Changelog

When an automation failed, the message on the task often read like it was meant for an engineer. You knew something broke, but not what, or what to change before you hit retry.

Now automation errors are written in plain language and point at the cause. Instead of a code, you'll see things like:

• Launch a project: "This project was not launched because the condition field 'Plan Year End' is empty. Fill in 'Plan Year End' and retry."

• Send an email: "There is no contact with the role 'Census Contact' configured for this plan or company. Add a contact with that role and retry."

• Save a project file: names the empty file field, or tells you the destination folder no longer exists or you don't have access to it

• Generate a report: names the date that's empty for the plan, or tells you the report timed out and to retry

• Compliance filings, Merge PDFs, Advance a deal and Invite to Client Portal: say which plan, file, deal or contact is missing and how to fix it

When the problem is temporary, such as a connection drop or a busy server, the message says so and asks you to retry. The full technical detail is still there for support, tucked under a Technical details toggle on the task's Automation tab, where it's easy to copy into a ticket.

This works across every automation now, with nothing to turn on. Open any task in Needs Attention to see the new messages.

Email that paces itself to your provider's limits

Microsoft and Google limit how fast a single mailbox can send. When a project launched dozens of Send Email tasks from one person's Outlook mailbox at once, many of them failed and had to be retried by hand.

Emails sent from a connected mailbox now go out through a queue that sends at a pace your provider accepts. If the provider asks us to slow down, Stax.ai waits and tries again on its own instead of failing the task. A Send Email task stays in progress until its email has actually gone out, and only then does the project move to the next step. If a mailbox needs to be reconnected, its queued emails wait and send on their own once it's back.

Improvements:

• Contacts: Deleting a contact now cancels any Client Portal invitations they hadn't accepted yet.

• Payroll: A payroll connection that synced but received no data now says so, instead of showing "Awaiting Mapping" and sending you looking for a mapping problem.

• Reports: Comments are now available in the projects, plans and companies datasets, and plan tags are available wherever plans appear.

Fixes:

• Automations: Save a project file no longer fails when one of its settings was filled in and later cleared.

• Bulk Email: A send that was stopped on purpose no longer shows "queued" next to its Failed status.

• Census: The browser tab title now updates when you close a participant record or switch plan years.

• Client Portals: Checkboxes on Fill & Sign forms now respond after the client has signed.

• Client Portals: Opening a second notice no longer shows the first notice's recipients.

• Client Portals: Tasks, forms and the Files page no longer carry over details from the one opened before.

• Files: Deleting an unlocked folder no longer deletes locked files inside it.

• Project Templates: A standalone form attached to a client task is now kept when the template is saved and reopened.

• Reports: Saved reports now show every row instead of stopping at 500, matching what the export returns.

• Reports: Reports that pull in many contact roles no longer fail to load.

Year end means a stack of record keeper statements, one per plan, and a 5500 that needs the numbers on them to tie out to the payroll and census data you already hold. None of it is hard, but there is a lot of it, and it lands when your team is busiest.

Asset Reconciliation puts the statement, the payroll/census data, and the 5500 in one flow. Whether you’re uploading bulk TPA downloads from your record keeper, or connecting your Trust Accounting account, CX will read and display your custodian balances against your plan sponsor’s census data. Identify differences at the plan or participant level, roll accrual balances forward, and tie contributions in one place. Once a reconciliation is confirmed, its figures can be automatically loaded into the plan's 5500.

Asset Reconciliation is rolling out now as a beta. We're bringing teams on in stages, starting with a training call so your team is set up well from day one. To join, talk to your Stax.ai account manager or reach out to product@stax.ai for access.

Learn more here

Make a PDF fillable with an automation

A PDF that arrives without fillable fields usually means someone placing every signature line, date, and checkbox by hand before it can be used. The new PDF automation does that for you. Add it to a task and point it at a PDF, either from a project data field or from a file path in the client directory, and it finds where the signature, date, text, dropdown, radio, and checkbox fields belong on the page and adds them as fillable fields.

Before the file is created, a team member can preview the result and approve, edit, or reject it, and the task is flagged as needing review until they do, so a form that looks wrong is stopped before it goes any further. You can also run field detection from the form editor.

Dashboards access without a seat limit

Assign dashboard and reporting access to all users.

• Read: view dashboards and reports, and run one-off exports

• Read/Write: create, edit, and delete reports and dashboards

People without the permission can't open the Dashboards or Reports pages, and people with Read access don't see the create, edit, or delete controls.

Failed project launches, shown and retry-able

When a template launch can't create a project for one or more plans, you now see exactly what happened. A banner above the Projects table lists the failures grouped by template, with the plan and a plain-language reason for each. You can retry or dismiss them one at a time or in bulk, and a confirmation with an Open project link appears when a retry works.

The person who launched, and your admins, also get a Launch failures tab in the notification bell with a count, so a failed launch doesn't go unnoticed.

Pre-flight checks before you launch a project

The pre-flight system now checks for problems that would leave a project broken before anything is created. It stops the launch for issues like a broken expression, a role with nobody assigned for that plan, or an empty required setting on an automation, so you can fix them first. It warns, and lets you acknowledge and continue, on things like a mailbox or team brand that isn't set up for sending, email recipients that won't resolve, a project with no lead, or targets that already have an active project from the template.

Rearrange the tiles on Company and Plan pages

You can now drag the tiles on Company and Plan pages into the order that works for you. On a company that's Plans, Deals, Payroll, Details, and Ownership. On a plan it's Company, Recordkeeper, Details, and Notes. Your arrangement is remembered the next time you open the page.

File 5500s for plan years 2020 through 2022

If you have delinquent filings, you can now choose plan year 2020, 2021, or 2022 when you create a filing in Government Filings. These years are prepared on the 2025 form.

Improvements

• Census: Changes to census data are now held until you select Save, then applied together, with eligibility recalculated once for each changed employee instead of after every edit.

• Census: The Key view now includes a year-by-year map of owners and officers along with a change log, and you can open the editor from any year to update it.

• Daily Briefing: Plan code now has its own column, so the Client / Plan column shows just the plan name. You can sort by it or hide it from the column picker.

• Plans: The company's Payroll card now appears on the plan page, showing connections with provider, status, and mapping, plus last sync, multiple connections, and payroll trigger. It's the same card as on the company page.

Fixes

• Appearance: Fixed a case where some pages loaded in the opposite theme from the one you selected.

• Attention: Results no longer disappear after a bulk action.

• Census: A record now shows the same name in the individual record as in the census table when a participant's name changed from the prior year.

• Client Portals: Text fields now recognize values added with right-click paste or autofill, so the EFAST credentials signing button no longer stays disabled.

• Comments: A comment that fails to post no longer stays on screen, and a slow comment can no longer land on another plan or company.

• Documents: Searching within a document now finds matches on every page and shows total results, not only the page in view.

• Email: A scheduled email can no longer be saved with a send time in the past.

• Files: After you move to another folder, Delete, Move, and Copy no longer act on a file you had selected in the previous one.

• Form 5500: Schedule C service codes listed with spaces between them no longer fail EFAST2 validation.

• Form 5500: Typing invalid characters before a signer's name in the portal no longer causes the filing to fail validation.

• Government Filings: The copy buttons for the acknowledgment ID and filing ID on a submitted filing now copy the value.

• Milestones: A new data field added to a milestone task that previously used a different milestone label now saves as the new field.

• Payroll: A payroll sync that fails is no longer reported as connected or synced.

• Payroll: Importing a payroll report no longer removes payroll rows that were synced from a connected provider.

• Payroll: Report imports now mark the report Processed and launch the payroll project only after the import succeeds.

• Payroll: Deleting a payroll report now removes its file.

• Payroll: The payroll page now shows the reports connection's failed-to-parse message.

• Plans: The company Pulse shown on a plan page now displays the correct value.

• Projects: Duplicate Plan Year Detail projects and census records are no longer created when two updates arrive at nearly the same time.

• Reporting: Milestone views and generated milestone reports no longer miss rows on first load.

• Tasks: A task no longer shows as complete when completing it failed.

• Tasks: Fixed timeouts that could keep the Tasks page from loading.

Every table in Stax.ai can show a lot of columns, and every person on your team used to set theirs up on their own. New hires started from a blank slate, and two people looking at the same plan list could be working from completely different views.

Now you can set the default columns for a table once, for your whole team or for a specific group. Everyone who opens that table starts from the same layout: the columns your firm relies on, in the order you want them. A group can have its own defaults, so your compliance team and your onboarding team can each start from the view that fits their work.

Defaults are a starting point, not a lock. Anyone can still adjust the columns on their own view.

Read the guide here.

Fixes:

• Assignees: Overdue and Due Today badges now compare the full date, so past-due tasks from an earlier week, month, or year are correctly marked Overdue.

• Census: The contact and assignee columns on the Census page now show only people in the matching role.

• Companies and Plans: Setting a contact role from the Plans or Companies table no longer removes the company's other contacts.

• Library Forms: Questions stay visible after a drag is cancelled, cancelling the "Show when" editor discards your unsaved changes, and duplicated questions get a proper field key.

• Participants: Estimated hours now calculate correctly for participants with a blank hire date, count terminated participants only through their termination date, and no longer come out a day short.

• Projects: Data fields selected on a Fill & Sign client task now stay selected when you launch a project from the template.

• Work Log: Entries that end on a different day than they started now show the end date along with the time.