Docs (Basic): Request E-Feedback (Approve/Disapprove) From Clients

Make sure your clients are satisfied and that you didn’t miss something by requesting approval of the documents you’ve prepared. This allows you not only to make sure clients are pleased with your work but also to check that you got everything correctly.

When a client is not satisfied, they are prompted to explain why, so you immediately know what to address.

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Covered here:

• How to Request Approvals
• Reminding Clients About Pending Approvals
• How Approvals Look on the Client’s Side
• Knowing When a Client Approved or Disapproved a Document?
• Managing Approvals
• Finding All Accounts With Documents Awaiting Approval
• Finding Out Why a Client Rejected a Document
• Linking Docs Awaiting Approval to Jobs and Using Automove

How to Request Approvals

Want to get a client’s okay for a service you performed? Toggle on Request client approval when you upload documents to a folder with Client can view access or while you edit an already uploaded document. Then set up Reminders if you want those too. 

Reminding Clients About Pending Approvals

Your clients get an email notification when you send them a document that needs to be approved. Decide whether you also want them to receive reminders when they take too long.

If you want a reminder to go out, either...

• ...manually resend a notification.
• ...set up automatic reminders.

Manually Send a New Reminder 

To manually send a reminder to the client to approve a document, follow these steps:

1. Go to the client’s account, select the Docs tab, open the Approvals subtab, then click Request Approval for Pending.
2. Review and edit the message for the client (optional), then click the Send Request button.

Here’s what happens:

• An additional email message is sent to the client.
• A portal notification moves to the top of the client’s to-dos.

Automatic Reminders

Toggle on Reminders when uploading documents you want clients to approve. You can also turn this feature on at any point by clicking the three dots to the far right of the document’s name and selecting Edit. When Reminders is toggled on, an additional email goes out to the client when they don’t approve the document within a certain amount of days. Once you toggle on Reminders, you can make some selections.  

• Days until next reminder: Remind the client after x days of inactivity. By default, a reminder is sent three days after the document is uploaded.

• Number of reminders: Send up to x number of reminders. By default, the client gets only one reminder email.

Reminders stop when...

• ...the client hasn’t approved the document, but the set number of reminders have been sent.
• ...the client approved the document.

How Approvals Look on the Client’s Side

Once you’ve sent documents that need approval, the client gets a notification on their dashboard and a message in their email.

On their client portal, they’ll see all documents awaiting their approval in the  Waiting for action pop-up on their Documents page. Below, we show you how the client okays your work:

Want to see TaxDome from a client’s side? Check out a read-only view of their portal.

Linking Docs Awaiting Approval to Jobs and Using Automove

Link documents pending approval to jobs so that they are immediately available in your pipelines. Plus, toggle on Automove Jobs  . This way, once the client approves a doc, the job automatically moves to the next stage in the pipeline.

Here’s how it works:

1. Access the pipeline settings, add the stage for the document pending approval, then toggle on Automove Jobs. You don’t need to add automations.

2. Go to the pipeline, make sure that the job is in the right stage, then link the document pending approval to it: Click the job box, click + Link at the top, select Documents, click the folder and choose the file(s), then click Link.

That’s it! Once the client approves the document, the job automatically moves to the next stage in the pipeline. And if you move the job manually, you can decide what to do with the linked document.

Knowing When a Client Has Approved or Disapproved a Document?

Once a client has approved or disapproved a document, it moves to the top of the Recent list on the Documents page. 

If you have turned on the Approvals checkbox in the Notification Preferences section of Settings, you’ll also receive an email and a notification in your Inbox+. 

Click on the document’s name or Go to... to view it.

Documents' statuses are displayed in the  Documents tab. For more on statuses, go here.

The document’s audit trail shows whether the client approved or disapproved a document.

Managing Approvals

1. There are a few ways to locate documents awaiting approval. Choose the one that works best for you:

• Go to Documents to see all documents that have been actively worked with (uploaded, edited, sent, locked to an invoice, etc) in the last 30 days, 
• Go to Documents, then Docs, then select the client to see documents for one client.
• Go to the Docs tab from the client’s account. 

2. Want to narrow down the list of documents awaiting approval? Click Filter in the upper-right corner and select one or more filters in the Approvals section to narrow down the results of your search. 

• All: all documents awaiting approval
• Pending Payment: all documents locked to invoices and awaiting payment
• Pending Approval: all documents awaiting client approval
• Approved: all documents approved by the client
• Rejected: all documents rejected by the client

3. Click Apply to filter the list.

To see all documents awaiting approval for one client, go to the account, open Docs, then open the Approvals subtab.

You’ll see the following info:

• Document name: the document’s name along with an icon showing the file type.
• Request date: the date the client’s approval was requested
• Uploaded by: the name of the team member who uploaded the document
• Description: a description of the document if one was added when the document was uploaded (optional)
• Status: the status of the document. Learn more about document statuses here.
• Disapproved: the date that the document was rejected if it was

Finding All Accounts With Documents Awaiting Approval

You can easily filter your client account list to see which ones have documents awaiting approval.

1. Go to Clients, then click Filter.
2. Select Approvals in the dropdown, and check Pending approval.

You can also add the filter on the Documents page in the Recent tab.

Finding out why a client has rejected a document

If a client is not entirely satisfied with a document you’ve prepared, TaxDome prompts them to explain why. To view a client’s feedback, open the document, click the three dots in the upper righthand corner and select Show more info (the button is unavailable if the document was accepted). To the right of the document, you’ll find the list of Disapproval Reasons with the client’s comments.

Click Back to return to the document list.