Sarah Prevost and Linda show how to use QuickBooks Online Accountant's Work tab to set up client onboarding projects and tasks. They create a new project, assign repeating tasks for payroll and monthly close, set due dates, and connect notifications to Slack. The payroll task appears two days before payroll runs.
Chapters
Good Sunday, Linda. Happy Cinco de Mayo. May the fourth be force be with you.
Be with you.
Well, yeah, but it's the day before, so okay. Happy Cinco de Mayo. Cinco de Drinko, right?
So yeah, with my margarita.
Well, instead of going out and celebrating Cinco de Mayo, we decided we should do a quick video to discuss. the onboarding capabilities within QuickBooks Online and the Work section. Yeah?
Yep.
So, yep.
I could say something, but I'm just not going to go down that road.
So what we shall do here, I'll share my screen and we're going to jump into our Newbie Accounting that we had before, right?
Yep.
And fortunately Linda just invited me into her law firm so we can actually do some stuff with this. But what we're actually talking about is the work tab. So for client onboarding, they've actually set up an example template that you can use. So if we click on work, it's going to pull up our menu like this. And through here you can actually go into like manage different templates.
It's basically your practice management tool.
Yeah, exactly. This is only available for QuickBooks Online for accountants. So it's a way to track the different tasks that you need to handle for your different clients, such as your payroll stuff will automatically populate onto it as well, which is great. But the one we're going to really focus on is the client onboarding template. And when you click on it, it's going to give you kind of a breakdown of all the different tasks it's going to create inside of your task list. We could duplicate this and then customize it but for this time, let's just go create the project.
It's kind of nice that they have that all set up for you too so you don't have to do the work. They even give you the ideas so if you're brand new and you don't really know what the steps are, you've got it laid out.
Yeah, which it is really great. Here You'd have the project name, of course. We would come in and we can choose the client we'd be doing this for. So you'd put the person in— connect them, I should say— and then you choose it. Your due date for this one would be when you're expecting to complete the entire project, not just one of the tasks.
Mm-hmm.
So let's give us till the 10th. And Linda always is so efficient, we should assign all of it to Linda.
Thank you.
That was nice of you.
I thought I was the boss on this one. Why are you telling me what to do?
I don't like this. We've got the ability, we can make this a repeating task. Obviously for client onboarding, we wouldn't use that, but for payroll or if you were to create a workflow template for your monthly close, You'd want that to be repeating month after month after month. So you can choose that. And then these are the tasks that it's auto-populating. By clicking into each one, you can choose additional details if you want. Again, let's give it to Linda. Meeting with client, she's best with law firms, so we want her to be the one to take care of it. Be sure to close the deal, Linda.
All caps, just like an old person shouting.
Let me fix it so that way there's no confusion either. Okay, um, put those details in, and as you'd see, so we would go through, we could add our own tasks, but let's just click Save. So now that we've done that, if we come back to our Work tab, we're going to see all the things we just set up under Law Firm.
Okay.
We can choose if we want to defer it down to just one person so we can see yours.
Mm-hmm.
We've got, let's see here, our client onboarding. Click on it, pulls it up. You'll see at the bottom here it's got 0 of 12 tasks. As you complete different tasks, you can see that. That's something they've really been improving and enhancing this part of the stuff. We will click back out of here but we can go— you can choose your different tasks. This one we're going to be in progress on and we should be able to come in here and say we finished this one. Status, we'll say done.
Meeting with the client could be meeting on Zoom because most of our clients are not right in Most of my clients are not in Florida. Yours are probably not all in California so you can meet on Zoom and do the contract with an e-signature which I use 17hats.
Exactly right. Using this work feature, it's pretty neat that you can get them kind of on board to see everything. You can also do kind of more of a task list or a calendar-based one, whichever you prefer. And then of course you also have the ability that you can connect all this to Slack as well. So if you're a big Slack user, then you would actually see all these tasks populate into your Slack channel, giving you, you know, reminding you what needs to be done or not.
That's nice.
Anything to add on to that?
No, I don't think so. That was— it's pretty good. And I haven't seen the calendar before because I'm not using this feature so much in my practice because it wasn't around and I had a practice— I had an app before that. So I've been still using the old app and this is pretty cool.
I like the fact that you can see how it's assigned to. So as you grow the firm larger and larger, you can have additional teammates and have it populated the way you need it to be done.
Yeah, it's a nice list too. I mean, it is. It's really nice. They've built it out quite a bit since the last time I was in it.
Now what that also does on our side of it is with the projects, if I remember correctly, what will happen is this actually creates a project also under a client though. Is that correct?
I don't know.
We'll go into our firm here. We've got our customers so we should see our law firm.
You'd have to have projects turned on as a feature. Did you turn it on? Newbie.
They're getting to a point where Projects is going to be on just automatically all the time. But what I'm doing now is I went to gear icon, company settings, come over to— I believe it's our advanced— come click on Projects. But because my boss doesn't allow me to have permission to change these things, I'll have to send a formal request to—
I gave you full access. It didn't let you do it?
No.
Oh, all right.
You would turn Projects on here. And you can then create different projects as you're using the work tab.
Okay.
I love the work tab for all my payroll. So it's a great way once I've set up the schedules for my clients for payroll, they will all populate right onto here and it makes it super easy for me to see which ones I have to do and when. It will only populate the date on here 2 days before your payroll though. I wish we could control that a little bit more. So like We generally, we do try to do payroll on Mondays for people that are going to be paid on Friday because nobody ever gives you stuff on time.
I've had to do the payroll. One of the things I like about QuickBooks Online payroll, I actually had to do the payroll at 8 o'clock in the East Coast time, which is sweet because everything's West Coast. So I ran into payroll because the client had hauled it off and then maybe he told me to do it and I didn't. And I was able to do the payroll and boom, that same day they got paid. It didn't look like I forgot. So it's a great feature. That's something I don't think any of the other payroll services have that QuickBooks Online Payroll has, that you can actually pay the same day.
Yes. Yeah. So what we will also do though, because Linda has actually done a really, really great job of documenting out her onboarding process, and we've made a couple videos on that in the past. Linda, would you mind just linking that into the comments of this video and we can let people see that from there as well?
Yeah, that will work.
Then on that note, I think it's time to go celebrate Cinco de Mayo and have a margarita and nachos. Here's wishing everybody a very successful week.
