Stop Chasing Tax Documents: How Firms Automate Document Collection

All right, all right, it looks like we are live. Hello, hello, beautiful people. Hello to everyone tuning in live and anyone watching the replay. Um, today we're going to be talking about how to never chase clients again and how I go about streamlining document collection for tax firms. We have an interesting guest today that I'll be honored to present in a little bit, uh, but let's go ahead and, uh, dive straight in. I'm just going to be presenting some of the, I guess, overall overview of the presentation, and then we'll get into it. All right, so in the next 45 minutes, I'm going to be sharing everything I know about the most painful step in a tax workflow, which is getting documents for clients. I'll literally be sharing word-for-word scripts of what to say in email templates to send, what software to use and how to set it up. And also automations that you can go and replicate for yourself. So you can kind of like go ahead and streamline this process on your own without having to pay us a dime. Now, of course, as founders and businesses that serve accounting firms, we do have solutions to offer in terms of helping you solve this problem. So let me go ahead and introduce myself and my host before we get going. All right. So my name is Isaac Perdomo. I am the co-founder of Opsware.co. We are a process optimization and automation agency, helping growing accounting firms do more with their existing team and software. And today here is joining me James Rose, which is the co-founder of Content Snare. Feel free to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit more about your tool.

Hey everyone. Yeah, James. Thanks for having me, Isaac. Awesome to be here. I think for those who don't know me, James from Content Snare. Content Snare is a software product we built don't know, 2016, I think we wrote the first lines of code, um, to help people get information from clients, um, in a timely manner. I know this, this was a massive problem for us in our digital agency. That's what we actually built it for originally. And then about 2020, um, we— a whole bunch of accountants started to use our platform. We investigated and went, wow, like, you guys are getting a lot of value from this. And we've basically doubled down on accounting and And focused on it since. So yeah, the long and short of it is, is that it's the easy way to get information from clients without the email back and forth.

Nice. All right. And for some context, at least we personally have been able to serve about 80 different firms and streamline about 2,000 processes for them. James, I don't know if there's anything you can share in terms of how many people have used your product, just so people can know that. Why they should—

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know the number, the total number over ever, but, um, currently it's around, um, 1,600, uh, companies that, that use the product, um, live, uh, collecting I think something like 200,000-300,000 different pieces of information from clients a month. So that includes like documents or answers to questions or whatever. Yeah, and I think, I think we're sending something close to 200,000 reminder emails a month as well, which is just out of control. Um, it's crazy to see those numbers because I guess when we built the product, you never know where it's going to end up. But it's like, man, like, we're kind of proud of the team and what we've built.

Yeah, definitely. Well, as we go through this, of course, feel free to take ContentSnare for a spin. Um, you can get started with a free trial, and James was kind enough to Um, extend the trial for the people that watch the webinar. If you can, you know, provide some guidance as to how people can get that, James, that would be appreciated.

Yeah, just simply just, um, tell, tell the support team when, when you create your account, open up— there's a little chat in the right-hand corner, um, open that up and just say, hey, would you mind extending my trial to 30 days? I heard about it on the Opsah or Isaac's webinar, um, and I'll extend that trial out to 30 days for you.

Perfect. All right. Um, of course we also offer free consultations. So if at any point you want to streamline and automate some processes in your firm, whether it's document collection or something else, feel free to check out our website and see if we can, uh, we can chat and see if we can help you out. All right. Let me remove you, James, for now. I'll bring you back in when it's time for your demo. Um, I see 3 people here live, so I'd love to see if Anyone here listening will be able to share, how do you guys collect documents today? Do you do it via email? Do you use a tax software product, a form application? There's many ways in which we can go about collecting documents from clients. Many of them has their pros and cons. If anyone could kind of leave that in the chat, we'll just kind of take a look at that at the end, just to get a sense of where people are at, at this point. many times in terms of document collection. All right, so let's get going with a little bit of a personal story first. I like to do desserts at home, and I personally like cinnamon rolls a little bit too much. And in my early 20s, I always was the type of person that said, you know what, I'll just work with what I have. Like, I'll somehow make up the ingredients on the fly. And what inevitably happened is that I started doing it, Started doing my recipe, and inevitably I realized I needed a specific ingredient that maybe was the brown sugar for the filling or the cream cheese for the frosting. And that inevitably meant I had to, you know, go to the groceries or order something. And what should have been maybe a 30-45 minute recipe turned into an entire afternoon just because I didn't line up a lot of the ingredients I needed before I get started. And of course, the moral of the story there is that sometimes a lot of the inefficiencies we see in tax firms and accounting firms don't necessarily come from the tools you're using or the way you're doing things. But sometimes it's just that you're not lining everything up before you start. You're lacking some ingredients before you get started. And that's something we see a lot with tax firms. They are sending a request via email, then they're following up because maybe the client didn't respond. So you try to still make some progress on your return. So You know, it's not— it doesn't get crazy at crunch time, but then you realize you need some information. Maybe something is incorrect or not legible, so you'd have to go back and send another request and on and on and on. And ultimately, just like with my cinnamon roll recipe, a return that maybe should have taken just a few hours takes however long because all the back and forth, and possibly a return that you priced, assuming that is It was going to take you just a few hours. Takes much more than that. So that's why we believe document collection is so important and a key part of streamlining your process specifically for tax firms, because it's data— document collection is like the biggest, like at least a big part of your workflow and what your team is spending time on getting in the first place. So let's solve this for good, and we're going to be talking about 6 specific steps that you can go through to guarantee as effortless of a document collection process as you can. First, we'll talk about getting early commitment from clients, then how could— how you can go about stopping using email and email attachments, how to go about using document collection software, how to go about reminding clients on a regular basis, of the requests or pending documents they have to share with you, why it is key and sometimes very useful to go multichannel to have a higher response rate, and then how we— how can we go about automating it all. So in each step, I'll be talking about the why, the how, and I'll be sharing also like exact scripts and templates for you to get going and just to make it a little bit easier for you guys to get started. All right, let me see. Let me just take a sip of water and we'll keep going. All right, so getting early commitment from clients— why is this important? If you've studied sales, influence, persuasion, any of those, I guess, psychological sciences, you know that humans are incredibly consistent with what they commit to others. So why not stack the deck in your favor by clarifying expectations with your client from the very beginning as to what responsiveness you expect from them and what response they can expect from you? And the way ideally in which you do this, it's literally on a, you know, face-to-face conversation, maybe a phone call, and as early in the relationship as possible, potentially in your kickoff call or potentially even in your proposal call if you have the opportunity to align those expectations early on. Now, what's something you might be able to say just to give you an idea of what it's something you might be able to say in a conversation with a client to make sure you get that commitment from them early on? You can say something like, hey, Mr. Client, I appreciate you for working with us. We'd like to align on expectations to have a successful working relationship. We aim to have a 2-week turnaround time, sooner if we can. And this is key. We want to make sure we are committing to the timeline or the turnaround time we have before we get them to commit on the turnaround or the response time we expect from them, right?

Yeah.

And you can then say, you know, you can count on us delivering on that timeline as long as you provide all the necessary information. Is that fair? And they might go about, yeah, I don't understand that, et cetera, et cetera. Then you might say, it's worth noting, any information that we receive after that may result in maybe your return not being ready by the deadline or any other consequences. So just like we commit to a 2-week timeline, we expect our clients to provide their information as soon as they can and no longer than 2 weeks. Can we count on you for that? And then you let them, you know, agree to that expectation. This is something that literally could— it's just a 2-minute conversation essentially, but it could save you a lot of time and headache further down the road. So let's talk about step number 2, stop accepting documents via email. Now, I know email is the lifeblood of many people's businesses. And it can be challenging to, um, stop using it even for things like receiving documents and receiving different attachments from clients. That said, especially for the type of information that accountants and tax firms request, it can be sensitive information, so it might not be as secure. It can also be very inefficient because you have you know, effectively all the emails from everybody, and it can be very challenging to later on maybe find a document when you need it later on or group them in any way that was going to make it efficiency for— efficient for you on your phone. And the way you go about doing this is announcing it to clients and then sticking to it. So setting up the infrastructure so that you can make that easy on yourself to stick to. And I have a couple of examples. So An email that you might be able to use to announce it to your client list might go something like, you know, dear Mr. Client, we've got an important update to share about the way we handle your sensitive information. To enhance the security of your files and how quickly we can review them, we will no longer accept attachment of documents via email effective X date. So you might give them a little bit of leeway. Moving forward, please use our secure document portal. And, uh, to submit any files. And if you have any questions, feel free to contact us to, to get help from there. All right, now this is like the official announcement, but of course you and I know that the clients will potentially still send emails. So what I also recommend is that you go about setting up auto-replies to emails that contain email attachments so that you can train your clients consistently as, you know, they are going to send you an email with an attachment eventually, and you can set up, um, automations or rules and settings within some of your email client tools to say, hey, the moment I receive an email with an attachment, I can reply automatically and say, hey, I noticed you emailed me an attachment. Can you submit that document again? Reiterate the reason why, right, to enhance the security of your files and quickly we can review them. We will no longer accept attachments of documents with email and link them to your portal or the specific solution you're using for them to provide you with the documents. And this is incredibly easy to set up, actually. If you go— if you're a Gmail user, you can literally in the next 45 seconds set up like, hey, any email that has an attachment, I want the system to automatically reply to it using a specific email template. I'll do an example in a little bit, but even in Microsoft you have some of those settings, some of those rules to say, hey, if the email has an attachment, potentially— I don't think they have a way for you to send the email directly, but you could potentially send it to another email address that will then auto-reply from there. Um, if you guys are familiar with tools like Make and Zapier, which are kind of like a big part of the tools we use internally to help our clients, that can also be used to set up an automation like this where you auto-reply to emails with attachment. And it gives you a little bit more flexibility in terms of you could potentially whitelist certain maybe vendors or some clients that maybe are too stubborn and don't really want to follow the rules or want to— don't want to sign up for the portal. We've kind of heard those cases where maybe there was a few exceptions to the rule that you want to make. And just to share like how easy this could be to set up, within, for example, Gmail. Let me go ahead and switch the tab here. So this will look familiar if you are in the Google Workspace environment. If you click on Show Search Options, you will see literally a button that says Has Attachment, a little checkbox. You can create a filter here, and then you can just send a template, select the template Create the filter, and you're effectively done. Um, so I mean, this is when I said it took, you know, 45 seconds to set it up. I was really not kidding. Uh, so let me turn into the slides again and keep going, uh, into step number 3. So using document collection software, um, the reason why we sometimes see a lot of firms opt firms opting for a dedicated document collection software tool is because although there are other options, for example, most practice management software, including a lot of the accounting-specific practice management software tools, will have a request feature of some sort. But if you think about it, they have like another 100 features to build, so they can't really allocate as much time and effort and other development time and neurons like someone like James and Contisner can into making that specific process great for the client and easy for your firm. We've also done a fair amount of, um, you know, designing and implementing a document collection process for firms with like custom form applications. There's multiple of them: Cognito Forms, Paperform, Typeform, Jotform, you name it. But usually you're starting from a blank slate, and if you want to add certain features like reminders or other things like portals, you have to usually integrate it with other tools, and it's just a little bit more time-consuming to get them set up the right way. So you have kind of that spectrum of like very custom, but you're starting from a blank slate, or you're using the all-in-one, but you might be sacrificing or compromising on some features and we believe that a document collection software sits somewhere in the middle where you don't have to start from a blank slate, but you have dedicated tools that's to be great at what they do. At this point, I'd love to let James take over and share some of the things that ContentSnare can do. So take it away, James.

Yeah, thanks, Isaac. Um, just like a couple of things I'm so glad you mentioned, one being, um, like that expectation setting piece where you're actually telling, uh, your clients that something like ContentSnare is coming and why, you know, especially like security. One thing, you know, we hear this occasionally where people go, um, you know, our clients are saying why, um, well, they might push back on having to upload all this information into a, into a platform. But really, they're gonna have to give you that information one way or another. So really emphasizing that, um, like using a proper checklist or a proper platform, it makes it easier for them to give you that same amount of information. If they— that's if you get the pushback. But like, this is the thing, you preempt it and be like, hey, we're using the system, we've got to get all this info from you anyway. Um, this will just make it really easy to see like what you have done, what you haven't done. Um, you know, and whatever. So really good to like set those expectations up front. And also, um, thank you for talking about, you know, like the whole thing around practice management tools often have this like feature that, uh, for some kind of request. And you nailed— you actually absolutely hit the nail on the head that, um, this is a serious problem to, to, uh, get right. It's really like, it has to be incredibly friction-free for clients to actually use it. That's the biggest thing. Like This is why client portals almost become a swear word because this history of portals just going like, here's the dumping ground for all the stuff and it's confusing for clients or whatever. So if the process sucks for them, they're just not going to use it. It's that simple. So we obviously spent a lot of time trying to make this very easy for people to use. Now I'm just going to try and share my screen. Sorry, I know I went on a ramble there, but that's like, it's just 2 things that are so important. I'll show you the client side of this first. So imagine your client has received an email, would look like this. It's customizable, you can change your colors and everything, but it's just saying, hey, we need some info from you. So imagine this is a tax return for a business.

Sorry, James.

Yeah.

Would you mind just zooming it in a little bit?

Yeah, sure.

Make sure people can see it.

Yeah, yeah, it's always a problem on these recordings, I mean webinars. So yeah, let's just say this is a business tax return. This could be for any process where you need information from clients, right? Any kind of document or whatever. So this is the client side. They click the link and they are straight into the system. You could have put a PIN code on it, but the whole thing here is that it's just ridiculously easy for them to do. It's like simple checklist down the left-hand side. Um, you know, we've got some instructions here and everything you see is customizable. You can put your own video, no video, whatever, get rid of this page completely. But one thing to do on screen—

Let me stop you there for a second. I apologize for the interruptions. But I would imagine some people saying, like, maybe some people, the reactions to that would be like, oh, it's so easy for people to get started. But maybe some people would panic that that's the case in terms of like, why didn't they have to put a password or anything like that? Could you explore a little bit of like why that wasn't the case and what's potentially the way you still handle security around that?

Yeah, so we do have the option for a PIN code and for them to create an account. Don't recommend the creating an account, just because we know how good clients are at remembering passwords. Very bad. Um, the big thing is this is what's called an unguessable link, and you're probably not going to be able to see that. Just know what I'm highlighting is a really long link, essentially, with a lot of random letters and numbers. Now, um, essentially it's decades of computing power to just randomly guess that, right? It's not, uh— So, so for example, Stripe, which is a payment processor, they use an API key as their primary, um, authentication, which is just a long string. So this is like, just in itself, is quite secure. Um, the, the issue, the potential issue, is if their email gets compromised or they forward that email to somebody else. And that's why you put a PIN code on it. The client sets that PIN code. So if someone else gets in there, they're not going to be able to access it. That link is also only live while the request is open. So if this is only a few days the chances of someone— it's basically a risk management thing that's up to you to decide. It depends on what kind of information you're collecting. If it's some really basic stuff, you might want to make it so it's just like one link and they're in, right? And then other than that, you might put a PIN code on some items. There's also another level. I don't know how much you want me to talk here, but you can mark individual questions as confidential.

Mm-hmm.

And what that'll do is no matter who accesses that link ever again, even if it's your client or someone they forward the link to or whatever, um, the person will not be able to see the answer, the previous answer to that question. So this is an option on every individual question. You can make one confidential, and what would happen is the client would come in and it would say, you've finished this question, or you've done this document, we just can't show you, you, you, we can't give you access to it because it's been marked confidential. either firm, um, just for security reasons. Um, if you want to redo it, you have to delete it and start again kind of thing, whereas everything else in this is like auto-saving on the fly. So, you know, if you pick yes, you can see we've got like another question that showed up as soon as they're uploading things. Um, or, uh, you know, basically— where's my demo docs? Everything they're adding, um, uploading, answering is just saved as soon as they do it. And if they want to come back and modify an answer, it's very easy unless it's marked confidential, in which case they have to erase it and start again just because we can't show them what was already there.

Nice.

But yeah, as you can see, pretty simple stuff. We're only showing them relevant questions, right? If they select no, we skip the ownership-based questions. If they purchase fixed assets, yes, you can see we pop up another couple of questions. So this is what the client's seeing. It's really, really, really simple for them. Type in— you can have typed answers uploaded, um, yes or no questions. Yeah, there's a whole lot of different stuff which I can show you later, but a really key thing here is if the client gets stuck on something, they can ask a question inline so they're not having to go back to email again, right? This is everything we do is to try and cut down on that email load. We spoke to a firm recently who actually counted how many emails came in and out of their firm before and after Content Snare, and they had a 50% reduction which is insane. But this is why, right? So it's like even when the client's asking a question, they just do it in here and you can answer it in here. You can see exactly what they're asking about because it's inline. So that's the client side. Just pretend they filled out a bunch of stuff. Let's have a look at your side quickly now. You get an overview of all the checklists that we've currently got out basically. You can see this person's got like 82 items still to do or whatever. This person's got 34. If we were to have a look at that checklist that that person we were just filling out, then it's this one here. It's popped up to the top so we can go in and have a look. I just wanted to show you quickly one feature. When you're reviewing the information that's come back from clients, you get these options here, which is probably one of our most popular features, is if they've uploaded the wrong document, you can go, Nope. You know, let's say it was a bank statement. You can go, that's last year's statement. Um, statement.

I love that.

Yeah, this is seriously one of our most popular things other than the automatic reminders, which we'll get into later. Uh, but yeah, this is massive. Again, another email saved. But not only an email saved, you know, this is coming— you— it's said, hey, come back and fix just this one file. So instead of you going back to the client saying that 3rd attachment you sent is wrong, and now adding another 2 emails when they reply— not only is it the 2 emails, but you've also got a thread with the wrong file in it as well. And someone's got to kind of remember that that's the wrong file, this is the right file, and it's just a mess, right? So in this case, they would just come back in, they click a button to replace that one file, and it's done. Um, you've always got the latest version. So that's the client side of things. Oh, sorry, the sort of When it comes to actually sending requests, this is going to be really fast, so I'll just quickly show people. But you just say you've got a new client coming on, you want to do client onboarding. Let's do that. It doesn't matter either, whatever process, it's pretty fast. We create a new request. You would choose your template, but since when you first create a new account, you're not going to have your own templates, you might just start with one of ours. So we'll go accounting client onboarding in the USA. I'm just going to use this template, skip over this step. On the next page is where you actually lay out all the questions. But because we used a template, all the questions are already here. Feel free to customize this, save it as your own template. You can add or remove questions. Nothing wrong with that. Again, just for time's sake, I'm going to keep moving. But just know this is like a full forms tool where you can ask— you can put tables, little spreadsheets in here. You can do identity verification. uploading files, lots of different stuff you can ask clients, and it's all just simple for them to use. Then we get a little preview and send it to the client and choose what automatic reminders we're going to send. Now, we're going to dig back into this later, right? So I don't— Yes, correct.

Yeah.

So that is the process of sending a checklist to a client. Pick the template, who it's going to, and you're on your way. And the reminders. Yeah, and then they'll get that email that you saw at the beginning.

Nice. I really like the approve and reject option. You know, that's something that I feel so many people would benefit from, just having that layer of being able to say, hey, Mr. Client, that's not the right document. And to your point, not having like this threat where you might— someone might go in and, you know, mistakenly pick the wrong one even though they send the the right one later on. It's so important. So I appreciate you sharing that.

Correct. Yeah.

Awesome. Right. All right. So let me keep going with some of these steps in our 6-step process, and then we'll jump into— James will jump in again with a couple more features to share with us. So reminders, reminders, reminders, reminders. Some of the most, uh, the most likely reason a client doesn't reply is sometimes that they forget. And, you know, if you're dealing with business owners, potentially with executives, that's, you know, that makes sense. They're busy. They're not like sitting around doing anything. And, you know, replying to my accountants, not necessarily at the top of their to-do list by any means. So you have to do whatever you can to remind them on a regular basis. I'll of the things they have to provide you and go ahead and if you can, something we suggest and we do with firms is setting up and customizing not only the frequency of those reminders but also the message to align with your firm and effectively your goals. Some examples, something we've seen works pretty well and we'll see some of that in the contents there, it's escalating the frequency of the messages as the due date approaches so that they are reminded a little bit more frequently when that due date is coming due. And also in terms of the messaging, making sure you state the consequences in terms of, hey, this may result in penalties if you don't reply, or you might have to extend the timeline or extend your return. Um, it's also stating the ease and time investment that takes for them, because sometimes clients just don't know how long it's going to take them. They think it's going to take them a couple of hours, but if it just takes them 15 minutes, let them know on a regular basis in those reminders for them to have that top of mind. And as well, something we've seen work pretty well is going from gentle and friendly in terms of the messaging just to a little bit more firm and assertive as you get into deadline to make sure that they— you get their attention and it actually So that's it on the reminder side. Something else we've seen work pretty well too is going multichannel. And what that means is we all know email is king, but it's very crowded and emails are just likely to get buried there the next day. We get hundreds of emails a day, many of us. So the more channels you use, the higher the chances you have of someone actually replying. So it is smart if you can to not only use email but to use something like text messages and potentially if you have the resources internally to speed things up. And we'll see an example later on after we see the demo. It's even potentially calling and making sure the clients, you know, you help them stay on track. So as it relates to ContentSnare, which we are demoing today, I know that You, James, have some features around text messaging and reminders, and they're pretty customizable. So we'd love to see what that looks like and how firms could go about customizing those, uh, for themselves.

Yep, absolutely.

Okay, so, uh, by the way, yeah, I see there are 13 people now and no one has commented, or I don't know if maybe we don't see their comments here, so Anyone's here seeing live, we really appreciate your comments. So let us know where you're coming from and, uh, give us a sense of life because I'd love to see how the comments come up so we can kind of tell.

Yeah, I, I was wondering that because I tried to write a comment in before just in the box. I had to connect to YouTube, so I don't know if it's put that comment over on YouTube or it's just in here.

I don't know what's going on there, but, uh, maybe people are commenting, we don't know. Who knows? We'll see.

Sorry.

In any case, in any case, keep going with, with your—

Yeah, okay. So I just, um, in here on Content Snare, um, you, you nailed it with like changing the, the kind of tone and stuff.

Oh, sorry, wait a second. Now you're sharing your screen. I was just sharing mine. Apologize for that. No stress at all.

Um, you nailed it with like changing the tone as you get like for certain clients, for certain types of work, or as you approach the deadline. Um, in, in Content Snare There's, uh, I mean, the main thing is like a schedule. So we have a— by default, there's like a list of emails that go out to the client. Um, and it's really simple. It's like 5 days after, after we send the request for info, if they have done nothing yet, we might send an email called Not Started, which is— maybe it's a bit more aggressive, being like, come on, you haven't even started yet, let's do something. Um, but if they, if they have done something, like if they've completed some fields but not all, might— we might send just a standard reminder, right? And you can create as many of these rules as you want. So you create 100 rules of like different emails are going to go out on, on different times, like into the future, um, but also SMS, right? So, um, yeah, if you just click over here, you can say I want to send an SMS to this client because, you know, some people, especially for example tradespeople, is a common example here that might just not be very good at using email. So they might send like every— especially the first message. So we have a message down here. These are the time-based ones. These are like when an event— when a certain thing happens in the app. So this is like when we first send the request, um, we're going to get that initial email sent to the client. But you might just say when we first send a request, we'll send, um, send a reminder to the client as well via SMS, right? So you can send as many of these as you want. Same SMS use credits, but emails don't. But yeah, I mean, this is essentially the engine behind when emails are going to go out. A really cool thing that a lot of people don't realize is sometimes it can be helpful to send yourself an email. So you might say like 2 days before the due date, if they have not completed everything yet, send myself an SMS. You say the request owner instead of the client. This can be a really good reminder just to go, oh yeah, we've got that deadline coming up in 3 days and they're not finished. Maybe I should call them and give them some encouragement, let's say. That's an option there as well. Now, really important thing that a lot of people don't do is—

Sorry.

Yeah.

You mentioned calling. Is that like an internal notification, that reminder?

No. This is what I would do in this case is send yourself an SMS. But in the template for the SMS, you just have the person's phone number in the SMS so you can just click it. Actually, and while I'm on that, I might quickly just show how you actually set the content of these emails. So they're just all your templates set up over here. So if we just look at a standard reminder email, we've got a subject and a body. It's pretty simple stuff. Just quick reminder, we need some info from you. You can do things like, You are X percent completed and there are 5 days remaining. So there's lots of different placeholders you can put in here. So this is what I was saying. In an SMS template, you might put the client's phone number in there as a placeholder. So when you receive the SMS, you can just click that and call them and give them some extra encouragement to fill out the request. But yeah, so that's how the emails and SMS templates work. The last thing is while there's— we've got one default email schedule in there, right? I would just suggest that people create different types of requests— sorry, types of schedules for different types of work and different types of clients. So for example, you could create an entirely new schedule. Sorry, actually what I might do is just duplicate this original one. And we might call this, we might have a different template or a different schedule for client onboarding. And then you could set a completely different set of emails that are gonna go out for client onboarding. Some people will even go as far as to create a different type of schedule for different types of clients. So if there's clients that, might need a little bit extra nudging, or you know they're going to be difficult, uh, they'll actually create—

Every day.

More reminders. Good to have you back, Isaac. I was about to panic there. Um, yeah, so you might actually have a reminder schedule with a lot more reminders because you know this kind of client is going to be more difficult. They need a reminder every day versus every, like, every few days. Maybe there's an imminent deadline, so you create a reminder schedule called like urgent work or something. And you— this one is like every day it's sending a message, um, and you just use every, every time you send a request, you just choose which set of reminders you're going to use. So it could be for, yeah, for a specifically difficult, different client or for a different type of work. You have different sets of emails and different rules that are going to go out for that type of work, right?

Makes sense. I was here all, all along. I just wanted to give you some All right. All right, so let me go ahead. I love that. You know, I think that's something that people should pay more attention to kind of customizing. And to your point, some clients might need a little bit more push, maybe some specific type of request might need a little bit more push or a different language. So go about and kind of take the time to customize those for Mm-hmm. For yourself. All right, so let's share my screen again. And we've effectively covered the first 5 steps of getting early commitment from clients, stopping email— stop, you know, the attachment and the email madness, uh, use document collection software instead, use reminders to customize them to your needs, and go multi-channel. And now we're going to talk about automating it all. So A big part of what we do internally, and I know that we, me and James, share a passion for it, sort of like automation. So I want to give you some ideas on some of the things you might be able to automate even further with ContentSnare. ContentSnare is a platform that we often recommend precisely because of some of these integrations capabilities. It integrates with some of the most popular automation tools like SAPUIR and Make. So I'm just gonna share some use cases just to give people some ideas of what they might be able to do, uh, with it. Okay, so I have 5 use cases for you of things you could potentially do within Content Snare. In this particular instance, I will be sharing sort of like a Make build. I'm not going to build it from scratch, I'm just going to share, sort of walk you through what it is and what it's doing and the intent behind it. Again, we're looking at Make, one popular automation tool. Here the idea is, how can we go about creating clients automatically so that when our teams have to go ahead and send that request, they don't have to remember or add the information at that point? You could say something like when a particular calendar event is booked, maybe you have a specific dedicated event to kick off for a kickoff meeting with your tax clients, you go ahead and create that client and you can, you know, at that point put their name, their email, their phone number, the company name, and any other details you might need, uh, from them. And that might be helpful. Okay, so, uh, another use case that you might be able to do with Contentstairs is actually sending the request automatically from a particular event. We might be, for example, when someone pays. If you charge a deposit or if you charge upfront, you may actually have the ability to say, hey, when my client pays, I want to go ahead and send them, uh, that particular request. Let's go ahead and share my screen to walk you through an example what this could look like. So again, in this case I'm using QuickBooks, but you might have Uh, let me see. I think we might be having issues. Can you still see the screen, James? Okay, perfect. I just got like a warning from the, from the studio for some reason. In any case, um, the idea here would be to say, hey, when an invoice is paid, I want to actually go ahead and look into what that invoice has. If you have separate requests, for example, for individual returns versus business returns, and you have that as a line item in your invoice, you can actually go ahead And make that differentiation within the automation so you can send the respective and the appropriate request based on specifically what it is that the client paid. Okay? And that way, rather than the client having to sit down after they paid, waiting for you to kind of send them what it is that they have to share your way, the moment they pay, they can receive that request, that email with what James shared earlier, and they can get started straight away without having to wait for a couple of days for your team to get back to them. So use case number 3, it's assigning requests evenly. So the idea behind this is how can we go about— if I have, say, multiple preparers, multiple accountants, how can I go about, as we get requests, I distribute it evenly for the team and assign them within the ContentSnare platform? Let me share the Make.

Okay, this is a cool idea. I've not seen anyone do this before. This is great.

Right. So the idea here would be, hey, when the request comes in, in this case I'm filtering if it is a task request, uh, and the last step here is I'm going about updating that particular request with, uh, the owner and the particular team member. In this case we have an error, but, um, Let me just walk you through sort of the concept behind it. Um, now you'll see a couple other steps here in the middle. The idea here is to actually list all of your team members and then perform the following, um, you know, calculation. So you're adding a counter and then you're dividing that counter by your total team members and you're getting the MOD, which is a mathematical function Or what's the remainder of a division? It's just a fancy way, honestly, to have a systematic way that this is gonna— as an example, if you have 3 members, everything this is going to return is going to be 0, 1, or 2. So as an example, if you've processed 30 returns, when this number is 30, 30 divided by 3 there's 0 left, so you're gonna have 0. But then it's 31, you're gonna have 1 left. Then 32, you're gonna have 2 left. Then 33, you're gonna have 0 left again. And it's just a popular algorithm to distribute the workload evenly within, you know, a set of team members. In this particular instance, it's used a lot in like assigning leads to a sales team, for example. In this context, we're using it to assign a request To a particular account, so that's another use case for you. Let's talk about use case number four, which is getting notified when you have a percentage, a certain percentage completed. We hear a lot that not all firms wait for 100% of their documents before they get started. Maybe when they have 80%. They can already make some progress and get started. So you might want to know specifically and within your, you know, dedicated tool of choice when that actually happens, whether it is something like Slack or Teams or email or your preferred platform. How can you go about saying, hey, when a request is updated, if that request is Tax Organizer and the completion percentage is over 80%, I want to go ahead and, you know, send a public message in this particular Slack channel, whatever it might be. In this case, you see a couple of more steps here, and these are just here to prevent this message to go out when you don't want to. For example, this will trigger in every update, but you only want the message when it surpasses 80%. When it gets to 83, 85, 88, 90, those will be further updates, but I don't want another message. So here we're simply creating a data store that, uh, when this happens for the first time, meaning it reached 80%, I added a record. And here I'm just kind of searching for that record before beforehand so that if I find it, I don't, I don't keep moving forward. Again, fancy way of saying I'm just getting one message the moment a request surpasses, uh, 80%. And the last use case I have for you, it's about listing on a regular basis your slow clients on a Google Sheet. So maybe your administrative team member can pick up the phone and maybe we batch those follow-up calls, I don't know, Friday afternoons to follow up with those clients. Um, now how that would look like is as follows. You would be listing all the requests and you'll be able to select a particular frequency. Here you can see I have each Monday at 9 AM. The idea is that I'll get each of those requests and I'll have some sort of condition. In this case, I have, hey, the completion percentage is less than 10%, so they've barely gotten, gotten started. And I also have that it's due, meaning that now it's later than the due date. Meaning if today is September 24th and their due date was September 23rd or any earlier than that, this trigger will allow those requests to go through. And the idea is that then you can list a number, a series of things. For example, their email, their full name, their phone number, the company name. You might also want like the completion percentage, when it's due, and who owns it, all with the goal of ultimately creating a spreadsheet that looks like this and that you can potentially send or have your administrative person take care of on a regular basis. Maybe you do this on a weekly basis during busy season and you have, hey, this, you know, 17 clients have barely gotten started, their due date's already passed. Here's their phone numbers. Go ahead, pick up the phone and say, hey, Mr. Client, I noticed that you haven't started. Would you mind answering a couple questions now? And maybe you can even, you know, here you can see the link. You can have a link to their requests assuming you didn't use the PIN code, you can go ahead and actually fill some of those questions on their behalf. Maybe you can ask them right there, did your medicine status change, or whatever questions you might have for them. So at least you can kind of like kill that inertia and get them going, um, and then you can— hey, I'm gonna send you the link after this call so you can keep going, uh, on your own. So just as a summary, these are just some ideas to get you thinking on things you could potentially automate. To either keep your list up to date, as we mentioned, taking a trigger like a Calendly event to create the clients, letting clients start straight away. So taking the trigger when you think they're gonna be ready, which might be when they pay and sending that request, having the ability to assign that work evenly, letting the team know when they can start and picking a specific completion percentage and batching up your follow-up calls to potentially manually remind the clients that need it. And that makes for the 6 steps to guarantee effortless document collection. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I want to leave some time for Q&A if the 13 people looking are willing to share a question. But of course, as I mentioned earlier in the presentation, feel free to take Content Snare for a spin. James has been kind enough to provide us with an extended 30-day trial. So feel free to visit opto.co/tools/cs to check that out and take him up on that offer. Um, anything else you'd like to add around that, James, by any chance?

No, not really. Just that I'm super impressed with, uh, these automations you've created. And in fact, um, one or two of them have made me think like, hey, we should actually build feature for that. Um, but yeah, like, I don't— I knew you were on top of automation. I knew you were good, good at automation. But like, these examples are so different and out of the box than most people think about with automations. I'm actually like really impressed. That's all I wanted to say.

Yeah, I appreciate it.

It's awesome.

I appreciate it for sure. Um, and here's something crazy too to think about. And this I kind of left out of the presentation, but I know a firm specifically that they've actually kind of like dabbled in with AI tools to kind of like call their clients to follow up on certain things.

Yeah.

So this could be even like a further step of automation and potentially, you know, listing that list of clients and potentially having AI call them.

Yeah.

It's still somewhat weird and I'm kind of like hesitant to make that suggestion for everybody, but Yeah, I guess food for thought.

I, yeah, I don't know how I feel about this yet because I mean, like, our whole philosophy is trying to make an awesome experience for clients. And obviously, yes, there are automated emails, but you know, you tell clients they are going to get those reminders and you then you create the nice personal experience inside the app itself. So automated calls, I feel like, yeah, that like I said, they're kind of weird at the moment.

They're, um, But maybe automated emails were weird 20 years ago.

That exactly, you know, I guess we'll see what happens.

Yeah, definitely. Um, all right, and again, um, if you want to talk to our team to see what we could optimize or automate in your firm, we'll be happy to take you up on a free consultation. So feel free to visit opto.co. There should be a link, uh, that says like start automating and you can fill out form to see if we're a good fit to, to help you out. And we're supposed to get into Q&A, but no one has shown sign of life. So unless you have a specific, um, topic you want to chat about, James, um, no, I think we're good.

I wish I knew if the— yeah, like the whole comments to YouTube versus here thing. I guess it's just Yeah, I don't know. When you're using a different platform, who knows? It specifically says some destinations won't get comments, so I don't know what's going on with that situation.

Yeah, yeah, I might be testing a different tool if, if I can actually see people's comments. Um, but yeah, I guess, uh, you test and you're gonna try.

So exactly right.

All right, well, if we don't have anything else to share, again, feel free to look into Content Snare if you wish to, um, you know, take it for a spin. Take up— it's free to test it out and see if you like it for your partner. And otherwise, I appreciate you, James, for coming on, and thanks for being my guest in this presentation today.

Yeah, thanks, Isaac, for having me. And, um, just remember, if you do want that extended trial, just ask the the team. Um, and yeah, thanks, uh, thanks for listening, everyone. Perfect.

Well, have a nice one, guys, and take care. Bye-bye.

Bye.