Main Features

GDPR – Updated Consent To Be Contacted By

This is the first update to include changes required by GDPR, please read.

The ‘Data protection’ section of the client front screen has been updated as below.  You can now track what date consent has been given and set-up your own lists of who your customers consent to be contacted by, and what they consent to be contacted about.  By default the options are contact by ‘Our company’ and ‘Associated companies’ in relation to ‘All business’ to match the current Durell system.  Existing consent ticks in your system will be pulled through to the Mail / Phone / Email tick boxes for these options.

• You can edit the lists of options under Setup -> Client screens -> ‘Setup data protection …’ buttons at the bottom of the pop-up.
• The message at the bottom of the section will tell you the number of combinations of by whom the client has consented to be contacted, and in relation to what.
• The access right under Setup -> Users -> Clients – ‘Data protection’ has been updated so that ‘None’ or ‘View’ means the user can’t edit any details; ‘Edit’ means they can add new dates and associated consents; ‘All’ means they can edit and delete existing dates and associated consents.
• When a user creates a new date, either by clicking ‘=’ for today’s date or typing a new date in the field, the previous date’s ticks will be pulled through to edit. So for example, if just one tick box needs to change you don’t need to re-enter all the rest at the same time.
• Under Signpost -> ‘Update data protection …” you can add consent in bulk to a selection of client records. At the bottom of that pop-up you can also tick to use those settings as defaults for all new client records.
• The ‘Override for data protection’ of the mailshotting pop-up has also been updated to match the options on the client screen.

MIFI II – Locked Notes

MIFID II requires firms to either record, or make a note of, telephone conversations and electronic communications that relate to “the reception, transmission and execution of orders, or dealing on own account”.  The minimum requirement of what needs to be captured is:

1. the date and time of the meeting,
2. the location of the meeting,

• the identity of the attendees,

1. the initiator of the meeting,
2. relevant information about the client’s order, including the price, volume, type of order and when it shall be transmitted or executed. The FCA says that in order to meet this, firms should “capture all the main points of the full conversation that are relevant to the order.”

The FCA also suggests good practice would be “sharing the notes made of relevant phone conversations with clients on a regular basis in order to ensure their accuracy.”

The MIFID I requirement on recordkeeping is that ‘records must not be capable of being manipulated or altered.’

So to allow you comply with these requirements we have added an additional feature to the Notes in Durell.  When setting up ‘Actions for Notes’ under ‘Setup -> Client notes -> Setup actions’ there is a new check box at the bottom of the pop-up to ‘Lock note’.  This means that once a Note with that Action has been saved it will no longer be editable.  So for example, you could create an Action for ‘Client call (locked)’ with that tick box checked and use it to record such notes.

The same feature has been added to Policy and Claim Notes as well as Client Notes, and obviously can be used for other purposes as well.

An user access-right has also been added under Setup -> Users -> Clients – ‘Client & policy notes locked entries’, which is defaulted to ‘View only’ so an administrator can be given permission to edit locked notes if required.

N.B. Durell already includes an integration (free of charge) with Synety Cloudcall for automatically recording phone conversations and linking them to your client records, which works with both normal hand sets and mobiles. Synety Cloudcall charge separately for this, but feel free to call our sales team for further details.

Itemised List

• A ‘Documents’ button has been added to the right-hand side of the Notes pop-up. If you’ve set your system to create Notes automatically when documents are added to a client record, then selecting such a Note and clicking Documents will take you to it.  This should make it easy to look through a client’s notes and go straight to the relevant documents.  If the Note hasn’t been created by adding a document then the Documents button will not be enabled.  If the linked document isn’t found the button will just open the Documents Viewer.
• When Finding documents from the Document Viewer there is a tick-box regarding ‘If found item is not already in the clients folder then move it there’. Whether this is ticked or not by default can now be set in the pop-up for ‘Setup / Document Viewer’, which has a new tick-box regarding your preference for the ‘move found item’ option.
• If you try to cash-up a Cashbook item from before the last period end you’ll now get a warning message to this effect (and its Banked date will have to be after the period end).
• Any or all of the twelve mailshot fields on the Client Details screen can now also be displayed on the Policies screen via the option on the policies Search pop-up (i.e. via the green binoculars button) to ‘Use column setup…’
• When setting-up most reports there is a “Policy Selection (new)…” button to select particular insurers, advisers, leads, etc. Previously if you made a selection of adviser/s then by default all leads were included, and vice versa. Now the reports will only include the explicitly selected advisers and leads.
• ‘Cross Sell’ and ‘Transfer from MMM’ have been added to the ‘Source of Business’ dropdown at the top of the first screen for all policies.
• If you ‘Find’ a document from the Document Viewer and try to move it to the client’s folder that already has one with that file name, then Durell will now automatically add a “(1)” or “(2)” to the end to prevent a duplicate file error.
• Resolved issue where the username was not being added to the Notes screen when attaching a document to a client record.
• Resolved issue where the Sanctions Search for selected users was running at every log-in instead of according to the schedule in ‘Setup / Sanctions Search’. Also it now records the fact that a check was made, even if no updates occurred.
• Resolved issue when using the Mailshot tick box option to ‘select where duplicates exist’, which now works as expected.
• Resolved issue where Durell would crash if you list policies (using ‘File / Print / Policy List’) via the Policies screen with a column for the Creation Date displayed.
• Resolved issue when printing Accounts Statements in bulk, and when printing the Diary, both of which were going to PDF rather than the default printer.
• Resolved issue where the first keystroke was ignored when amending the Name field for Sales or Purchase entries.
• Resolved issue where a client record could become inaccessible because of a non-existent outstanding complaint.
• Resolved issue when removing the link between a ledger entry and an adviser or lead, which caused the system to crash.
• Resolved issue where you cannot get to the Cashbook Reconciliation screen, because the client’s search name has changed. It will now check for this when displaying the record and automatically fix the cashbook entry.
• Resolved issue with cost centres, where an error message stated they do not total 100% when they definitely do. It now only issues an error if the current centre to which you’re allocating exceeds 100%. There’s also a new “Total cost centre allocation” line at the bottom of the nominal setup (which will only show if there are any cost centres allocated).
• In the ‘Funds Held’ report an option has been added to “Show policy reference”, which if selected will replace the “Sector” column on the report. This applies to all the “Group list by” options except by “Fund”, which already shows the policy reference.
• Resolved issue when using Commission Download for L&G mortgages, where the system “Could not find posting default for this policy”.
• An optional new ‘Discount reduces commission’ tick box has been added to the ‘Setup Products’ pop-up. If checked, commission will be calculated as a percentage of the ‘Gross premium before discount’, and any discount entered in the ‘Basic’ column (i.e. that would otherwise discount the nett sum) will reduce the commission instead.  In this case the sum that feeds through to the Sales Commission screen will be that shown in a new ‘Commission – discount £’ field.
• Another new optional ‘Show take-up date on premium screen’ tick box has been added to the ‘Setup Products’ pop-up. Ticking this allows the take-up date to be set manually on the Premium Details page.  If the field is left blank then the take-up date will be set automatically, as it is currently.
• Contract Certainty calculations have been added under the ‘Awaiting’ pop-up. These are based on the days difference between ‘Policy docs forwarded’ and ‘On risk’ dates for the type of Business of the policy.  Contract Certainty is achieved for Business = ‘Consumer’ or ‘Not set’ if docs are forwarded within 7 days, or within 30 days for ‘non-Consumer’ business.
• Contract Certainty has been also added as a ‘Yes/No’ column at the end of the ‘Compliance daybook’ report. There is also a new user access-right under Setup -> Users -> General – ‘General compliance certainty’ that determines whether the checkbox can be edited.
• The report for ‘Percentage of Business (current account set only)’ now includes the Adviser and the Product Type.
• In the ‘MTA History’ pop-up (available from bottom-right of the Premium Details screen) you can no longer manually Add MTAs, though you can still Edit & Delete them. This is because MTAs should only be added from the Policies screen (i.e. the scrolling list of all policies).
• If in ‘Setup / Products’ no value has been entered for the ‘Fee at Renewal’ then by default the renewal will now be given the same fee as the original policy.
• Changed the option from “Show policy reference” when printing Diary entries to “Show policy or claim reference”. So now, if an entry has a link to a claim then that ref will be shown, otherwise it’ll show the policy ref as before.
• When taking-up an MTA the field for its ‘Description’ has been increased from 30 characters to 80.
• Postcodes are now automatically re-formatted when linking to Applied for motor or household quotes (e.g. “TF93” will be re-formatted to “TF9 3” to avoid failing AXA’s validation checks).
• Added a new dropdown field entitled “Terrorism” on the ‘Health club sums insured & premiums’ screen to indicate whether this is included or not.
• The ‘Value of the vehicle’ field has now been increased to seven digits.
• Resolved issue in Household policies where the insured items weren’t being copied at MTA if the ‘Business’ type was set to ‘Commercial’.
• Resolved issue where the log for the ‘Client Bank / Reconciliation (Solvency)’ excluded items from the sales ledger that resulted in a zero balance (e.g. where an invoice is negated by a credit).
• Resolved issue when using the integration with Applied where Aviva Renewal Amend Risks were responding with a ‘No schemes were returned by Applied Systems’ message.
• Fixed the format of fields at the bottom of the Renewal Retention report.
• Fixed problem with the Bordereau report where a risk address was too long, which will now be truncated as necessary.
• Fixed problem with Commercial policies where risk addresses and executors/directors were not getting copied during MTA/Renewal.
• Resolved issue where Historical Policies could not be accessed when using a particular selection of columns on the Policies screen.
• Resolved issue where the Brokerage Charge Analysis report was not including negative charges.
• Resolved issue where the Brokerage Charge Analysis report was displaying incorrect totals after an MTA on a policy that occurred in the same month as the policy was posted.
• Resolved issue where the inception date would very occasionally change to the on-risk date.
• Resolved issue when deleting a policy that has a Legal Protection add-on, where there was no option to ‘Delete as rubbish’. You can now choose this or instead to ‘Move it to the history table’.

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