Would anyone care to share their processes for onboarding clients to TaxFolder?
We are just starting with TF and are finding it a bit difficult, even with all the videos and documents available.
Do you use a template when you invite a client from TaxCycle to TF? If yes, can you share it? What does it say? It was recommended that we send the invite first before sending a request to upload documents. We wanted to do this in TaxCycle so we didn’t have to manually enter contact details in TF. The client is getting an email that says “we have shared a document with them”, but we haven’t.
I just started to use TF and when i send the form to sign via TF it automatically invites them to the actual folder. i sometimes take that away as im not sure what this will do for me at tax time
i agree the videos are confusing
Jeannette Guy-St. Jean
705-896-0505
The Personal Touch Services
tptservices13@icloud.com
So… if you’re sending out the AUTHREP as one of your first tasks, then you can also invite to TF / request uploads in that one shot. Works beautifully.
However, often I need to see information before I’ve engaged them, and/or before i have their business number to send out the AUTHREP. I’ve set them up on TF manually, but there is no link to TC that I can discern. So when i name the engagement as i would the corporate name (say), there’ll be two engagements in TF that look the same in their TF portal.
In summary, starting with TC works well. Starting in TF is likely a temporary measure. Perhaps there’s a way to invite them to TF from TC without requiring a signature? I might just send out a generic letter of some kind from TC instead.
It might be that the designers figure everyone will start with an engagement letter from TC. However, that’s not the case, if using alternative methods or as i said, needing info before engaged.
The only way to add a client from TaxCycle is to print a document to TaxFolder using either signature request, approval request or share documents. If you select the share documents option the print request gets delivered as a PDF in the client files section and the client can only retrieve it through the client portal so an invite is required for shared documents.
In the print dialogue, you can select to Invite a “new” client to the client portal and it will send an invite. This setting is ignored if the client already exists in TaxFolder.
You can also trigger the email to upload documents, but only if a new engagement folder is being created in TaxFolder (ie new tax year or new return type). There is currently no way to trigger this email for an existing engagement (from TaxCycle or from TaxFolder) so either it gets sent with the invite or not at all. This is something on our list of items to improve.
Also on our list of items to improve is to include a function that would add a client to TaxFolder without having to send a document. For now, you would need to add the client in TaxFolder manually if you do not have anything to sign/approve or are not using the client portal.
I am just starting with TaxFolder this year too.
I created a correspondence template I called Welcome to TaxFolder and basically just gave them an intro to the different sections (My Documents, Signature, Preparer Documents) and a link to more resources. I personalized with their name, and then sent it with a TaxFolder email template that tells them they are going to get an invite to create a TaxCycle account to link to their new TaxFolder account. The document then lives in their Preparer Documents section where they can refer to it for more info (though by the time they figure out how to find the document, they probably don’t need it anymore, ha!)
Seems to be working. To make sending quicker (since I belatedly discovered you can’t send as a batch),I created a printset to ‘print’ the welcome page to PDF with TaxFolder (with the “Invite new clients…” option ticked, as well as using “Share Documents”) so that I just had to hit print for that printset to get the email out introducing them to the system.
I will warn you that somewhere along the line my email defaulted back to the Adobe email, instead of the template I created, so a few went out with a different email by accident, asking them to sign a document that didn’t exist. So that wasn’t great, but other than that, the process went well!
I’m actually resending emails today to those clients that didn’t meet the 48 hour link deadline, encouraging them to sign up - I hadn’t realized there was a deadline, so you might want to consider the timing of when you invite…I chose a Thursday afternoon to give clients a work day and a weekend day in the hopes they would complete in time.
Lynne