What is a service and how does it affect my Dashboard

A service is anything from looking after a firm’s Year End accounts to registering somebody for VAT; it’s a service that you provide to your client throughout as part of your service. Some of these services will be on your Letters of Engagement, others can be an internal service and so you can keep these off of your engagement letters and use these to populate deadlines instead. 

When starting out, we recommend picking 3 or 4 of your most commonly used services and getting to know the system defaults and behaviours. Get comfortable and set your defaults, change what you need to and you’ll get a feel for how it pieces together. 

So let's enter what you’d charge for a standard YE set of accounts. 

Example - Settings - Jobs - Services - locate Limited Company Accounts - Pencil Icon

This will take you to all the items that can be edited. Scroll down to the pricing enter your firm’s standard pricing - in this example we have set £1,000 as our base fee:

As you can see there’s a number of ways in which you can explore tailoring your pricing to be inline with your firm's practices - this is explored in great detail here

For now, we’re keeping things simple so you get comfortable with the system and how it behaves. These are your defaults and will populate the relevant services throughout the system. 

Now that you’ve set your internal pricing, what about deadlines? When do you want to get these accounts filed by? We’d always recommend getting your services squared away well ahead of any statutory deadline, so let’s set this in the system - do you have an INTERNAL Deadline for the service?

Example - we never want to be working until the 11th hour on a deadline day, so let’s get everything completed 4 months ahead of the filing due date. 

Still in the same Edit function, head down to ‘default frequency’ and Enable the Automatic internal deadline - set your preferred default. This will create Deadlines on your Dashboard. 

The Engager software will always use dates taken from Companies House for your statutory deadlines, so you won’t need to set these per client. 

So we’ve set our price and our internal deadlines for filing. What about the actual work itself, what are the actions taken and who carries these out? You can be as detailed or as straightforward here as needed. 

Phases

When you have multiple phases and staff members, it’s a great idea to complete the next stage to ensure that each phase (job) is correctly allocated and triggering the required emails that you want. This becomes your workflow

The defaults will be relatively basic, so preparation then filing - in your firm, you’re likely to have ‘send request for records’ ‘YE Production’ ‘YE review’ ‘Send for review’ and so on - everybody’s workflow is going to be different and completed by different team members - so tell the system

So you’ve now created your basic defaults for your first service, pricing, internal deadlines and part of your workflow. 

Now you have the basic knowledge to go and build out a few more of your essential services. 

Dashboards - a dashboard gives you and your staff a clear view of your tasks, appointments and upcoming deadlines. 

This is all about having an overview of your services and work so that you can make informed decisions as to what you need to complete as priority. Clicking into the widgets, will take you directly to the work required

You can customise your dashboard by moving your service widgets by clicking and moving them by holding down the left mouse button. 

With the image below, I know that I have 2 Unsigned Letters of Engagement that should have been signed by now - this encourages me to select this and take urgent action to get my prospective customers on board. 

If your Dashboard starts to look like the image below - you need to take action

There are overdue items that need immediate attention. It could be genuine issues that have meant you haven’t filed Limited Company accounts, or realistically, perhaps it’s a job card that hasn’t been marked as Completed, meaning it will remain as overdue. Either way, it’s a great way to stay on top of your company services and deadlines with a bit of internal housekeeping.