How To Easily Off-board Tax Prep Clients In TaxDome

Co-Authored By: Jessica Smith, EA and Jamie Gruol, MBA

As an Enrolled Agent or Certified Public Accountant (CPA), you understand the challenges that come with the client off-boarding process. The manual and time-consuming tasks, lack of standardization, communication gaps, managing client expectations, and administrative burden can all take a toll on your productivity and overall client experience. 

However, there is a solution that can transform the way you off-board your clients while saving you precious time and effort. In this article, we will discuss how to use TaxDome's powerful automation and pipelines to streamline your off-boarding process, eliminate tedious tasks, and provide a seamless experience for both you and your tax preparation clients. This includes the use of conditional logic, account tags, automatic organizer applied tags, and more. 

Say goodbye to headaches and inefficient workflows and say hello to effortless off-boarding with TaxDome! 

Meet Jessica Smith, EA of Tax Savvy Jessica, and her business partner Jamie Gruol, MBA. With over a decade of experience as a tax strategist, Jessica joined forces with Jamie, a systems implementation specialist and workflow expert. Together, they embarked on a remarkable journey, co-founding Workflows for Tax Pros in 2021. This unique program and community empowers tax practitioners with expert guidance and support to automate their practices with TaxDome. 

Together, these two powerhouses are the dream team you need to get your tax workflows under control.

Why off-boarding is a critical step in your tax preparation pipeline

Client off-boarding is a critical phase in your relationship with tax return clients, leaving a lasting impression that can impact their satisfaction, reviews, and even future referrals. Unfortunately, many tax professionals overlook the importance of a streamlined off-boarding process. 

That’s where TaxDome comes in. 

This powerful CRM (customer relationship management) software enables tax professionals like you to automate your tax practice and create a custom off-boarding experience for your clients.

Here are a few key advantages: 

1. Time Savings: By automating the off-boarding process, tax professionals can save significant time and effort. Manual tasks such as requesting signatures, generating invoices, tax document management, and sending instructions can be automated, freeing up valuable time to focus on more critical tasks in your practice.
2. Enhanced Client Experience: A well-designed off-boarding process ensures a smooth and professional experience for clients. Automated workflows enable timely and personalized communication, providing clients with clear instructions and guidance, especially for clients who have a tax liability to the IRS. This improves client satisfaction, reduces confusion, and minimizes the need for back-and-forth communication.
3. Reduced Errors: Automation minimizes the chances of errors and omissions in the off-boarding and filing process. By leveraging technology, you can ensure consistency and accuracy in delivering information and instructions to your clients while also protecting their important client data. This helps maintain a high level of professionalism and trust.
4. Increased Efficiency: Streamlining your off-boarding tasks eliminates bottlenecks and improves overall efficiency. Automated systems can trigger specific actions based on client tags, such as entity types or custom account tags, allowing for customized experiences and targeted communication. This reduces manual intervention and ensures that clients receive the right information at the right time.
5. Scalability and Growth: An automated off-boarding process provides scalability for tax professionals. As the practice grows, the system can handle an increasing number of clients without compromising on quality or efficiency. This scalability enables you to expand your client base, improve productivity, and focus on business growth.

Using conditional logic and account tags 

Before we go further, let’s discuss what conditional logic actually is. Conditional logic is the idea that you can set specific rules or conditions that will cause your process to change based on the input received. 

Think of this as an “IF/THEN” conditional statement. For example: “IF I eat a pint of ice cream, THEN I will have an upset stomach.” 

In TaxDome, tags are applied at the account level and are used to trigger specific experiences for your clients. An “account” would be the entity type that you are providing services for. Some examples of different entities (or accounts) are S-Corp, Married Filing Jointly, Individual, C-Corp, or Partnerships.

The great thing about the tagging system is that the possibilities are virtually endless.  Here are a few examples of different tags that can be used:

One step further: automatic organizer applied tags 

TaxDome's Automatic Organizer Applied Tags feature is a new feature that is totally changing the way that Jessica has been offboarding her clients, particularly when it comes to the client return review process. 

This exciting new feature enables her to offer customized return review options. With the tagging system, her clients can choose how they prefer to work with her during the return review, which then triggers specific logic further down the line. 

By implementing this feature in your client organizer, your clients can also select their preferred method, as shown in this image

You can also go into your settings and update the account tags based on the choice that the client makes:

Once they submit their choice, the corresponding tag is applied to their account, allowing for a seamless and personalized return review.

In Jessica’s pipeline, she leverages these tags to trigger tailored messages for each client. For those who opt for video reviews, a specific message outlines the process, including how they will receive their return, the importance of scheduling an appointment, and any necessary actions to be performed. On the other hand, clients who prefer Zoom meetings receive a different message, guiding them on the next steps and providing clear instructions. 

By utilizing conditional logic and tags in TaxDome, you can create a highly customized and efficient off-boarding experience, reducing manual work and ensuring a smooth transition through the return review process.

If you're interested in digging deeper into the application of tags and conditional logic in TaxDome, we invite you to join our program, Workflows for Tax Pros. Through this program, we provide extensive knowledge, skills, and proven templates to leverage TaxDome in a sophisticated manner, resulting in an exceptional client experience that demands less work from you. By harnessing the power of conditional logic and custom experiences within the organizer questions, you can elevate your practice and streamline your client offboarding process. 

Payment Automation 

Once you have completed the return review process according to your client's preference, you take the next step of automatically sending them Form 8879 with a "locked" invoice.

The beauty of using TaxDome’s payment automation features is that by receiving payment upfront (and before providing the final steps of service), you can virtually eliminate the hassle of accounts receivable and chasing invoices.

Moving forward, you can now enter the e-file stage where you carefully monitor for the IRS acknowledgment of the return receipt. Once you receive this acknowledgment, you can proceed to the final stage, where you leverage tags again to send your clients specific instructions. 

Applying tags can be done through the organizer or manually, which is a pretty straightforward process. By accessing a client's account, navigating to the info tab, selecting edit, and applying tags, such as "balance due," we can easily categorize clients accordingly.

As we progress through our process, we create jobs within our pipeline. Utilizing tags, we can trigger a balance-due email to instruct clients on how to submit their payments to the IRS. Additionally, at a stage where the 8879 form has been sent, we can set a task to apply the tags "refund" or "payment due." This ensures that our emails are sent appropriately during the final stage. By employing this approach, we can deliver a highly customized experience, tailored to each client's specific circumstances.

Wrapping Up 

By leveraging these powerful features of TaxDome, you can transform your client off-boarding process into a seamless, efficient, and client-centric experience. That will result in saved time, improved productivity, enhanced client satisfaction, and ultimately, a stronger and more successful practice. 

Ready to transform your client off-boarding experience? Join Workflows for Tax Pros today and unlock the full potential of TaxDome. Experience the power of automation and provide an exceptional client journey, even if you aren’t tech-savvy. Don't miss out—join now and take your tax practice to the next level!