When you have clients with a lot of unique needs, how do you manage them?
There’s the client who has a unique bookkeeping process, or the ones that requires a meeting, or the one that wants theirs on a different timeline.
When it comes to managing clients, one of the biggest challenges is in how to manage it all?
As an accountant, you have a LOT of responsibilities. You might be the bookkeeper, the tax planner, the tax preparer, you might be managing payroll, sales tax, or just trying to get through tax season (p.s. You’re almost there!)
The point is, you have a lot on your plate. And dealing with the unique needs of you clients doesn’t make things any easier. But if you’ve been reading our stuff for awhile, then you know how we feel about a problem…and that is that there is ALWAYS a solution. It might not be perfect, but there’s a way to make your day easier to manage. The key is, to find that solution and then take action.
When it comes to building your workflows, and creating that custom solution, we have a few recommendations.
Start with the basics. Create your general workflow BEFORE trying to customize anything. This would be the workflow you can either a. use for most of your clients, or b. the ideal workflow you could use if you didn’t have any customization.
Once you have that design in place, start documenting what that customization is.Detail out the various scenarios, so you can see patterns across clients. Do you have multiple clients who have this 1 specific deliverable? Are there alignments in special dates that clients have requested? Grouping clients together for their customization can make you life just that much easier when it comes time to build you workflow.
Once you have documented those nuances by client, now you want to build them out. Luckily TaxDome allows for a ton of customization through the use of their “tags” feature.
Build out your basic workflows in TaxDome’s pipeline editor. You’re also going to want to create any templates (tasks, messages, emails, etc.) that you will be using for your unique client needs. For example, if you want to notify your client A that their work is done and you don't need to do that for other clients, then you would create the message for that client. Hint: you can also use custom fields inTaxDome for even further customization.
Once you have those templates, you’re going to want to create your custom tags for that client. In this case, you might want to add a tag for “Client A”, or if you have a group of clients with this same need, you can group them with a tag such as “Group B” (we suggest using much more specific language than this that will explain what this group is.)
Now that you have your templates created and your custom tags created, make sure to tag those clients
with the appropriate tag in TaxDome. Now you’re ready to create your customization in your pipeline!
Edit your pipeline to add in your specific tasks, messages, emails, etc. in the right stage. This is where you can add a condition, and then select your tag for that specific client or group. This means that this automation will ONLY occur for the tagged client/group of clients. Please note, you only want to use 1 tag for this or TaxDome will apply this automation for clients that have ALL that tags listed.
Once your pipeline is saved and live and you’ve added your jobs, you will now see this automation occur ONLY for those specific clients. And voila! Your client customization is now up & running.
There are other options for customizing your TaxDome for your various client needs, but this is one of the most powerful ways to do it.
If you want to learn more about how we can help you build this customization in your pipeline, go ahead and book a free consultation using the link here: https://www.cabotandmain.com/buildyourtaxandbookkeepingsystems