Signature requests arrive by email, and email gets read on a phone. Until now, the plan sponsor who opened your request on the train had to remember to come back to it at a desk, and the follow-up to make sure they did came out of your day.
The client portal is now built for a phone. A sponsor can open the emailed link, log in or accept an invitation, find the task, draw a signature with their finger, and submit, all without leaving their phone. Documents open fit to the width of the screen with zoom controls and a toolbar you can actually reach, and the dashboard, files, tasks, questionnaires, and settings all reflow instead of demanding a desktop window.
A few steps genuinely need a big screen, including census review, 5500 prep, and playback. Rather than leave someone stuck in a layout that cannot work, those now show a clear screen telling them to open the task on a computer, so the client knows what to do next instead of calling you to ask.
Nothing changes for anyone on a desktop. Above 1024px the portal is identical to what your clients see today.
Projects that start themselves
Most of the work a plan takes on doesn't announce itself. A census file lands in a client folder, a payroll run posts, and the project behind it only begins once someone notices and launches it by hand.
Project templates now launch on their own when the work arrives. You can configure a template to trigger when a file is uploaded into a specific folder or a folder pattern, in either a client directory or a shared directory, so dropping the census in the right place is all it takes to put the project in motion. Payroll can trigger a project the same way, set per company.
Both are configured on the project template, alongside the triggers you already use, and payroll launch is turned on from the company record. Everything downstream behaves exactly as it does today, including the tasks, assignments, and due dates the template already defines.
File short plan years on prior-year forms until the current year's are released
Government forms are rarely available the moment you need them. When a plan year closes ahead of the IRS releasing the updated form, you can now file on the prior year's form in the current year and keep moving. The filing year selector offers the current year, and Stax.ai uses the most recent released form behind it. When the new form is published, filings pick it up automatically.
Report builder upgrades
The report builder picked up a set of capabilities aimed at the questions that take more than one column to answer.
The biggest is filtered measures: a column can now count the records matching its own filter, so a single report can carry projects matching one condition, tasks matching that same condition, and tasks matching a second condition, each as its own distinct count. Alongside that:
Rename any column by clicking its chip. The new name carries through to the export, and the underlying aggregation is still shown.
Move and sort computed columns, which can now be dragged into position like any other column.
Filter on Company Status from the dropdown, including the custom statuses your team configures.
Filter on "is not empty", which joins "is empty" as an option.
Report on people against companies and plans. The user dataset now joins to both, through new user plan assignment and company assignment datasets.
Lost reasons on deals
When a deal is marked lost or moved to the final stage, Stax.ai now asks why. Lost reason is an optional field, so it never blocks anyone from closing out a deal, and it's available for reporting, which turns a pipeline you can only count into one you can actually learn from.
Ownership on the company page
Company ownership now has its own card on the company page, so ownership structure sits with the rest of the company record instead of in a separate file you have to go find. The card includes a download button, which is useful when ownership needs to travel with a testing package or a document request.
Configurable columns on Companies and Plans
The Companies and Plans tables now let you choose the columns you see, including website, company and plan information, and internal roles. Sorting sticks too: an A-Z selection is saved, so the view you set up is the view you come back to.
Improvements:
Bulk email: Sends now carry a default Reply-To address, so when a recipient replies the response reaches the right person.
Companies: You can now allow multiple payroll connections on a company, and override the prior service condition where a plan calls for it.
Companies and plans: Adding a project or task from the To-do tab now opens the create modal in place, so you can finish the record without leaving the page.
Comments: Comments on companies, plans, and similar records can now be deleted or edited by the person who wrote them or removed by an admin.
Contacts: Phone numbers now carry an extension field, so a direct line no longer has to be squeezed into the number itself.
Custom fields: A file stored in a custom field can now be downloaded directly from the field.
Milestones: You can now set a milestone's stage manually, with a confirmation step, and edit milestone dates by hand.
Plan data tables: Removing an item now asks for confirmation, so a stray click on the x no longer deletes a field outright.
Tables: Joined data can now be expanded onto separate lines from the gear menu, so records that carry several values read one per row.
Views: Number fields now format with commas and two decimal places, and a currency type is available with the same formatting.
Fixes:
Automations: Corrected an issue where expressions in single-line fields, such as To, CC, output file names, and folder paths, showed their underlying text instead of the field chip.
Bulk email: Corrected the targeted-recipient count on a send, which could read higher than the number of people actually addressed.
Client portal: Resolved a case where a signing task was marked complete even though the signed document failed to upload.
Client portal: Corrected a signing flow that asked for the digital signature attestation twice in one document.
Client portal: Resolved an issue where a drawn signature was not placed until the field was selected a second time.
Client portal: The Users page under Settings now shows an empty state and an invite button when a client has no portal users yet.
Email reminders: Resolved a case where reminders sent with a custom email template included a second copy of the sender's signature.
