The Long-Time Coming Mega Update is live, and at the heart of it is a change we have been building toward for months: a proper data model for the people and entities your firm serves.
If you have used Seamlss for a while, you will have noticed the friction. A company, a trust, and the three directors behind them all lived in one flat list. When you sent a request, it was not obvious who it was actually going to. When you pulled a report, groupings got fuzzy. And every time we tried to add something new, like compliance tracking or offboarding, we kept bumping into the same wall.
That wall is gone.
The new three tier model
From today, every record in Seamlss sits in one of three places.
Contacts are people. One record per real human. They have names, emails, phone numbers and verifications. A Contact never moves. If the same person sits behind three companies, that is still one Contact.
Clients are entities you act for. There are 13 Client types now, covering Individuals, Sole Traders, Companies, Trusts with their different trustee structures, Partnerships, SMSFs, Not for Profits and more. A Client is what you actually bill, lodge for and engage with.
Groups bundle Clients that belong together. A family group, a company and its trust, a holding structure with its subsidiaries, whatever shape the real-world relationship takes.
Every request, every report, every verification, every document now sits against the right layer. It sounds simple written down. That was the goal.
What this unlocks right now
The new data model is the reason so much else in this release even exists.
The request system has been rebuilt on top of it. Client Request, Insta Fetch and InstaSend all use the new Contacts and Clients structure, so recipients resolve cleanly, the client portal shows the right cards, and you stop sending three copies of the same ask.
Additional reports became possible. We now have a Reports area with six live views: contacts, clients, groups, requests, verifications, and leads.
Ethical Clearances, Client Offboarding with secure 2FA transfer, the AML Compliance Hub, the Setup wizard, re-engagement flows. Every one of these features needed the new model to work properly.
What it lets us build next
Here is the part that matters most.
The reason we invested in this rebuild is not just the features we could ship this week. It is the features we could never ship before.
A cleaner data model means we can finally move on things that were blocked:
- Per-Request item permissions – send to multiple contacts, allowing some to view and others to edit
- Multi-sign engagement letters
- Deeper XPM and accounting system integrations that actually keep two-way sync tidy
- Practice-wide dashboards that show real client health rather than ticket counts
- Automated workflows that trigger off Client, Group or Contact events
- Smarter verification renewal tracking against the right legal entity
- Richer audit trails for compliance teams
- Bulk actions that respect group relationships instead of flattening them
More quietly: every new feature we ship from here costs a lot less to build, because it slots into a structure that already knows what a Client is.
What you need to do
Not much. The migration will run overnight on the 15th April. Your existing data will be reshaped into Contacts, Clients and Groups automatically, and you will see the new layout under Client Management in the left nav.
If you want to understand the new model in depth, start with Understanding Contacts, Clients and Groups. For day-to-day use, Managing Contacts and Managing Groups cover the common actions. If you want to send a request in the new shape, How to Send a Client Request walks through the full three step wizard.
Thank you
This one has been in the works for a long time. Thank you for sticking with us through the beta quirks and the ten different iterations of what a “Contact” should even mean. The version shipping this week is the version that lets us build the future of Seamlss.
If you hit anything odd, click the support button in-app. Every note helps.
Clayton and Daniel