Feature release: meet the Group App, a powerful control centre for multi-office agencies

If you work in an agency with more than two or three offices, you should be using the new Group App. It’s a premium Rex feature, available at a monthly cost of $25 plus GST per office. That’s about the equivalent of one hour of admin time. (Trust us, it’s worth it. You’re going to save a whole lot more time than that.) If you’d like to set it up, please contact our support team at support@rexsoftware.com.au. Our latest update gives those of you working in agencies with multiple offices a much better (read: easier and more powerful) way to centrally manage all of your Rex accounts. The new Group App provides a consolidated admin experience across separate Rex accounts for group reporting, admin user access and assignment, group announcements and cross account search. Previously, head offices with multi-accounts in Rex were able to use something called the “Franchise Centre” to control all their Rex accounts and users. But if you’ve been with us for a while, you’ll know we’re all about creating software solutions that last - and that means constant improvements. So, meet the new Group App!

TL;DR

If you’re just after the highlights, here’s the short version of what’s new in the Group App:

• a new concept of Office Groups
• more granular privilege control, restricting what users can do within both the Group App and related office accounts
• the ability to publish announcements to specific office accounts only
• a fresh coat of paint, to make the experience that much nicer

If all of your offices share a single Rex account (what we refer to as a ‘multi-location account’), this doesn’t affect you. Everything you need to do, you can do from within your account. Want to know more about the Group App? Keep reading.

Office Groups: a new way of organising offices

Before diving into the benefits of this feature update, we need to talk about Office Groups. It’s a big win for those agencies who assign people to look after a particular subset of offices - say, as regional managers. This new functionality lets you set up ‘Queensland’, ‘New South Wales’ and ‘Victoria’ Office Groups, for example. Think of it like User Groups, but on an office level. To set up an Office Group, click Office Groups in the main menu and then +. Give the new group a name and choose which offices should be included from the dropdown menu. Click Create group - and you’re done! It’s that simple. For now, Office Groups can be used for two things: access and announcements.

More granular privileges for better data control

It used to be the case that all head office users had super admin access to all sub accounts (we’ll refer to these as ‘child accounts’). This wasn’t ideal, as it meant those users had the ability to view and edit every kind of record in each child account. With this feature update, we’ve given you much better control over what users can and can’t do, both in the child accounts as well as in the Group App itself. Essentially, this means you can give people access to only the data that they need. There’s now two types of privileges:

• Rex Account Privileges - which govern what a Group App user can see and do in child accounts
• Group App Privileges - which give users the ability to do certain things in the Group App itself

Getting set up

To grant privileges to a Group App user, click Users from the menu and then click on their name. Under Rex Account Privileges, you can choose to:

• restrict a Group App user to the Group App only (i.e. the user cannot log in to any child accounts - handy if you’ve got an accountant who needs to create cross-account reports, for example)
• grant the user super admin access to all child accounts
• grant the user specific, granular privileges for particular office groups (allowing a Queensland regional manager to view - but not edit - contact records within the New South Wales Office Group accounts, for example).

Under Group App Privileges, you can grant specific privileges relating to reports, announcements, users, office groups and admin.

Announcements for specific Office Groups

You can also use Office Groups to limit in-app announcements to specific regions. You might want to alert everyone in Queensland of an updated Government-issued form, or perhaps remind them to submit their application for a QLD-specific industry award. There’s no limit to the ways you could use this new feature. Office closures or relocations, public holidays, milestone achievements, reporting deadlines… it’s up to you. The new Group App, alongside other powerful Rex features including custom fields and centralised template distribution, make Rex a powerful platform for agencies with multiple offices. And, of course, our API is fully open so you can integrate Rex will all the tools your offices use.

A fresh coat of paint

Well, that's an understatement. If you ever used the old "Franchise Centre", you'll notice a marked difference. We've re-written the whole thing from the ground up, so it's faster and more responsive to allow power users to move quicker across tasks. If you want to know more about Group App and how it works, jump into the Help Centre. Got some suggestions for us? We’d love to hear them - let us know at Uservoice.