Insights in FreeAgent
This article explains what Insights are in FreeAgent. It also highlights what Insights are available and how to manage them.
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What are Insights?
Insights are notifications that highlight certain areas of your business’s performance.
These notifications are designed to help you run your business more successfully, by highlighting business performance, opportunities and potential issues, to help you make better decisions about your finances.
Please note that to be served Insights, you’ll need to have a user access level of 7 or 8.
How to view your Insights
You can view your Insights by selecting the bell-shaped icon beside your business name in the top-right of the screen.
New Insights will be shown under the ‘Radar’ tab within the drop-down menu. The number of unread Insights will be shown in brackets beside the ‘Radar’ tab header. To read more about an Insight, select it from the menu and you will be taken to the Radar area.
Please note that once you have read a Radar notification, it will no longer appear in the Radar drop-down menu.
To view previous Insights, select ‘View Radar page’ at the bottom of the drop-down menu.
Which Insights are available?
FreeAgent currently has five key Insights (not including the initial ‘Introducing Insights’ notification). These are:
- Your top customers
- Upcoming VAT payments
- Your slowest paying customers
- Your top spending categories
- Your accounting year end
Your top customers
The ‘Your top customers’ Insight lists your top five customers over the last six months, pulling data from what you’ve invoiced. This Insight also links off to the Customer Sales report, which lets you break down income from all your customers, over different time periods.
Upcoming VAT payment
The 'Upcoming VAT payment' Insight will appear if you have a VAT bill due within the next month that you don’t have enough money in your bank account to cover.
Your slowest paying customers
The 'Your slowest paying customers' Insight lists your slowest paying customers from the past 12 months to show you how long your clients take to pay. You can also view the average payment time for a customer by viewing a contact, and then checking the Invoice Payments panel at the side of the screen.
Your top spending categories
The 'Your top spending categories' Insight will show your top five spending categories from the last six months, taken from your categorised bills, expenses and bank transactions. It also shows a comparison with the same six months in the previous year.
This Insight links off to the Spending Categories Report, which lets you break down income from all your customers, over different time periods.
Your accounting year end
The 'Your accounting year ends on [x]' Insight notifies you when your accounting year end is approaching, and suggests actions that might be helpful for you to take, such as reviewing your comparative Profit and Loss report.
How to manage Insights
You have the option of receiving tailored Insights regarding products or services that we think might be of interest to you. These Insights will always be personalised to your business, and we won’t send them to you if we don’t think they’ll be relevant to you. If you don't want to receive these Insights, you can turn them off from the Settings area of your FreeAgent account.
Select 'Settings' from the drop-down menu under your business name and then select 'Communication Preferences'.
Uncheck the option labelled 'Show links to partner products or services'.