4th Sept AMA: I’m Dexter, product manager of Xplan Business Intelligence (XBI), Ask Me Anything!

Hi everyone ?

I’m Dexter Manuel, product manager of Xplan Business Intelligence (XBI).

We’re building XBI to make reporting in Xplan faster, smarter, and more useful – and I’d love to hear your questions and ideas.

To get you started, you might want to ask about:

The kinds of business insights you’d find most valuable to see at a glance
Insights already available (CRM, Docnotes)
What’s on the roadmap (Workflows, Portfolios, CommPay)
How reporting could be simplified or improved in practice

Drop your questions below — whether it’s something specific you’d like answered, or feedback on what would make reporting better for your business.

I’ll be here live on Thursday, 4 September at 3 pm AEST to respond.

Looking forward to the conversation!

? Update: This AMA has now ended, but please continue to pop your questions in the discussion forums and make sure you tag me @dexter.manuel

?️ Let us know what you thought of the AMA and what topics you would like to see next here.

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Comments

rainier.reyes

Welcome everyone to this AMA thread!

Please ensure you read the instructions on the right-hand side of this page.

Submit your Xplan reporting questions, queries and feedback now by hitting the 'Reply' button on the post above and @dexter.manuel will respond during the scheduled time.

Not sure what to ask? I highly recommend checking out @laura.capozzi 's latest blog about XBI here.

If you have any issues, please don't hesitate to send me a message.

Looking forward to seeing all your questions!

rainier.reyes

To help you ask questions and give feedback, further information on XBI can be found here:

Iress Learning Centre: Calculated Fields Micro Learn

Iress Community: Calculated Fields Community Article

Iress Community: Help Article - Prepare a dataset to kickoff a dashboard to identify possible outliers and exceptions

leah.saunders

Hey Dexter,

We have spent a lot of time talking about what good data looks like over the past quarter. Now knowing what the product is going to look like, do you have any further recommendations on how people should align their data to get the most value out of XBI?

I have to tell you I am pretty excited for this new product ?

kellie.vizer

Hi Dexter, what is on the roadmap for Workflows and how will XBI help?

kellie.vizer

How do we use the insights already available and how does XBI fit in with these?

laura.capozzi

I've been looking through some of the XBI material and I can see how a great looking dashboard like this can really help visualise trends in the business. It's an easy way to quickly find and interrogate data and provide valuable information, especially when you have put in the time and effort to make sure your data is clean and up to date.

felicity.eardley

Hi Dexter, thank you for running this session.

What is the cost/licencing structure for this module?
How customisable is it going to be? Everyone uses XPlan differently, has their own custom fields, workflows, tasks etc that they will want to extract. How are the data sets going to be built to cope with them?
When will this be available?

Priorities for use would be:

CommPay revenue / cost to serve
Monitoring Service obligations
Workflow tracking
data sets for standard industry reports e.g the Professional Indemnity Insurance
Proposal Form

Thanks, Felicity

felicity.eardley

What I want to know is are we able to modify that to make it relevant to our business?

rainier.reyes

Hi everyone and welcome to today's AMA! Great to see all your questions already. To see new questions and responses as they come in, make sure you refresh the page regularly.

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Send me a message if you need any assistance!

dexter.manuel

Hi Kelli! Thanks for your question. You’ll have a permission-sensitive dashboard view per user (respecting your Xplan client visibility).

Out of the box (for Readers/Authors) we could include Workflow Throughput & SLA, Team Workload & WIP, My Work, and a Template & Benchmark explorer—showing open vs closed, cycle times, breach rates, items by assignee/group, ageing buckets, and drill-through to item lists and client context, all using native Xplan labels.

As an XBI Author, you can build your own dashboards with custom calculations (cycle time, SLA flags), “my group” filters, ageing bands, and slices by template or assignee—for capacity planning, template effectiveness, or a personalised daily queue. XBI reports on your existing workflows; task creation and updates continue in Xplan.

laura.capozzi

Absolutely. While we will provide some out-of-the-box dashboards to help get you started, you can build your own dashboards and reports from scratch using any of the data in the data set.

dexter.manuel

Hi Felicity — thanks for the question and for sharing your priorities.

Licensing: we’ll offer a monthly Author licence and a lower-cost Reader licence; pricing is being finalised and will be shared before launch.

Customisation: the first release ships with standard fields across CRM, DocNotes and Workflows; Authors can build their own dashboards and reports from these.

Support for practice-specific custom fields is on the roadmap for a later release. Availability: we’re in pilot now and targeting general availability by the end of 2025.

Regarding your priorities: Workflow tracking is included in the starter datasets and dashboards; monitoring of service obligations is supported via the standard datasets and can be extended by Authors; CommPay-based revenue/cost-to-serve and export-ready datasets for standard industry reports (e.g., Professional Indemnity Insurance proposal forms) are being evaluated for the next phase.

felicity.eardley

Including custom fields?

dexter.manuel

All your existing Xplan insights—Xports, Management reports and dashboard widgets—remain unchanged.

XBI sits alongside them as a self-service analytics layer: a permission-sensitive workspace where Authors can build custom charts, tables and dashboards, and Readers can use out-of-the-box views.

Keep using today’s tools for the regular reporting you trust; use XBI when you want deeper analysis, drill-through and flexible slicing across CRM, DocNotes and Workflow.

dexter.manuel

XBI includes standard Xplan data across CRM, DocNotes and Workflows so to get the most value: keep the client master clean (consistent entity status/category, adviser and team roles populated, partner/household links set); keep compliance fields current (opt-in and disclosure dates, risk profile, estate/will details, investor classification, superfund names); enforce note hygiene (standard types/subtypes, clear subjects, correct permissions, and attach documents to notes); standardise workflow usage (use templates, set due dates and benchmarks, assign owners, use priorities, and close items with outcomes); and tidy picklists (retire legacy/duplicate values). Finally, make sure basic client visibility is correct at the client record level, as that’s what drives what you see in XBI.

We'll share a data dictionary with all fields we have available in XBI via Iress Community (and shared here!) shortly.

melita

All of the following would be useful in XBI dashboards:

Opportunities pipeline including number of active opportunities, expected Revenue and FUM in each opportunity stage would be good. Particularly useful if could be filtered by Designated Roles such as Client Adviser and Insurance Adviser (would love to be able to pick multiple combinations in the filter).

Doc Notes by Master Client by Doc Note Type and SubType with dashboard date range filter and adviser role filtering etc.

Tasks Dashboard showing active, overdue, completed, days to completion etc by Task Type, Subtype, Assignee, with overall filter on dashboard for date range, Assignee (allow multiple selection), Client Adviser (to see all tasks against clients of a particular Adviser/s).

Case/Thread Dashboard showing active and completed Thread and Case numbers grouped by Thread Template or Case Template, aging Threads/cases - days since Activation date etc

Ability to self-create dashboard or clone and edit off-the-shelf dashboards to add additional data including custom fields etc will make the solution more useful for a greater number of firms.

Ability to export to PDF to share overview with non-xplan users (such as Board reporting) - even better if can schedule automated export to PDF even if delivery is via email or xplan Bell icon.