that is briefly unavailable says so in a sentence of its own.
• Autosave offline. A form you are filling in keeps your changes while you are offline and saves them when you are back.
• Search and sorting. Search finds names that start with a macron, and lists sort the way Australian English expects.

Fixed

• An organisation's alias web address opens its portal and sign-in under the organisation's own branding.
• A web address another organisation already holds is no longer offered as available.
• The completion check on a form filled in on someone's behalf names the register rule that stops it.

Also

Behind-the-scenes work on the operator console, monitoring, backups, secrets, the release and incident runbooks, and the demonstration data used in sales.