TaxDome Dictionary

Here, we guide you through common TaxDome terms with easy-to-understand definitions.

Covered here:

Accounts
Automations
Chats
Client Portal
Client requests
Contacts
Document Approvals
Email Sync
E-Signatures
Folder Templates
Inbox+
Jobs
Job recurrences
Organizers
Pipelines
Profile Access
Proposals
Reminders
Services
Tags
Tasks
TaxDome Drive
Templates

Accounts

Account, client account, and client profile are all synonymous. You perform work for a client—whether it’s an individual, a family, a business, a nonprofit, or a trust—who has an account/profile on TaxDome. The account/profile itself is where you communicate with the client and store their data, such as documents, organizers, invoices, payments, etc.

Accounts don’t include emails, contacts do. If you want a client to be able to access their client portal, you link their account with one or more contacts, then turn on the profile access for at least one email.

Automations

TaxDome’s automations initiate actions for you, your team members, or clients at different stages of the work process. You set up automations inside pipelines. This way, when a job moves to a new stage in a pipeline, actions that need to be performed are triggered on their own—a specific message, an organizer, or a proposal automatically goes out to the client, for instance.

To learn more about using automations, go here.

Chats

Chats are a secure way to communicate with your clients on TaxDome. Chats might be linked to a specific job, automated within a pipeline, or even standalone.

Chat threads are neatly organized within each client’s profile, and you’ll always be able to see how many of them remain unread and which team member has responded in a thread. Chat threads may include task lists for clients, as well as attached documents. Once you’ve got what you need from a client, you can archive or delete the thread to avoid cluttering things up.

For more on chats, go here.

Client Portal

TaxDome’s client portal is a safe and secure hub where clients share important documents with you, pay for your services, view their payment history, stay up-to-date on deadlines, ask and answer questions in real time, and complete tax organizers. They can do all of this in one spot from the comfort of their homes—or on the go from their mobile devices.

You can give portal access to a client while you create their account or afterward. Once you’ve added portal access to a contact’s email address, TaxDome sends the person an activation request by email. To activate the account, the client needs to accept the request and create a password.

See How to Introduce TaxDome to Your Clients for more details.

Client requests

Client requests allow you to send quick, ad-hoc questionnaires to clients in the middle of a job to clarify information without disrupting the workflow. You can address them either to your clients or third parties; no sign-in is required. Unlike full organizers, client requests do not require templates and can thus be compiled and sent faster.

Find out more about client requests here.

Contacts

Contacts are all of the people you interact with. Our Contacts feature allows you to store people’s telephone numbers, email addresses, and street addresses; it’s where you keep the personal details of not only clients but also coworkers, prospective clients, partners, and clients’ family members.

One contact can be linked to several accounts. For example, Kate Smith’s contact, along with her email address (katesmith@gmail.com), is linked to Kate Smith Family, Kate’s LLC 1, and Kate’s Trust, because all three accounts are hers, albeit different entities. Each account, or client profile, on TaxDome has a corresponding contact or several.

Document Approvals

After you’ve finished preparing a document, you may want feedback from the client. TaxDome allows you to request approval to make sure your clients are satisfied with your work or find out whether they need anything else. If a client is not entirely satisfied with a document, they’ll be prompted to itemize the reasons why, so you’ll immediately know what to tackle.

To learn more about our Document Approval feature, go here.

Email Sync

There are lots of ways to communicate with clients—and email is the most common. This is why TaxDome offers a secure, integrated email system. With TaxDome, you don’t need to create a folder for each client or get CC’d on an email that doesn’t require a response. Instead, you share an inbox with each client, which you access from their profile. To use this feature, each team member needs to sync their email account with TaxDome.

All new messages in a thread with a client or team member are shown in the Inbox+ section, along with other notifications.

Find out how to sync your email here.

E-Signatures

E-signature is a legal way to get consent or approval on electronic documents or forms.

There are two ways of using electronic signatures on TaxDome:

Request Signature for Your Prepared Documents and Forms
Ask to E-sign Your Agreements With Clients

Folder Templates

Folder templates speed up the process of organizing your client’s documents by making default folders for their accounts. Folder templates can be automated within a pipeline or manually applied to specific client accounts.

Find out more about folder templates here.

Inbox+

Inbox+ is where you start and finish your projects, as well as receive important notifications that keep your work on track. You get notifications on TaxDome whenever a client-related event occurs—a client opens a document, signs a proposal, sends a new message, and so on—and Inbox+ lets you know what status those notifications are in. Preferences for notifications are easily set up for each team member.

Learn more about Inbox+ here.

Jobs

Most likely, your firm offers an array of services. On TaxDome, a job is what we call an individual service a client pays you to do. A job goes into a pipeline designed for that particular service, so that one pipeline might include many jobs for different clients. For example, your clients’ 1040 Returns for 2020 (each, a job) are handled in your 1040 Return pipeline. Each job is paired with a client account, and both move together through the pipeline from first stage to last.

Find out more about jobs here.

Job recurrences

Use job recurrences to set up a default schedule for all jobs in a pipeline to recur daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly or annually. They can be automatically generated in your pipelines when needed. You can also set up individual schedules for job recurrences already added to your pipelines.

Organizers

Organizers are custom-designed questionnaires that help you gather the information you need from your clients, minimizing the back-and-forth between you. They might be linked to a specific job, automated within a pipeline, or even standalone.

Find out more about organizers here.

Pipelines

A pipeline is an established work procedure: a sequence of steps involved to complete a particular service you perform. Pipelines help you manage your client flow; you create one for each different type of service you offer—for instance, a 1040 Return, a W-2, and a Payroll pipeline. Each pipeline has its own unique set of steps, called stages. Jobs, the individual projects a client pays you to do, go into their required pipeline, then move from stage to stage until completion.

For more in-depth details on pipelines, go here.

Profile Access

Each account/profile is linked to one or more contacts, and each contact contains an email address. This way, if an account needs to have more than one user, all can access the account via the client portal, and each person will have their own separate login credentials.

For example, a married couple who files jointly needs only one account. If both spouses want portal access, link both their contacts to the account. Once you’ve added portal access to their contacts’ email addresses, TaxDome sends them each an activation request by email. Each spouse then accepts the request and creates their own password; they will then both have separate login credentials for the same account.

Read more here about how to give additional users access to an account.

Proposals

The proposals and engagement letter builder allows firms to create interactive, client-facing documents to engage clients professionally. Through the customization options, you can create a proposal (marketing, sales), engagement letter - or both. Additionally, you can choose to require payment at the time of signing automatically through your preferred method of payment.

The entire feature is customizable, including the naming of the sidebars and steps your clients see. All of this can be saved as a template to save time on data entry and use in pipeline automations.

Find out more about proposals here.

Reminders

Reminders are additional email notifications that automatically go out to clients when they don’t respond to an email prompt within a certain time frame—for instance, the client delays signing a document or paying an invoice. By using our automated reminders, you save time by not having to call an unresponsive or forgetful client.

To find out more about reminders, go here.

Services

Use our Services feature to itemize your invoices and add specific services to your proposals. You’ll be able to complete transactions faster and get more detailed financial reports. Plus, clients will always know exactly what they’re paying for.

To find out more about services, go here.

Tasks are to-dos. On TaxDome, we see tasks as steps that must be taken to complete a job. A job might involve a variety of tasks for your team and the client—chats, invoices, time entries, proposals, and so on.

Tasks can be assigned to any of your team members, linked to a specific job, automated within a pipeline, or even standalone. Labeled with different statuses, tasks may also include subtasks as well as comments.

To learn all about tasks, go here.

TaxDome Drive

Using TaxDome Drive is a quick and easy way to upload, view, and manage client documents without opening your browser. Basically, it’s a mapped drive (Z:\ Drive) on your desktop that works the same way as Dropbox or Google Drive. The best thing about TaxDome Drive is that all your data is stored on a server, even though you can see and interact with it; this way, all of that data isn’t taking up precious space on your hard drive.

Learn how to set up and use the TaxDome Drive here.

Templates

Our templates are predesigned documents, emails, forms, tasks, and more. Like a blueprint, a template is used as the basis to create more of the same. Templates speed up the process of sending out an email, for instance, or creating folders structures, proposals, and organizers that you’ll need more than once. They’re also helpful when adding automations to pipelines.

For example, you can set up a Call Client task template to be triggered so that a team member calls the client as soon as a job for them enters the first stage of a pipeline. Or you can create a proposal template that you’ll use over and over again.