Pipelines: Overview

Pipelines are an essential part of your workflow. They are a visual representation of a process that takes a client from point A (start) to point B (end) along a series of defined stages. You can use them to manage various services, such as monthly bookkeeping. tax preparation, weekly payroll, and more.

In this article, you will learn the main steps to start working with pipelines in TaxDome.

Map your processes

Since pipelines in TaxDome represent your processes, you must map them out before you can start using pipelines. Here’s how you can accomplish this.

First, determine what the processes are and the steps involved. Answer the following questions:

1. What are the inputs and outputs of each step?

2. What do you have to do at each step?

3. How do you know that the step is finished?

We recommend you map your processes this way:

1. Begin by identifying your process's first and last stages, which will serve as its endpoints. These stages are crucial because they provide an initial understanding of the entire process.

For example:

1. Send the engagement letter.

...

5. Send prepared documents.

2. Add stages in the middle that take the client from the beginning to the end, based on the activities you perform and the outputs you receive.

For example:

1. Send the engagement letter.

2. Collect all required documents.

3. Prepare a return.

4. Have the return reviewed

5. Send prepared documents.

Also:

For bookkeeping services, you might have stages for collecting invoices, entering data into the accounting software, reconciling accounts and generating reports. At TaxDome, it will look something like:

For payroll, you will need to receive the employee timesheets, prepare the payroll, obtain the confirmation, process the payroll and upload all necessary documents. At TaxDome, it will look something like:

Understand pipeline structure

Our pipelines are designed to look like a kanban board. 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.

What happens inside a pipeline:

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.
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.
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.

You can explore pipeline structure further.

Set up your pipeline

Once you understand the steps of your process, you are ready to create your first pipeline. Though it could be done from scratch, the fastest way is to build it based on a ready-made template. You can get several from the Marketplace for free.

Once you do, you can fine-tune them to fit your needs. This includes:

Add/modify stages: The steps you identified in your process correspond to stages in the pipeline, so feel free to add some or rename the ones you have in the downloaded template.
Review pipeline automations and templates used. Every stage of your pipeline can include one or several automated actions performed at the needed time. When you copy the pipeline template, you get all templates used in automations, such as emails, proposals, organizers and more. Take your time to review and make changes to them.

Adjust pipeline settings: In pipeline settings, you can decide to which team members this pipeline will be available to, adjust the kanban view to your liking and speed up further job creation by selecting a default job template.

Add jobs

Once your pipeline is set up, you can start adding jobs to it. One job in a pipeline is one project you are doing for your client. So, your pipeline will really start working for you only when you add a job.

Jobs may contain all the info needed to provide a service, such as linked documents, tasks for different team members, filled organizers, and more.

To automate working with jobs and spend less time creating them, you can:

Use job templates to pre-fill general data, such as service name, description or due date.
Set up job recurrences to automatically create jobs for recurring services.

Move and complete jobs

When you finish the step you are working on, you can move the job to the next stage. This can be done either manually or automatically. An automated move happens when all pending items for a stage are completed. For example, if the client pays an invoice, this may automatically move the job to the next stage of document preparation.

When the job moves to the next stage, further automated actions may occur, such as creating tasks for team members, notifying the client of job progress, sending an invoice, and more.

Once your job reaches the final stage and everything is done, you can archive it so it disappears from the kanban view but can still be accessed at any time.