Active accounts explained

Table of contents

What counts as one account
What makes an account active
What doesn’t make an account active
How the count works
Archive accounts you no longer work with

Note

This article applies to every firm on client-based pricing: in the US and Canada and other countries .

Your plan is sized by active accounts: the clients with activity during your plan year. Each account is counted once and stays covered until your plan year ends.

What counts as one account

An account is a client: a person, a household, or a business entity. Pricing counts accounts, never contacts:

Several people on one account, like two spouses or the partners in a business, are contacts on the same account and count as one
A household is one account, even when you prepare a return for each spouse
Separate entities are separate accounts: a client with a personal return and a partnership return is two accounts

We recommend keeping each entity as its own account for clean records.

What makes an account active

An account becomes active the first time your firm or the client does something with it in your plan year—any of these:

Your firm issues an invoice for the account
Your firm creates a job for the account
A contact logs in to the client portal
A contact downloads a document
Your firm sends a chat message
Anyone creates an organizer for the account
Anyone uploads a document to the account

Once active, the account is covered for your entire plan year and counted once, no matter how much happens after that.

What doesn’t make an account active

Emails your firm sends
Documents added with the web migration tool

Importing your client list is free and unlimited, and contacts without activity cost nothing.

Note

If you import accounts with a folder template that contains documents, those accounts become active.

How the count works

The count starts at zero at each renewal. As accounts have activity, they count toward your active account allowance.

Archive accounts you no longer work with

Archiving doesn’t change an account’s activity: an account with no activity costs nothing next year, whether you archive it or not. You can archive clients you no longer work with . Contacts on an archived account can’t sign in to the portal, so an archived account stays inactive.