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Weekly Live Session - August 19, 2026

This was the first Weekly Live moved to a Wednesday afternoon slot (1pm) instead of the usual Wednesday evening. Johan used the session to recap two often-missed features -- requesting and submitting HMRC agent authorisation directly from a client's tax references, and the correct way to invite clients to the portal -- before taking a wide-ranging set of questions, including a detailed discussion of Engager's cautious approach to AI.

Key takeaways

  • A client's Tax References tab isn't just for storing reference numbers -- for Corporation Tax, CIS and PAYE you can request the HMRC authorisation code from there and, uniquely, also submit the code back once it arrives, without needing to log into the agent services account at all.
  • For VAT and MTD, requesting authorisation generates a clickable link that HMRC sends back via the API, ready for you to email straight to the client from within Engager.
  • Client portal invites only work if you press the actual "Invite" button (individually or in bulk from the dashboard's portal-invites widget) -- pasting the portal placeholder into a random email will not grant access.
  • Engager is deliberately cautious about AI: it's exploring both MCP-style connections and AI built directly into the product, but strongly recommends only ever connecting business data via an enterprise or teams-tier AI plan (never a free or personal tier), since only those carry contractual data protections.
  • Corporation Tax reference fields (company number, registered postcode) aren't auto-populated from company data because HMRC's own records don't reliably match Companies House formatting (e.g. leading letters like "SC" for Scottish companies) or postcode updates.
  • Auto-linking of emails to a client's communication log only works going forward from when it's set up -- to backfill older emails, open the email in the inbox and use "link to client" manually.
  • The new Deals functionality (paid tier) is targeted for August/September, with the current free version remaining available until the paid version is ready.
  • The mobile app already supports linking a client's portal without scanning a QR code -- they can instead type in the firm's engager.app subdomain directly.
  • If a client isn't receiving mobile notifications, check they've opted in to notifications for the app in their phone's settings, since both iOS and Android now default new app installs to notifications off.

Full transcript

try this again. Good afternoon everybody. I hope you are all well. If you can see and hear me, say hello in the comments um and confirm that you can hear me loud and clear for me.

Jennifer says hello. Chris, hello. Amanda, Paul, Sally, Nissa, Johan, all loud and clear. Thank you very much. Lovely. Loads of people coming in. Good. Good. Okay, guys. Welcome to Engage Live, especially to all of you that are new to Engage Alive or haven't been along for a while. We are now at 1:00 in the afternoon instead of 7:30 on a Wednesday night, which my wife is ecstatic about. Um, so yeah, I after three years I get my Wednesday nights back. That'll be nice. But hopefully this will also prove a more support a more better time for you. Um,

so yeah, hopefully that this all works out well for everybody. Bit of housekeeping for you. Um, if you've got any questions, and this whole session is about me answering your questions. If you've got any questions you want me to answer, please put them into the Q&A box. If there isn't a Q&A option at the bottom of your screen, which is a speech bubble with a question mark in it saying Q&A underneath it, it's probably in the more options, which is a round circle with three dots in more written underneath it. If you click on that, you'll find the Q&A option in there. Try not to put anything into the webinar chat because it will be rather busy in here. um so I can easily miss questions in there whereas questions in the Q&A box they sit there until I've marked them as answered to make sure that we don't miss any of your important questions. Um, a final bit of housekeeping is that it doesn't matter whether you are brand new to engager, whether you've been using us for years, please ask whatever questions you've got, no matter how dafted you think that question is, because the amount of people that come to these sessions and learn something by someone else asking what they think is a silly question is really, really good. So, you know, people ask, "Oh, can you do this?" And I can go in, I show them how it works. and other people go, "Oh, I'd forgotten an engager can do that." So, yeah, this whole session is about us all asking questions that you want to ask, me answering them, and working out uh and everyone else learning alongside us all. So, as I say, the whole session is about you asking questions. So, if you'd like to start by asking questions in the Q&A box, you'd be more than welcome to. Um, I'm going to cover a couple of features that have come up recently in the in the Facebook group. There's been some questions about. So, I want to deep dive into those quickly and just recap how you do things. Um, but while I'm doing that, please feel free to put your questions into the Q&A box. Um, and we will go through from there. Um, normally at the start of a session is when I would show you if we've got anything that we're testing in the demo account. At the moment, we haven't got anything in testing at the moment. The developers are all busy building and um re code uh reviewing the code and stuff for that uh for new features and stuff coming up soon. So, there's nothing in testing to release in the coming days. So, there's nothing to talk to you about in that regards today. Um, but the uh what I do want to quickly cover is two key features that most people seem to forget we've got or they don't understand how it works. So the first one is when we go into a client, let's go into ABC limited.

Tax references here are not just for you to store the tax reference information. They're here for you to be able to request agent authorization. Oh, sorry, I haven't shared my screen. Um, and my screen share buttons moved. Hold the line. Hold the line.

There we go. Trust everyone can see my screen now. Um, so when we go into a client and we go into tax references, this section isn't just here for you to store tax reference information. It's actually here for you to request agent authorization. So if it's MTD VAT, what will happen is you'll put your details, the vid, registration number, uh, and the principal postcode, etc. in here. You can request authorization, and we will actually then generate the an email with the link in it for your client to press and click on the link to authorize you. Uh, Rey, you're going to have to zoom in, I'm afraid. The screen's as big as it can be, I think. Um, so yeah, the screen size isn't normally an issue. So you you might just need to zoom in on your screen a bit, right? I don't think I'm going to get it any bigger. Uh, zoom in. There you go. That's the probably the best I can do it without it blowing distorting everything.

Uh, hang on. Let me see if I can move some bits around and try and widen the screen.

Is that any better for everybody?

We don't normally have issues with screen sizes on the weekly live. So yeah, uh Miriam says all looks all fine. Can see your full screen. Okay. Yeah. So guys, in Zoom, you can tell it to instead of looking at me and my beautiful face, you can expand this the share screen to the full size. Um, and in doing that, you'll have a a better view of it. Cool. So, as I as I was saying, the um tax references aren't just here for you to store reference details in. This is in fact, I'm just going to cuz this is too big for me now. I'll just zoom out by one. There we go. So they're actually here to get you agent authorization as well. So if it's corporation tax, construction industry scheme or payee, you enter the same details as normal and then on letterbased you press request authorized uh code authorization code from HMRC. That sends that then tells HMRC to send the letter with the code in to the client. And unlike in any other practice management tool, when that letter comes with a code, you can come back here and submit the code from here. You don't have to go into your agent portal in government gateway, find the submission and enter it there. You can submit it from here and get it authorized. If you are using VAT or MTD authorizations, we will throw the information down the API to HMRC and they push back the clickable URL link that your client you would normally copy and paste and send to your client in an email. So you can then we then give you an email in front of you saying right press send here and you can send it. So that so this is a really quick and easy way to make sure you've got all the agent authorizations in place that you need. A lot of people forget that we've got this functionality and they forget even more that actually not only can you request the information, you can process the information here because no one else does that. Um

there just says I've just I've just done a few authorizations. Works works really well. I didn't realize before that you can submit the code in engager when it comes to uh comes in too. Very much times saving and great absolutely um as I say no other practice management tool does this to the same level that we do. Um some allow you to request the codes but they don't allow you to get the co uh put the code in and submit it.

Um so yeah. Right. So that was my first thing I wanted to cover. Second thing I needed to cover was the um client portals invites. So when you go into a client, you can't just send a random email and use the portal placeholder. You need to follow the system. So if you go into a um person, let me find somebody. So, if I go into Amy Davis on the right hand side here, I can see client portal not invited. To invite her, all I do is press invite, and that will give me the template that we've already got, and I can press send. Copying and pasting this placeholder into a random email will not work. You have to click to say you're inviting them. If you want to do this in bulk, you can do it from the dashboard. And you can go down to portal invites. Uh where are we? Where I find someone's hidden it

portals. So I've got 53 not invited and five where the invites have expired. So if I click on the five that the invites have expired, I can select all and I can invite them again. or I can go to 53. I can select all or I can select a subset of them and then press invite. So, I'm inviting them in bulk and that's absolutely fine. But what you have to do is you always have to press a button that says invite. Otherwise, the system won't work. It won't know who you're inviting.

Um, there's a few questions coming in, guys. Please remember to put them into the Q&A, not the webinar chat, because the webinar chat moves quite quickly. Uh, and there's 90 odd people on this call. So, please stick the Q&As's into um the Q&A box. Right. So they were they were my two main points just from discussions with f with users recently um not realizing that you can do the agent authorization thing and also with um some of the comments we've seen in Facebook recently about inviting clients to the portal. So uh I will start now going through the uh questions in the Q&A box. So we've got five questions in at the moment. As I go guys keep adding more questions as you've got them. Um, Allison, how do I remove a task permanently? Allison, is this a job that reoccurs and is a service or is this a task that you've gone in and you've clicked like new task and it's an a random task, add ad hoc task? If you can clarify that for me in the Q&A, I will come back to that uh in a moment. John, when creating and adding deals, is it possible to add prospect details in that process or is it done separately? At the moment, John, it's done separately. So, you go into the client list, you create a prospect, and then you create a deal. Um, if a deal comes in and you've not created the prospect, you can still create the deal and link it to the prospect once you've created the prospect later, but you can't do it all in one space at this time. That is something we are looking at as what our options are to go forwards. Uh John again, is there a good reason not to autopop populate the tax reference field of registered cocode and CRN for corporation tax when these details are populated in client's info screen? Actually, there's several good reasons, John. So, first of all, if I go into tax references, uh so first of all, the CRN is omitting zeros and letters. So we would have to teach the system to ignore SC or 000. Um so that's why this is a manual process at the moment because we've not taught the system how to do that. Um so yeah that's the first thing is that the company number that comes through from company's house is not the necessarily the whole number that you submit to for agent authorization with HMRC. Absolute madness that HMRC can't handle it. And I'll give you an example of how much HMRC can't handle the SC in front of a company number. I had an is I my firm is um AML supervised by HMRC. Renewal after renewal, no problems. This year had a three month battle with them because they were they were convinced I wasn't giving them the full uh picture of who's got ultimate ownership of our firm. Turned out once I finally got someone on on the phone for it, she entered the numbers into company's house and was coming up with a different company to what I've got, which is my company number, because she was skipping the SC. So, she was coming up with a whole different company because 00 and that number came back with a different company to SC and that number. So that's how mad it is between company's house and HMRC that they can't get their own databases aligned but yeah so we can't there is no automatic assumptions for this and the client's registered office postcode in theory it should be what's at company's house but HMRC doesn't update its records automatically from company's house so it might not be the right postcode which is why we ask you to enter the postcode based on what you believe HMRC have got on record. So that's why we don't do these two sections automatically. Hopefully that makes some kind of sense. It makes no sense. Let's get let's be fair. But it's as sensible as what HMRC let us do it.

Um right, Angela, I think I saw an email or post on engager and AI. Can you tell me what engager's approach to AI is? Are you intending to enable links to Claude, etc.? I'm not asking for any specific. I just want a flavor of the approach to AI is. So, uh there has been some posts about AI recently. We are looking at AI. We are looking at both what are called MCPS which is like an API. So, that's the an MCP is the API of the AI world which connects claw chatgpt and stuff. We are looking at that um and how that could work. We're also looking at how AI built into engager could work and it could be a lot more secure that way. The risk that we're seeing and I saw it a couple literally last week I spoke to three different firm owners all trying to use AI and they were connecting things like QuickBooks and Zero and other CRM and marketing market email marketing tools and stuff to chat GPT or Claude or Google. And when I said, "Oh, what version of chat GPT are you on or clawed or whatever it was?" "Oh, I'm on the free one," which is a huge, huge, huge security issue and GDPR issue. The So, we need to look at how we can help you be safe. A car goes over 70 mph doesn't make it legal to go over 70 mph on the motorway or through a 20 mph zone. Just because a tool can do something doesn't mean it's done. it's safe to do it. So, but what we always try and do is put some safety rails up. We try and make it safe for you. Um because what we want is to make sure you're getting the maximum ability out of the data whilst making it safe. Now, you can use claw today in engager by using clawed chrome plug-in. If you're using claw, chatgpt, anything like that, you must must be on the teams or the enterprise package and nothing below that cuz those especially with claude, those ones have legally binding paperwork between you and Claude that agree that your data is completely ring fenced and it stands up in a court law. the free version of claw chatgpt even the 20 pound a month for individuals it doesn't have the ISO ratings it doesn't have the uh hippo ratings it doesn't have this GDPR ratings and it doesn't have any legally binding agreements to not use your data for any other purpose so we are we've been looking at AI for a long time at engager we see huge advantages to it but we've got to make sure no users are going to make huge huge mistakes by using it when it's so important that you're doing it safely. And one of my rants at the moment is no software out there is telling you properly how to do this safely. They're just going, "Oh, we've got MCPs. We've got connectors." But no one is actually telling you how to do it safely and securely in your practice. So, yeah, we, as I say, we are looking at a AI. It's a constant conversation. I use it all the time in my firm, but I've read up on it. I've done my research. You know, I spend4500 pounds a month on Claude. And that's just my team, every one of my team members having access to it because we're on a team's package because I don't want them to I don't want if I don't give them access to the secure package, secure version. The risk is they go, well, I want to use AI to ask this question or do this. I haven't got access, so I'm just going to use a free version. So if you're going to use it, you need to then encourage your team but and facilitate them using it on the right package. It costs money. It's not a small investment, but it's a lot cheaper to do it properly than it is to get put in court or the ICO about data breaches. Um, so yeah, so there you go. That is my rant on uh AI. Thank you, Angela, for bringing that one up. I do apologize. Um, Miriam, the issue some of my clients have is linking the portal to the mobile app after they download the app. They never get it right and we go around in circles with the QR code. Uh, they don't have to just use the QR code, Angela. There is another way around it that is in the help center. Uh

the

I think it's that one.

Is it in here? No, it's not that one. But there is a help guide and there's a there's help articles in the product as well teaching talking you through how your clients can link it without using the QR code. We about a year and a half ago we built a system so you didn't have to use the QR code. You can just put in the uh firm name.engager.app instead.

Um Emma I can't get agent authorization to work. I've entered the agent credentials. Any ideas? Absolutely. So if you go to settings and go to your integrations and HMRC, first of all, you need to go through the ID is the government gateway ID number. The password is the password you're using. And then you also need to put in the IR agent reference. Again, in the help center, there is a guide to where to find these when by logging into your government gateway. Um, and you need to do that for each tax. Even if they're all linked to the same login details, you have to put the same login details each time. And then you need to put in the MTD. You need to click on authorize to link to the MTD portal as well as a separate authorization. And then put in your MTD agent reference. So mine's like F A R N and a series of numbers. Um, there cannot be any spaces in here. Okay. there cannot be a space beforehand or space after it. It's very hard to see, but often that's nine out of 10 times with the MTD one, there's a space where someone's copied and pasted it wrong. Um, if you're still struggling, screenshot this whole page for us. Screenshot where you're getting your agent, uh, reference numbers, uh, reference details from, and email it into support. We'll take a look for you to try and help you out.

Claire, I've had a couple of clients saying they cannot get into the portal. They've tried resetting the password, but no reset emails are received. Any ideas? Claire, are they using the email address to log in and to reset the password that is on engager? So, basically, I mean, you'll be amazed how many times I come across this. If I go to David Baker, if I if the client doesn't use the email address saved here, then the system doesn't know who it belongs to. The system doesn't know who they are. They've got to use the email address here. The amount of times I see people going, "Oh, I use my other Hotmail account or I use my Gmail account instead of my Outlook account." So, well, you've only given us, you know, this is the email address you've given us. This is the email address we're doing all our communications from. That's why it's not working. So check that they are using the right email address to log in and reset the passwords. Failing that, click on delete. That removes their access. It doesn't delete anything in the portal. That all still saves their own files. And then reinvite them. Okay. And that will bypass any issues they're having with their spam filters and stuff like that.

Uh Allison says it's a task, but it reoccurs. Absolutely. So basically Allison, what you need to do is go into jobs, go to work. Let me find a task

and you click on a task and you should just be able to delete the task. And if you've done that, and it's still coming back up with the reoccurrence, send it into us so we can hunt down the bug that's causing the reoccurrence to be ignoring the delete button. Um, so if you guys ever need anything from us, contact engager.app is our uh support line. It's they're really quick. They're really helpful. Uh, you'll normally end up with um cat. She's absolutely lovely. Patience of a saint to say the least. Um, bingo. Right. John says, "Yes, that makes sense about agent agent authorizations.

Uh, what are the tax account credentials used for the tax references? Jane, I think I've answered that just now, but if you um, yeah, basically if you go, let me have a look and see if I can find it in the help center.

There we go. So on the when you log into your agent service account for MTD stuff on your welcome screen, you've got agent reference number under that black box there. That's where that number is. And when you log in and you need the IR agent references, once you log into your agent service one, the old one, the analog one as I call it, next to each tax that's linked to this account will be your agent access. Okay, they're blacked out here because I had to take screenshots of my own agent access to use uh because there's ar there aren't any examples online. Hopefully that helps.

Uh, John, I'd like to add a service quarterly contact updates with clients. Is there a way to run the timings of this service based on the financial year so the quarters align with 36? Absolutely, John. All you're going to do is you're going to go in and create a new service. So, basically, John wants a quarterly update, a quarterly uh job to touch base with the client. So, we're going to have um quarterly client catchup

uh D and we're going to say that this job happens.

Oh, every 3 months.

Check in with the client. Save. Right. And then what are you're going to do is you're going to go to your client and you're going to enable the service.

So at the bottom will be my new service. And then at the bottom it's going to ask right when's this next due. So what you can do is you can go right well the accounting year month is the 1 of January. So you can go right the first one would be due

uh at the let's go for the 31st of December. So the information you need for the accounting year is up here. If you want to try and do this in bulk, what you can do is go to clients.

You're going to go, first of all, you're going to go filter and you're going to go to uh where are we?

That's fees. Basically, I want a deadline date.

Um,

I'm going blind for looking. Basically, we want the year- end date um or the uh deadline for the accounts and we can b we can then go right all of these clients. So, we'd filter by them all. All of these clients have the year end of December. So, their next check-in point would be this and you can enable the service using the bulk enable service. But, I'm just going blind for looking and got a load of things coming in on top of that. Um but yeah so you can bulk update basically. So you can bulk update bulk actions edit. We're going to turn do a service. We're going to do the quarterly update client service and we're going to change the we're going to enable it first.

There we go. That's enabled for everybody. Then I can go back to my bolt actions, edit service, quarterly update again. Then I'm going I can change my uh deadline uh due date and I can set my due date. So you could do batches of clients based on their year end dates or something is how I would do that quickly.

Uh

Angela says, "Thank you for your answer. Please don't worry. We are on clawed teams and have red lines for the teams not to cross." Fantastic. Unfortunately, so many don't. And we have to consider the lowest level. Um, Andrew, if I send an email to a client and they do not respond, how do I then follow it up if I want to resend my original email as well? Um, in engager, what I would do is I'd go to my client,

find someone that might have a drag and retail, go to communication. I can see the email here. I can copy and paste and put it in and go please see below. Or you can go into your Outlook or your Gmail, reforward uh find the email that you sent in the sent box, reply to it again or forward it to them. At that point, it will come back on our we'll pick that up as well cuz you don't have to send an email from Engager for it to appear on the communications log. As long as you're emailing the client with the email address that's related to their account and Gmail or Outlook is linked to Engager, we will pick it up and put it on the timeline for you.

Uh Amanda, are you going to create a placeholder for the mobile link? Define the mobile link, Amanda. So, you can we've already got on our templates in our templated emails. if you've updated yours or not, I don't know. But if I go to messages,

portal

uh

portal signup request. So, we've already got these links. These are the links to the mobile phone app in the relevant stores. I'll put those in the chat for you now just so everyone can go copy them if they want to. Um, so they're already there.

Um, and then they need to click on that link, download the app, then open the app, and then they can either scan a QR code or they can press a button where they type in the domain which you guys have here, which is under the portal general settings. This is your portal link and there's already a placeholder for that. So if I go to a client

and

click on that, if I go into here,

web address of client portal, put that in there.

that's automatically populated it for you. So, there's already a link there for you,

right? Let's just tidy up some of these questions. Lucy, does that mean if we change a client's email address outside, it will change it for the client's portal? So, we need to let them know. Absolutely. Yes. So, if you change a client's email address on your record, that becomes their login email address automatically. They don't have to reset the password. They don't have to log in and do anything. They just need to know next time they log in, the email address that's stored here is what they should be using to log in.

Um did Jane I mean the bone within the client record there is separate section in there. Sorry I'm still a bit lost. Jane can you let me just see what your previous question was Jane.

Oh the T right. So Jane so the bit here the tax account credentials. This is if you store the ID and password for your client's login preferences. I do not encourage you to do this. As far as HMRC concerned, these credentials are the equivalent of online login banking login details. Um, but we were asked time and time again by accountants and bookkeepers who store this information to give them a place to store it. So, we gave them that place. It doesn't let you log into anything. It doesn't link to anything. It's just a data storage area. Um, again, these are credentials we do not save in our in our records in my firm. And anytime a client send us these details naively because the old accountant wanted them to file directly instead of using agent authorization processes, we then turn around to them, explain where what they've just done and tell them need to go and reset their password for security purposes.

Um done. Are there any plans to have the ability to embed Loom videos into checklists or tasks, please? Uh, yes, hyperlinks are the plan. Um, I don't know where we're up to with that. It's on the ideas list. It's been requested and well voted for. Um, I don't know where we're up to yet with that though. Um, so I basic go on to our ideas list, Alexis. Uh, basically you to get there you go click on your name and go you can either request a feature um or you can go for the product road map and you can see all of our ideas that have been put in by our users and you can vote on the ones you like. Um, but yes that is on there.

Alexis appreciate the discussion on AI. There's a huge level of education and governance needed with engage in AI. Will we be able to decide? I have a client with the with an internal anti-AII policy. So, I need to consider how I communicate this service to them. So, you will if we put in AI like an NC an MCP, you won't be able to you'll be able to decide whether you're going to activate that or not. So, that will be exactly like all of our other integrations. So you know if you if you don't use admin you don't use analytics you don't use uh Microsoft or something you don't have to activate it at which point if you haven't activated it these softwares don't know you exist and they don't know about you using engager so any MCPs would be built like this um and we will always look at doing on and off things so like time tracking for example in engager that's an on or off thing you you decide if you want to turn time tracking on or not, it's up to you. Um, so yeah, anything like that, anything we build will have an on and off feature.

Anna, I have a new client who assign who signed terms in terms and then I found out they were accessing their software. They need a lot of catch-up work. Is there a way to send just a catch-up fee without the whole new proposal? Um, you've got a choice, Anna. You can either resend the whole thing or you can send like an a letter amending the proposal. Uh, you need to speak to your governing body and your insurance provider first because there are some insurance providers out there that will not cover you unless you send a whole new letter of engage uh of engagement. Um, some governing bodies think it's best practice to send the whole letter again. Others are quite happy for you to send a letter. So, for example, I think I've got an example in here. Let me have a look. Uh,

I'm trying to think what I called it. I've not looked for it in a while.

No.

No, I don't think I have got an example in here. Basically, I I had a I've got a template in my firm because HMRC are our governing of our AML supervisor. We don't have a governing body. Um, and our insurance provider has signed off on the fact that we don't have to send out letters of engagement for new services. We just send a letter documenting that we've been asked to provide a service and we get them to e-sign that letter to authorize us to carry out and they accept the fee. So in my firm, I've got an additional service letter that basically says this sits alongside the terms and conditions already agreed on on top of the letter of engagement already agreed and we are going to deliver these extra services and we type them in manually. We put in the fee manually etc. So we've got that as a document template in my firm before you asked me for it. All I did was I went to Claude and asked it to come up with a legal a letter for this kind of thing and it did it in seconds. Um, if you're not using AI yet, a really safe way to use it um that you can happily use this on is uh writing templates. So, letters of engagement, proposal templates, uh, email templates, document templates, all are fantastic ways to use AI to save you a lot of time. Yes, you have to proofread it like you would with any team member, uh, doing the work for you, but it will make life a lot easier using template, uh, AI to create templates for you.

Right. Is it possible to bulk turn on autolink new emails to this profile? I tried earlier but couldn't find it. So, no. Um, once you link once you've got a client's record set up in Engager and you've told Engager to autosave emails,

we'll link auto link to their communication log going forwards. We don't go backwards. If you want to go backwards, you need to go and do it manually. And to do that, you go into emails, you go to inbox, and you can literally click on any of these, click on client links, link to client, and choose your client.

And that will also link all the older emails in this commun in this conversation as well. So, if it's a conversation that's already had 20 emails, that's 20 linked in one go. Um, so yeah, it's something that we deal with going forwards, not backwards.

Uh, can you bulk update to remove a check in a box? For example, business start date. Um, I no, you can't. We wouldn't have built that because we wouldn't have assumed everybody had the same business start date. Uh that will be a manual thing.

Um

Jane, as I say, it's there because we were asked for it. So James asked, why is it there if it shouldn't be used? Why does a car go past 70 mph if it's not allowed to legally go past 70 mph? So, we were asked for this feature. We built it for users. Um, we we tell you it's not the right way to do it. It's not a best practice. HMRC tell taxpayers that their login details, their government gateway are sacred, like bank online banking details. So, yeah, it it's there because we were asked for it. I'm here to educate you that it's not best practice. Um, but it doesn't stop people from doing it. A car can go over 70 miles an hour. You shouldn't, but it doesn't stop people from speeding.

Kirsty reference the portal. Is it worth mentioning that what you said about needing to amend phone settings to allow notifications? Uh, yeah. So, if your clients have got a have got a um got the mobile app and they're saying they're not getting notified about updates and stuff, it's because they haven't enabled the notifications on their app. So, Apple and Google changed it about a year and a half ago that you don't opt out of notifications. You have to opt in. So, whenever you install a new app, it asks you these days, do you want to get notifications? And you say yes or no. Well, if you've said no or if the client said no, then we they won't get the notification saying that your accountant or bookkeepers uploaded a document for you to sign, etc. So, if the client's saying they're not getting notifications, tell them to check their settings for notifications.

Uh Diane, I can't find how to filter by accounts year end date on the client list. Uh, I can't either right now, Diane. I will look into this and come back to you. I'm sure we used to be able to do it because I'm sure I did it. Um,

but yeah, I don't know where what I'm where I'm missing something. Um,

Alexis, so you'd only want Okay, so Alexis is asking, "Could AR if we build any AI, could we spec specify which clients do and don't have access to it?" Uh, that's very unlikely. It's normally a firmwide yes or no, Alexis. Like, that's that is how it is. Um,

yeah, that would you'd probably Yeah, we I'll feed that back to the team though because we're still scoping this out and looking at it. Uh, that you want you'd want it to choose which clients are hit by AI or not? Andrew, will the AI be closed rather than open? Uh, in which in what regards, Andrew? So basically it'll be ring fence to each firm is my understanding at the moment. As I say guys, we're still brainstorming at this point. We're testing different ideas and stuff. We haven't got anywhere near a finished product or a finished even a finished idea of what the finished product would look like. Um so I can't answer too many questions about the AI because we've not decided yet.

Uh Duh.

Hi. In the email linking, I've set it for all users to see, but other users can't see my email. Um, without looking at your screen, Lisa, can you I won't be able to help you on that, but if you screenshot your email settings and screenshot, get one of your team members to screenshot what they are seeing. Send it into support and we'll have a look for you.

Is it on the plan to be able to see the detail of email that you are replying to when you are replying CLA? Uh yes, it is CLA. I don't have an ETA on it, but the whole email module thing is due. Uh we've got a big eye big brainstorming thing going on with that at the moment of how we can improve that and make it more powerful.

Um cool. That is all of my questions that have come in so far. You've still got 14 minutes of my time, guys. So, feel free to stick any more questions into the Q&A. Um, let me just go through some of the comments quickly.

Talking about the screen. Oh, hold on. Uh, Jennifer, do we have a date for the new deals functionality yet? Looking forward to the changes. Uh I don't have a date yet. It's due August sl into September. If it's basically the the current free version will remain there until we have the paid for version ready. Um because what we don't want to do like we've had loads of really good feedback basically for what we should put behind the do with the paid version. So uh different ideas for reports and all sorts. So we are working on that. It's just made the project a bit bigger than planned. Um, but yeah, the deals board will stay there until the new version comes out. Uh, and we'll give you as much notice as possible about the new version as well.

Dian says, "The only problem I find is that you don't get the reminders that the code is about to expire." Yeah. HMRC only issue reminders after uh don't issue reminders if it's been submitted by the API. But what you could what I do in my firm Diane is I I send the agent authorization request and then I create a new task. Um I call it 7 days until code expiry.

put it on to the client and I go, "Right, I filed that on the 19th. It's due to expire on the 19th there." So, I'll put a reminder for the 11th, for example. Save. I've now got a task to that will come up on my jobs board to remind me. Andrew, is it possible to have a recording of this session? It's very good. Andrew, every single one of these sessions in for the last three plus years are all on the help center. So you can go into the help center and find them in there. Um, and this one will be put in there in the coming days. I just have to wait for Zoom to finish processing the download. I then have to upload it and store it into YouTube and then I take it from you. I put the link from YouTube into the help center. So it just takes a bit of time to sort it all out. Um, Katie, I see there is a way of chasing missing paperwork. I've not looked too much into this, but does this only work if you're a tax calcer? Well, I don't not sure if I know what you're referring to there, Katie. Um, we haven't really got a set way of chasing missing paperwork. We've got forms to send out requesting information uh which work for anybody. Um and we will be doing a what we are building is a form like a tax questionnaire which will be sent but that will be powered by the data within tax calc. So tax c will go right they had all these fields last time this was the information. So we can go look this is all the answers you gave us last time. What's the what are the answers for this year? Um but we've always been teaching people how to use forms to send out tax questionnaires anyway. Um, so when you go to settings and client data form settings, if I go to self- assessment tax questionnaire, we've always been teaching people how to build these um, and we can even send you so if you contact support asking for the self- assessment tax question return questionnaire, we'll export this from the demo account and send it to you so you can import it into your own engager. And all you do is go to settings, form settings, click on new form, import from file. You upload the file that we've emailed to you, and that form will go in here as a draft ready for you to use.

If you have an open-ended job, so no end date, but it's to send out an email every year, will that happen each year without make marking it as complete each year or is it something I need to make sure I need to do to make sure it rolls forward? No. So if it's a so even in your example there, CLA, I would argue that's not an open-ended job. That is a job that reoccurs annually. And once you've sent the email, you've done the job, it then should reoccur in a year's time. So that's not open-ended. That is a set deadline date to send the email. Um so yeah, so I would have either a task or a service um that reoccurs annually. You complete this today's one and it will reoccur in a year. So yeah, you do need to mark them as complete though, otherwise they won't the system won't know to reoccur because the system works on deadlines. That's how it prioritizes everything for you.

Uh right, let's just have a quick look and see what's going on in the comments.

Cla, can I change a service I've already set up to being annual then? Yes, absolutely, Cla. So, go to settings, go to your services. Uh, where am I? Um, jobs and nope, I am miles away today. So, this is a monthly service here. Default fee period monthly everything. If I go in here, it's actually set as to default once every year. So, normally this would have been that. So, I can just go in and go to that and that will change it for all jobs going forwards for new clients. But then what you'll need to do is go to clients, select the clients you want, bulk edit, edit services, choose the service you're going to want. Let's go to VAT for example. And you can ch go in and choose frequency. You can have a default frequency or custom. So I could go in and turn all my VATs to annual straight away just like that using the bulk edit. And if you've selected what you can do though is if let's say that that service isn't turned on for every client. If you select all clients and do that change that I've just shown you it will only do it where the service is turned on. So the clients that haven't got the service turned on it won't impact them. It will just come up saying the service doesn't exist for this client.

Um,

I think I've seen I think everything in the comments has been kind of covered already.

Uh, we've got our final five minutes, guys. So, any last questions, stick them into the Q&A box. In the meantime, hopefully those of you like, you know, we've had 95 people on this session at one point. We're still at 80 odd right now. Um, that's two, three times the amount that normally turn up on a Wednesday night, which is incredible. Hopefully, for all of you new people that have attended this for the first time, you've seen value here. And this is this is something you think, actually, this is brilliant. I need to make sure I'm attending this every week or every couple of weeks. Um, so yeah, like this is what our week, our lives is all about. Um, and it's basically just asking me any questions you've got to make sure you to help you use engager better and to learn from listening to other people's questions and answers. Um, as I say, we've been doing this for three plus years now. Um we then you know we've got over 2,200 firms using engager but the weekly lives didn't really grow. Uh which is why we did a poll um on the Facebook group over the week uh over the weekend to see if people would prefer an afternoon. And we'll see how this goes. But so far so good. And as I say, hopefully all the new people have um found real value in this. Um

Jane, can a field be added for data marriage? Yes, Jane, you can add as many fields as you like. You go to settings and you go to client data and custom fields and you can add as many fields as you like for your own for your firm.

Andrew, integration with tax calc. What's your question in regards to integration with tax calc?

Uh

definitely. So while I wait for Andrew just to answer that, uh Audra, uh definitely prefer the Wednesday sessions. Thank you, Samantha. I always used to forget about the Wednesday night sessions despite reminders. This is useful at this time. Great.

Uh Alexis, first time I've been in here in ages. Struggled with the evenings. Not a problem.

Um Allison, I really prefer this. The evening ones clashed with Zumba. Well, we've got I'm glad I can see your priorities there. Um Diane says, "And you get to spend Wednesday evenings at home." Very true. Uh Lisa says, "Afternoon sessions is great." Thank you. You're very welcome. Andrew's come back saying, "Does it fully recognize new clients?" So whenever you create a new client in Engage or Tax C, Andrew, you need to then create them in the other and then match them. So let's say you've got two John Smiths, we wouldn't want the risk of getting the wrong John Smith linked to the wrong John Smith. Um, so basically what I would suggest is you create a client in engager first because engager holds so much more data than you'll need to put into tax calc. So you might not put in pay references to tax calc. You might not put in VAT details into tax calc. So, what I would suggest suggest is when you add a new client is that you uh this this is a limited company, so we'll import them from company's house.

Okay, I've already got two of these on here, but what's the matter? Um, and then I'd say link with tax uh tax calc. It's already gone. Oh, they're already in tax calc. if they weren't already in Tax Calc, it would come up and you'd create a new one. Then you'd add all your details. You press save and then every time you save this client in engager or in tax calc, we cross reference all the data to make sure we've got all the data. So if you put in a new address in engager, that would go to tax calc. If you put in um a new UTR number in engager or in tax calc, we would cross reference them for you.

Um CLA, if you have a service with no phases, it sends out an automatic an email automatically on the due date. How do you mark it as complete? uh you the the service won't appear on the dead on the deadlines board if it's not got a phase. You need at least one phase on it and then you can mark it as complete. Um I don't want to have to manually mark it as complete as I know the email has gone. Uh yeah, that that's not what the services were really built for. Cla, you're kind of you're you've done a great thing. you found a way to automate emails. Um, but the which is great in the short term, but actually in the long term you can't complete the job to move it on. Um, the only option you'd have is to go to clients.

No. Right. So if I go to clients, you could um select them or select a subset bulk actions, edit the client or service service, choose the service you want to edit and then choose change the due date and then submit and that will change it for everybody. Um, but yeah, it you've created a mess by trying to buy trying to strongarm a service to do something it wasn't really set up for. Um, I get why you've done it and love it, but that is the downside of how you've that's the in the short term it it works. It's brilliant. In the long term, you've created a bit of a mess without realizing it. Um, but one I can that you could easily fix. Uh but yeah, brilliant. Thank you, Cla. Um Daffy says it's easier to concentrate at this time of day. Very much true. Uh and will you be integrating with Work Hero? I don't know at the moment. I've not got any updates on that. I know Tax Calc and Work Hero have got a big integration going on. Uh there's not been any real discussions as to whether that will reach into Engager in the future or not at this time. Um but we've certainly not made any commitments or plans for it. Right. Thank you everybody for turning up today. Hope this has been a fantastic session for you. As I say, this live session will go into the uh help center in the next couple of days. Um and you can watch it all back. And yeah, hopefully I'll see plenty of you here again next Wednesday at 1:00. I hope you all have a fantastic week and that you uh have a wonderful weekend when it comes. I'll see you all next Wednesday. Bye-bye.