Workflow (Basic): What Are Pipelines, Stages, Jobs, Tasks

TaxDome Workflow boosts your efficiency and eliminates routine. The workflow consists of pipelines, stages, jobs, and tasks; learn how they work together.

Workflow, explained

TaxDome Workflow saves time and drives operational efficiency. You can achieve more in less time by setting repeatable processes and automating menial tasks, as well as automating client communications. To align with each of your business processes, Workflow offers you three powerful features, such as Pipelines, Jobs and Tasks.

What’s the difference between Pipelines, Jobs and Tasks? We break it all down by showing you the overall structure of the TaxDome Workflow system.

Pipelines

Pipelines are at the top level of the Workflow hierarchy. They are an established work procedure—a sequence of steps, or stages, involved in preparing, say, a 1040 form from beginning to end. The overall function of a pipeline is to help you easily track the progress of similar jobs for different clients while allowing them to flow smoothly toward completion.

Our pipelines are designed to look like a kanban board. Jobs, displayed on cards, move from stage to stage on the board. And once automated, pipelines do much of the work for you!

What happens inside a pipeline:   

1. Stages are the steps in an overall work procedure. Once all the work involved in a stage is completed, a job moves to the next stage.
2. Jobs, the individual projects a client pays you for (such as a tax return or a January payroll), are introduced to a pipeline specifically designed for it. Each job associated with a client account moves through the pipeline from the first to the last stage, or completion. 
3. Automations, the mechanisms that automate a pipeline, make things happen independently. Once triggered, they create tasks for team members or send organizers and proposals to clients, for example.

Stages & Automations

A pipeline consists of stages, which represent the different steps required to progress a job towards completion. For instance, a 1040 Tax Return Pipeline could include stages like Review Docs, Prepare Engagement Letter, Prepare Return, and Review. You can customize these stages to align with your specific workflow processes.

Stages include automations that simplify routine tasks, such as sending organizers, messages or invoices. You can set up your pipelines so automatic actions are triggered each time a job enters a new stage: e.g., a task is created for a team member, or an email is sent out to a client.

Jobs

Each job is an individual service a client pays for. A job goes into a pipeline specifically designed for the service it requires. It can also be compared to a single trip through a pipeline for a given client. For example, all of your clients’ 1040 returns for 2022 will go into your 1040 Return pipeline.

Each time you receive a job from a client, you add it to the first stage of the appropriate pipeline. Then, you move the job through the stages of the pipeline, either manually or via automation. Here's more on adding jobs to pipelines.

Whenever you have any blocker, such as additional requirements or missing documents, you can change the job status to a custom one. This can trigger automations or just visually indicate the job status without moving it to a different stage. Here's more on job statuses.

Jobs may contain linked elements—organizers, tasks, messages, invoices, etc. This way, each job always contains everything you need to complete it.

You can move a job to another pipeline at any time -- or when it reaches the last stage. For example, when a bookkeeping lead becomes a client, you may want to move that job from the lead pipeline to a bookkeeping pipeline.

Tasks

Tasks are the to-do items that you and your team members perform. You can add any number of tasks to the job. For example, you have a tax prep job for which you have to prepare the 1040, the 1120 and the 8879 forms. For each form, you can create a separate task, delegate it to different team members, and link it to a job. Thus, all forms will be prepared simultaneously as part of a single job. 

Tasks could be accessed via the Tasks list where all info about associated pipelines and jobs is visible. Learn more about creating tasks and using tasks in jobs. 

Webinar: Discover how to manage your processes, enhance efficiency and track the progress of your work by automating most of your repetitive tasks with Leverage workflow automation in TaxDome