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Weekly Live Session - September 2, 2026

Johan was back hosting this week's Engager Live after Andy T covered the previous session, and used it to demo two features currently in testing: a new user-guiding setup checklist for first-time configuration, and the much-anticipated deals prospect form, which turns website, social and QR-code enquiries into deal cards automatically. He also covered ad hoc PDF letter templates with placeholders, a tool for prospecting newly formed companies, and where best to log client notes.

Key takeaways

  • A new setup checklist is coming that guides new users step by step through setting up their practice, inviting team members, setting up services, creating a first job and adding clients, with a Need help panel bringing the help centre into Engager itself.
  • The deals prospect form (in testing, expected live within a week or two) lets you build branded lead-capture forms for your website, social media or a QR code; each submission automatically creates a prospect (or links to an existing client) and a deal card, with reporting on views, starts, submissions and abandonment by source.
  • Deal defaults let you set rules for form submissions -- who owns the deal, the follow-up window (1 day to 2 weeks), priority and an optional manual fee -- applied to every form for now, with per-form rules planned for a later phase.
  • Deals functionality (board, pipeline, reporting and prospect forms) is currently free while in testing; the eventual plan is to charge 15% of your monthly subscription fee once it's out of testing, with no date yet confirmed.
  • You can build ad hoc PDF letter templates with your own placeholders (client name, business name, custom text) under Settings > Document design > Document content, including your own letterhead, front cover and footer.
  • For a contact who runs two separate businesses with two different email addresses, add them as a contact twice (once linked to each business) rather than trying to hold two emails against one contact -- contacts themselves are free, only clients you actively service are charged.
  • There is no reliable way to track MTD IT submission status for individuals from outside HMRC (unlike company data), since that information isn't public; a company-formations data tool was suggested instead for finding new prospects by postcode or industry.
  • There's currently no way to link a specific email or communication directly to an individual job card -- it's on the ideas list, but for now use the client-level communication log, job notes, comments, or the general remarks field depending on what you're trying to track.
  • The next Engager Weekly Live falls on the same week as the Edinburgh Fusion event (Thursday, at Dynamic Earth), with the regular Wednesday session still running as usual that week.

Full transcript

Good afternoon everybody. Hope you are all well. If you can say hello in the comments to confirm that you can a see me and b hear me that would be wonderful. Fantastic. Chris says afternoon Johan can see and hear you. Sarah's here. Good evening. Uh good afternoon Sarah. See still used to these being in the evenings. This is still catching up with me. Um still adjusting after three years of evening sessions. We're still getting there with the idea of it being an afternoon. Uh Joe Black says hello. Kathy says hello and yes. K good afternoon. Good afternoon K. Angela says C equals yes. Here equals yes. Lovely. Thank you. Angela Miriam loud and clear. Wonderful. Robert Newman all good. Shelley Oland. Hello. John Morgan good to see you. Emma D. Someone's Firefly. Michael Taylor says hello Johan. Paul Ingrams, good afternoon. Uh Sarah said, I nearly said evening. Brilliant. Wonderful. Loads and loads of people here. As Paul Ingram says, old habits die hard. Okay, guys. Hello and welcome to Engager Live. This is your weekly show where I go through everything that's new in Engager, what's coming up, what we're working on, and testing. And I also spend a considerable amount of the time going through all your questions. So, to make sure I can keep up with all of your questions, cuz there's like 78 of you here at the moment, um, please put your questions into the Q&A box. If they go into the webinar chat, the chances are I will miss them. So, throughout the show, please put everything into the Q&A box. And in the Q&A box um go to uh you to find the Q&A box, it's either on the bottom of your panel, a Zoom, or it might be in under more, which is a big circle with three dots in it and the word more written under it. And then the Q&A will be in there and it's a Q&A with a speech bubble above it and a question mark. So, please put everything into this and then I can make sure I can go through those comment uh through those questions. I can answer them as I go, mark them as answered and we don't miss anything. So, we've got a lot to go through today. So, I'm going to crack straight on and I'm going to remember to share my screen this week because the other week I totally forgot. And apologies for not being here last week and Andy T having to do a somewhat wonderful job with you all. Um, I managed to double book myself on the second ever version of an afternoon version of this um, show. So, Andy T very kindly stepped in to uh, cover it and take you through all the releases we launched last week as well. Wonderful. If you can just confirm in the chat that you can see the uh, shared shared screen that would be wonderful. Yep. Yep. Fantastic. Good start. You see we after 3 years we might actually get professional at doing this right. So in engager we are currently testing two brand new features. One most of you probably won't worry about straight away um but is there and we'd love to get your feedback on how whether that would have this new feature would have helped you um in setting up your engager in the first place. So if you could have a play with it when it goes live. Uh I don't know when this is going to go live. It's probably next week, end of next week. Um, we'd love your feedback just from a point of view of how you feel that this new feature would actually have helped you when you first started using engage. Okay. So, the first thing we've got is this quick start like setup checklist. So, basically we've got user guiding coming into the product. So the idea is that we are going to help guide you through doing things that you've not done before. So there's now going to be this new option on the side here. Let me just get rid of another option that I've got blocking my view. No, that didn't help. Give me two seconds. I've got another button blocking my view. There we go. Right. So we've got this new bit on the left right hand side of the screen called need help. I can click on that and that opens the help center and it takes you through various different things. Um, and it's searchable as well. So, we're bringing the help center into engager instead of a separate tab. But what we're also doing is when you first log in, when we first release this, we're talking you through how to do things. So, set up your practice. Oh, I want to do that. And it will tell you, right, click on your profile, click on settings, then it will tell you to go on to information. And basically it will take you through each area you need to work do to set up for the first time. I'm going to end that there quickly. The other options are invite your team members, set up your services, create your first job, and begin adding your clients. So these are things that we're going to keep adding to. And as new features release, we're going to build user guiding. So when a new feature comes out, it'll be there ready to talk you through how to do it for the first time. If however when this releases you don't want this popup at all then please click on and say do not show again and click on are you sure you don't want you want to quit the setup checklist. Yes. And that's it. It won't show up again providing you don't reset your cookies uh and your cash because if you wipe your cookies and cash then the system doesn't know you've told us to ignore it. So it might pop up again after that. But if anytime you need to, you can click on need more help and you can find options here. So that's our user guiding that's going to be getting released in the next update. Um, so remember guys, questions into the Q&A box. I can see some bits coming in on the chat, but I will lose track of them by the time I get to them. So if you want to ask me a question, please put in the Q&A box. Um, so the next one, this is the big one. We have got the deals prospect form coming live in the next week or two. Uh, I'm currently testing it uh in my firm. I've been testing it since Saturday and it's a little bit clever. So, we've always got our deals. We've already got our deals board, right? Um, what we're now bringing into settings under deals is your prospect form and your prospect form deal defaults. So, what we're going to do this is we're going to do the deal defaults first. And basically this is telling the system when a com when a prospect form is completed by a prospect on my website, on my social media, they've scanned a QR code, whatever it is, you're going to be able to uh this is what the system's going to follow these rules. So you're going to create a um a rule basically. So what I would suggest is I would call mine form name because you can have number of forms. So, you could have a form that is about for getting leads for a tax inquiry special offer that you're doing. Maybe you're doing a deal on payroll and you've put some a form together in a QR code or a leaflet. Maybe you're handing business cards out at an event and you want to put a QR code on. So, like these are my business cards. I don't know if you're going to see that.

Not easily because the background keeps kicking in. So these are my business cards and they've got a QR code on them. Now that takes you to my LinkedIn, but you could put a QR code onto your business cards. So that form might be called business card inquiry. So you can track that. Then you might go dash uh first name space surname. And basically that means when a deal gets created cuz they've completed your form, it will be called the name of the form and then the first name and surname of the person. You can add other stuff here, but these are the placeholders that we've created for now. Let us know what else you want on here these placeholders and we can look at building those out. Then we can select who is going to re is the owner of this deal. So we'll say say it's the boss. We're going to set follow up for either one day, 3 days, 1 week or 2 weeks after the created date. I say one day. We want to follow up. These these are opportunities to sell our services. We want to follow them up quickly. And how quickly do we normally close our deals? Well, I normally try and get my deals closed within 2 weeks. We can set a priority. So, this all deals coming in will be this priority. We can set a manual fee if you want or you can just leave it as zero until you've had that inquiry conversation and worked out what it's actually worth. And then you press save. So, that's just setting up the the rule for the when an inquiry form's completed. What we're going to look at is then building out different rules for different forms. This is just our first stab at this. So, it's one set of rules covering all the forms. Um, and then if we go back to settings, our other option is a prospect form. So, you can have as many active forms as you like. And you so you could have one on your website, you could have one that goes on as a URL for Facebook posts, LinkedIn, whatever you want. Or you could have one form that can be tracked from different places. So it's entirely up to you. Um like I've got a my uh one of my firms, Root Growth, they sponsor a event every summer in the local area. So, we're going to have a QR code built that will that when someone scans that we it will go to a specific form which tells us this is the event that this inquiry came from cuz that way we can start tracking our return on investment. Look at us all being business related, business-like. So, we're going to create a new form bit like document creation. You're going to see what's happening on the right by doing stuff on the left. So, we're going to create a new form. So we'll call it website inquiry or in fact let's call it just a general inquiry because we're going to

so we're going to call it general inquiry. Okay. Um so that's the name of the form that we see internally.

Um form title. So we're going to this is the name that's going to appear at the top of the form. You can put a description in here. uh please fill out this form for telling us what services you're interested in and the team will reach out to you soon. Okay, so that's there. I can decide if I want that to the left or the right or the center. I've got the ability to add titles. So, we've got your details. That's what's here. Then we've got name, first name, surname, and email. They're mandatory. You need to get those so you can do the inquiries. And then you can create as many different fields here as you want. Okay. So, we've got company name, mobile, maybe I want the mobile next to the telephone number. That just feels better to me. Uh maybe I want client type before the client name. Then I can go through services and I can add as many different services onto this. Now, the reason we've done it this way is I don't know about you, I've got 30 or 40 odd services. The client doesn't need to know that. This is an inquiry. We just want the client to give us a a feel of what they're looking at. So, we can try and assign this deal to the right person to track. And then you can have custom questions. So, we've put in a couple of defaults here. What's your annual turnover? Who is your previous accountant? Maybe you think that's a bit direct. It's like, um, have you worked with a previous with accountant an accountant before or a bookkeeper? If so, why are you looking uh for a new provider? So, basically, we're trying to work out who what's what's their background? But you can add as many questions here as you want. And it can either be a question or information. So, if it's information, so if I go down here, if I make this information, it just becomes a block of text. If it's a question, it has the an option for them to put an answer in. Okay? And these are all enabled, disabled. Uh you can enable and disable whole sections. So if you don't want to ask what services they want, you don't have to. Um consent. Do you want to give them the ability to consent to marketing? Of course we do. We want to be able to reach out to these people afterwards, don't we? So I'm even going to make that a required thing that they must tick this uh they must uh say yes or no to this. Um, but you don't have to put it there if you don't want to. Um, then we've got branding. Well, we're going to use the company logo and I want it at the center. So, that's going to be up here. Look, my practice is there. I can go dark mode. I can tell it to adapt to the browser setting that the user is using. Um, I can make my logo left, right, or center. I can pull in all the colors from my logos and make it multiple colors. I can get rid of a few of these if I want to. So, you're making this literally suit you.

And then when we get down to here, you can even choose the background colors here. So, I might get rid of that background color and it goes a different color. Again, I can pull more colors in from my logo or I can add a custom color. Absolutely. Design it as you see fit. Then we've got publishing. So this is where you either save it and that's a draft. So it's not it's not live, it's just saved. You can publish it, you can unpublish it, and you can just cancel this whole thing and get come out of here entirely if you don't want to save it whatsoever. You just playing with it for the sake of playing with it. So I'm going to publish this. And that's it. It's live. Okay. So we've now published it. So, you've now got a URL, a web address for this. But what's really clever is if you tell us where you're going to put it. So, are you going to put on your website? Are you going to put it on LinkedIn on social media? Is it going in an email campaign? Is it going to be a QR code? Or is it going to be for something else? So, if I click on, oh, it's on my website, it's now copied that. And it has a special bit of code at the end that tells us where it's being put. So, we can track this. Now, if I want to unpublish this, I can click unpublish. So, let's say it was it was only a 30-day special offer. If you didn't sign up in that 30 days, you don't get the special offer. You could then say, right, when I when someone clicks on this link after I unpublish this, I want them to get a message. And that message is, "Thanks for clicking through on our recent offer. Unfortunately, the offer is now closed, but if you'd like to reach out to us about other services, please click here." And you could put another URL link to take them back to your general form. And done. And that means that when someone clicks on that link, old link, they get a instead of just a, oh, it can't be found, they get a little nice landing page saying uh that message that you've just put in there. So that's how you build your form. Dead simple, right? Then we need to know how how are these forms performing. So if we go to deals and we click on reports, there's now a new prospect form reports. So in here I've got my each form. I've got this form here. I can see either 30 days, 60 days, 90 days since published or a custom date range. I can see how many times the view uh forms been viewed. I can see how many for times they've been started, how many submissions I've had, how many have abandoned, and what the submission rate was. I can also see right whether it was viewed on LinkedIn or social media, whether it was viewed as a QR code website. I can see all of that because I've put the copied the right links to the right places to track them properly. And that's the benefit of this. And we can see what percentage of people have started filling out the form. And we can see what percentage submitted it successfully and where it was all accessed from. And we can also see who submitted the forms once they pressed submit. We can't see if John partly filled out a form and gave up. What we can what we will be able to see though is when John has submitted the form and you're going to be able to report on all of this. As per usual with pretty much everything in engager, you can export all this data out as well to use it and manipulate it however you like. Um but yeah, so that is forms for deal prospects. It's coming live very soon. We're in testing um at the moment and we will let you know when this is going to go live. So, I've got quite a few questions on this already. So, I'll start going through that. But, if you've got any other questions, guys, stick them in the Q&A box and I'll come back to them in a moment.

So, Jennifer, I'm going to come back to your question in a minute because it's on a different topic. Uh Sarah, it would be good to track where they have come from. Facebook, Google, etc. Not sure if that's on the agenda. It's there. It's live. It's working. Trust me, I'm playing with it in my firm. So, yeah. Um Paul, will there be a code link we can add to our website? Yes. So, that URL code, uh Paul, if you put that onto into a button on your website, it'll open a new tab with the form there ready for you. or you depending on what your website provider is, you might be able to take that uh URL code and embed it as a form in your website. So, it depends on your website provider uh what you can do with it. Uh but I've I've definitely got it embedded in my website. It's working very well. Um Paul done that one. Can they choose multiple services? Yes, Sarah. They can tick as many services as they like and that information comes through on the deal card. So you can see that can the deal forms be linked to services in Engager rather than manually creating them on the form again. Same for some of the questions that might relate uh not at this time Chris. So we we looked at it some firms have got 150 services. So you don't want to list all of those. you just want the kind of a a generic kind of direction on a form as to which direct what what type of services are they looking for. So that's why we've kept it really high level at this point. This is just phase one. We will of course go forwards with this um and take on more feedback and adapt it and evolve it further. Um,

Nikki, when I complete a quarterly client fee review and the price changes, do I resend both the proposal and the letter of engagement? I'll come back to that in a minute. Nikki, Sharon, is it possible to get HTML code to embed the form onto our website instead of our generic contact form, a contact us form? It's not HTML code, Sharon. If you give that URL code though to your website provider, they'll be able to embed it. I've done it myself. It's actually really simple. Um, and if they've got a HTML base, they'll be able to embed it into the HTML code to then work make it work.

Uh, Claire, where does the data go that is entered into the form? So, as soon as a form's completed, a new deal card will be created. I've not got one here to actually show you, but basically, we'll what we do is first of all, we create a prospect in the client list for you. If it's a client that's already with you, we check by the email address. We won't create a new prospect because we want to don't want to duplicate them. We'll we'll create a deal associated to that client. So, you'll get a deal bought card will turn up in here and it will be linked to either a prospect or a client depending on if they're new to you or a current client uh or an archive client. If an archive client comes back, we'll find that as well. And you'll also get a notification that a new deal has been created and assigned to you. Hopefully that answers that question. Um, is there a page for after they filled out the form? At the moment, I I show mine as a quick quote rather than uh So, Sarah, there's a there is a page for when they filled the form out. And literally, it's just a a uh confetti animation saying success. We've got your form. We'll be in touch with you shortly. We're looking at how way we can give you guys more access and control over that. So, you can put in different wording and stuff. At this time, it's not going to be doing quotes and stuff.

Um,

Claire, does it get updated to the prospect and then it's converted to a client if successful? Yes. So, as I've just said, Cla, once that form comes in, if it's a brand new person that's an email address isn't on the system, we create a prospect for you and then you can create a letter of engagement and stuff for them with that and we create a deal card. If it's someone that's already a client or was a client, they're archived, so we know the email address. will create a deal card and it will be linked to their current record.

Sharon, sorry, another one. Could you effectively create a similar form for our account managers to complete when they have new prospect to provide information so we can stop using M&S forms needing to re key into engager tax calc? Uh, no, because our form the the deal form is just a free text. It's not linked to any fields in engager apart from first name, surname, and email at this time. Um, if they if your team are using MS forms, it's because you're trying to your your team's filling out the form for the client. Personally, in my in my firm, my clients fill out those forms. So, if they're doing on if the client's joining us, they complete the onboarding form. you when you register with a doctor, the doctor doesn't fill out your registration form that you as the patient fill it out and that's exactly how we work in my firm and we use engagers form tool for that Sharon so that you can review that form when it comes in select all the answers and save them without double entry uh typing open kin

uh Michelle is the deals included in the current subscription or an add-on so at the moment Deals is included in the current subscription. The plan was to charge 15% of your subscription fee for the deals board and the pipe and the reporting and the prospect form because this is costing us to host all this data and to host all the forms and keep them working. However, my understanding is we're actually going to postpone the charging of this until a later date. I don't know when it's moved to, but we're going to give you a period of time. Again, I'm waiting to be told exactly how long that's going to be um for you to use all of this free of charge so you can see the value of it. And then what we once we are charging for it, it will be 15% of your subscription. So if you've got uh five clients and you're £9 a month, this is like 92p a month for this functionality. Whereas if you've got 10,000 clients and you're paying thousand a couple of thousand pounds a month for the sub for the software, it's a couple it's £100 and it's a couple hundred pounds like it's the same. It's scalable to whatever size firm you are basically. Um but yeah, for now this is going to be a free of charge feature for you to get to use to find the value in it and see how we get on. Um Hannah, when you put a mention on deals, the mention doesn't go through to the person. Is that right? It should be they should be receiving them. Uh yes, they should be receiving them, Hannah. So if they're not, can you send that to support so we can have a look it for you, please? Chris, what happens if you are at the current license limit? Uh so because it's a prospect, it will just create prospects. Um so that's not an issue. It won't let you send a letter of engagement stuff out until you've got space for that client to go, "Yes, I want to be uh for that prospect to sign up." Um, so yeah, we will give you plenty of warning as we already do. Uh, Sharon, there is a separate onboarding form that the client fills out. It's more to capture the info and front and upfront about the client. In which case, Sharon, are they on a Teams call, Zoom call, or is this in person? cuz if they're on a call, I would suggest having engager open on one of the and typing it in as you go. Um, if they're in person, then I would carry on with doing what you're doing. Um, but why are you getting your team to fill stuff out that the client could fill out for you? like there's no the relationship's not going to fall that down just because you've not got that client's date of birth immediately and the client's you're waiting for the client to fill out the form. Um CLA so you can use a form for data collection whilst on the phone to someone who just calls in. So not a published form just an internal one. Uh no. So Cla this form will be published to your website or your social media etc. If they call in your team member could open the contact page on your website and fill it out or they can create a prospect manually and then a deal card. It's up to you how you do that. Um you could have a uh phone form where your team has a URL like a web address. they click it as a shortcut and it opens up the form. So, you know, these inquiries came through the phone like walk-in inquiries and stuff like that. So, you could do it that way. Uh Katie, if you don't want the functionality, can you opt out? Absolutely. The uh like everything we do, you've got to opt in. We don't we don't assume you want this. So, you have to turn it on and subscribe. It's like the zero uh4 pound a month zero bolt-on. We don't assume you've got zero. If you want and even if you have it, we don't assume you want the functionality. You go in and you turn it on.

Uh what what's on the plan for this for phase 2? Off the top of my head, Sarah, I don't know. We've been working on this for about a year now. So, give us a chance to actually release this. Um, this has already evolved so much since when we first came up with the idea a year ago. So things like reporting and stuff that's we've got loads and loads of ideas on this. So we've got currently loads of information about deal summaries and stuff. Uh, one deals lost deals. That's literally been there a week in live product. So there's absolutely tons we can do with it and we're just building up all the feedback so we can come up with a plan with it. Um, cool. Right, I'm going to move on to some different topics. Uh, so Jennifer has got asked a question and so has Nikki.

Um, Nikki, when I complete a quarterly client fee review and the price changes, do I resend both the proposal and the letter of engagement? And do I have to change the engagement date on the client's general info page so it shows on the proposal or does that not need does that need to remain the date they join me? Nikki, that is not a question for me. That is a question for your insurance provider and your governing body if you have one. Um, some governing bodies like the letter engagement to have the original engagement date on it. Um others like the original engagement date listed but then a date on the letter. So you can add a new field on the letter saying uh today's date for example. Other go uh other governing bodies don't care. They don't want the enga they don't care about the engagement date. They just want to know the today's date as it were. Um some governing bodies don't care if you send out a new letter of engagement. No one will want you well no one will care if you send a proposal. That's just a nice thing to do. The contract of your service is your letter of engagement. Some governing bodies and insurance companies insist that if you are to be covered, you should have uh every time you do a fee increase, you should issue a new letter of engagement and get it signed. Others don't. So, it's really not a software provider's place to tell you what is right or wrong. We are here to give you the tools. A car can go over 70 mph. It's not our It's not the car manufacturer's job to tell you whether it should or not and whether that's legal to do. It's the law and your insurance company that tells you whether it's right or wrong. So, yeah, it's not a question for us. Uh we've got the facilities to do it however you like to do it. You need to speak to your governing body and work out with them what is acceptable and what is expected by them for their supervision.

Uh Nikki says, "Ah, okay. Thank you. No problems. Um, CLA Davis, if you wanted to do a specific campaign, can you turn it on, just run that and then turn it off after when it gets to the paid version? I.e., can you opt in and out as necessary? Absolutely. You can turn on the zero bolt-on. You can turn on deal campaigns on and off as well. But I'll I'll be honest, I you're not going to find this value for money anywhere else. Even, you know, and that's when we charge. Remember, this is free for now. like to get a prospecting form that feeds into a CRM that creates deal boards for you to like people like that do this are people like HubSpot and HubSpot charges 50 plus pounds a month for the privilege of stuff like this. So if you're on if you're paying us £25 a month then you're only paying like4 quid a month for this privilege for this functionality. If you get one new customer a year while by having this turned on compared to what you were getting before this tool, you've paid for it. So I I think I worked it out in my firm. I think it was going to I need one new self assessment a year more than what I'm getting now to do this. Now we've got multiple ways of attracting new clients. So, we've got our website, we've got social media, we've got big beach flags that go to events that we're at, we've got pull-up banners, we've got advertisement in our shop window, we've got um letters that go out to newly formed businesses. Every single one of those we track independently to see which areas of marketing spend are working and getting us money and which ones aren't. So, the money you could save by knowing what is and isn't performing alone with this steel board, never mind the new customers you can get, and the time it's going to save you entering all the data is going to be phenomenal value.

Uh, right, Jennifer, please could you show us how to create a covering letter with placeholders, etc. via the ad hoc PDF? Thank you. Absolutely, Jennifer. Right. So this is when you let's say there's a letter that you normally put on with to a set of accounts um or it's a letter to the bank to reassure them that this customer is real and they have set up a new business uh whatever it is what you can do is you can have document templates in engager I go to settings document design and document content I can go into my document templates And I can create any templates with placeholders in ad hoc PDF under document design. This is where I make what I decide it looks like. So I can decide whether it's got a front cover or not. Do I want this letter to have front cover? No. Um or back etc. So oh you can design your front cover and you can turn it off document by document. So this is all in here and this is what your letter would look like with your headings and stuff. you can design all the information, decide what you're going to put in your footers and stuff. There's loads of guides in the help center here. Um, then what you do is you go to your settings and you create your templates. So, if I go into document templates, I've got loads of different templates here. Okay, so cover letter for notice a strike off for example. If I edit this, I've got all my different placeholders in here. So to create one of these from scratch at the top we can call it um accounts cover letter. No that excuse my transcription that's gone terribly wrong. Accounts

and I can put into There we go. Nice category for it. And then I can do whatever I want here. So maybe I want to go uh left center and I'm going to put in uh my firm name. Next line I'm going to put in

uh the practices

uh email address. Basically you can build this out. Um 1 2 3 I street

London etc. Then I want to go to the left. Oh no. Go to that

and I want to go to the left. So this is basically like using word. Okay. Uh dear. And then I'm going to put a placeholder in for client name. Uh let's call it name.

Uh

this letter is the covering letter to your accounts and and tax return. Please note that we need you to read and sign the uh accounts provided. Below are some notes regarding the accounts we have provided for you. If you've got any questions, please reach out to us. Basically, you can put whatever you like in here. You could put other information. You could uh this cover covering letter for the accounts and tax return for Uh so we could go name put the name of the business. Um and so b basically it's the world's your oyster and you've got all of these different placeholders. There's absolutely tons that you can build out as many different letters as you want. And then you press save. Okay. So we've now got our template. We go to our clients

and let's go to say right ABC limited. I'm going to do a cover letter for you. I'm going to go into the files. I'm going to go to the folder where I want this f letter to be saved. So correspondence might be a good place. Click on new PDF. Uh 202526 accounts. Uh, just so anyone knows it, that's not black magic. That's me using uh a software called Whisper, and I've got a shortcut on a button, which I press and hold the button, it listens to me, and it dictates it for me. Uh, Whisper Flow is what that app's called. Very cool bit of AI. And then I'm going to use the covering letter that I've just created.

um

accounts letter. Put that down there. And if I press, you know, I can then come in here and put some extra notes can be added here. Maybe I want to talk about the turnover, the profitability, the year-on-year differences. Then I can press generate. And what it will do is it will show you the letter with all your heading and stuff. It's put in the information of the firm, the email address I've asked it to. It's put in the name of the client, etc. Um, and then I can either go back to editing or I can save it as a PDF. Once it's saved, you can't edit it. It's a PDF. But you can go back to editing if you think actually I need to add some more information. Press save. Uh, do you want to notify the client? So you can notify the client there's the document there or maybe you want to say no I'm going to send it as an eside verse or whatever it is and that's there now it's done nice and easy in the client's portal ready for them to review it hopefully that helps uh there Jennifer

um Sarah a little off topic but I noticed you mentioned on your podcast that you use a tool to target new businesses on the company's in his house. Can you share the software? Don't worry if not. I know it's a little cheeky. I've searched for something like this everywhere. Um, it is formations data. Yeah, there you go. Formation data. So, basically, it's like 80 quid a month and you can ask it to surface like all the new companies formed in this date range in this postcode area. Um, or you can ask it to list all companies whose accounts are now overdue in this postcode area. Um, or you could ask it to say all the confirmation statements that are overdue in this area or in this industry or I want to see all companies who accounts are overdue with a balance sheet value of at least this, etc. So, it's a really cool tool for getting you customer data to then send letters out to. Uh, there you go. Sarah, always willing to share.

Um, AAB, can we use our own PDF letter head? Yes. So what you do at AFAB is in settings you go to the ad hoc PDF part of document design and scroll down and you can add your own images and stuff to these PDFs. So you can create your you can rebuild your headers and footers for your documents here and that way you're using your own. Uh Sarah says that's amazing. Thank you very much. No problems. Louise, we have an existing client uh as a contact in engager who is setting up a new business with a separate email address. They'd like communications for each business to go to respective email addresses. Is there any way around this in engager as the contact can only have one email address? Put the contacts on twice, Louise. So, I'd have Bob Smith related with Bob Smith at ABC Limited.com. I'd relate him to abcimited.com. I might also relate him to xyzlimited.com his second business just so he has one portal login and you just tell look Bob I'm going to send emails to the right email address but for your login so you don't have to have two login just use this email address and I'll we'll list it all on one side for you. So I've got my Bob Smith with bobabcited.com email address. Then I'd have bobsmith@xyz.com

as their email address. And I'd relate that contact just to the XY Z Limited company. That way you've got both contacts on there. You're emailing Bob on the right email address, but you've also made it nice and easy for Bob to only be logging in with one portal instead of two. Hopefully that answers that question, Louise. And remember, contacts aren't charged. You can have as many contacts as you like. They're free of charge. It's just clients where you're doing services for them that are charged. Uh Miriam, on Sarah's subject, is there a similar tool to search for MTD it submission overdue individuals? Uh there's not. That information is not public knowledge, Miriam. So the only people that know that information is HMRC and they don't make they don't list that because they're individuals. So there's a huge GDPR thing going on there. Um, so there's no way of targeting, but I like I like your thinking, Miriam. Um, so we in my firm, I use that formation data app to send letters out to newly formed companies and companies that have passed the accounts deadline date. Um, we do it every Friday. We run the report every Friday for the last seven days and we post on a Saturday. Um, and we've had three new clients off it and we've only been doing it a month. Um, so yeah, we're we're we're relatively happy with it. So we've had three clients and we've sent about 100 letters. So a 3% response rate, which in the grand scheme of of marketing, that's actually really good. Like cold emails, you're lucky if you get more than 5%. So 3% response rate to letters is really good. Um, and Miriam says, "Haha, you're right with my thinking. Thanks." No problems, Miriam. I like the idea of targeting people that we know haven't filed a tax return. Um, done. Robert Newman, do you post the formation data inhouse or use an external service? Uh, no, we do it in house. I've got um so at Route to Growth, one of our accounting firms, we've got a high street shop and we wanted to open on Saturdays because we figured tradesmen and stuff Monday to Friday 9 till 5 doesn't really work for them. So we thought, right, we'd open on Saturday, but we'd need to make sure somebody's in on Saturday. Um actually responsible ownership, we don't really want one person lone working in the office all day, so we ought to have two people in. So, Mandy, our practice manager, has a day off during the week and she works Saturdays. And then we've got Alfie, who is a uh 17-year-old college student who loves technology, is interested in the accounting world. So, he works Saturdays uh in the office, and one of his jobs is to mail merge all of these letters, print them, envelope them, and take them to the post office. Um, and yeah, and then he also works uh 3 days a week during school holidays as well. Um, so yeah, no, we do it all in house because we needed to find stuff to do on a Saturday uh while the office is open for potential walk-in clients. Again, actually been quite successful. We've had quite a lot of new walk-in clients because we open on a Saturday, which for two years before that wasn't happening because it was open 9 till 5 Monday to Friday. Um, and again though, we track all of that. We have like a QR code team scan to fill out a form, which is now a engager form. Uh, so we know, oh, this person came from a walk-in. But we've always tracked our sources of where new clients have come from or new inquiries even have come from. Brilliant. Uh, right, final 15 minutes, guys. Anything else I can help with?

um thoughts on the feedback. Uh what's your feedback on the deals prospecting form? Um let me just go to forms and I can show you what it actually looks like once we've got a form that's live. Uh so this is unpublished. So let's go in and publish it and save. and I'm going to copy the URL.

Now, remember, if this looks terrible, it's because I've not done anything with it. So, there we go. When someone puts in this URL, whether they're scanning a QR code, clicking a button, or this is built into your website, this is what it looks like. They can type their details in.

Uh, so yan@test.com.

No, it didn't get the first bit.

Um,

uh, maybe I want I'm going to be a limited company test LTD.

I'm going to have some tax advice and I want to talk about VAT and some payroll.

Um, any additional information? I'm going to say I've got a five a £50,000 turnover. Uh, he was never responding.

Uh, would I like to receive updates? Oh, yes. Now, we've also got this verifying thing to make sure we're human. Okay. So this the software is checking that this person is going to be human based on multiple things like mouse activity and stuff. Um so it makes sure you're not getting spammed by robots. Submit. There we go. And that's what this looks like at the moment. So you get a nice little confetti. Submitted successfully. And if I go in here and re Oh, I've got two. I've got a thing. Look. Oh, look. I've got a prospect form returned for a new client for Yohen Gori and I've got a G deal general inquiry for Yohori. So I click on here. There's my prospect form. Yo has been created as a it says contact only. It's going to be a prospect when this goes live and there's a new document thing called prospect form. It shows you the form. And if you if they filled out multiple forms, they would all be here. So that's looking very nice. And if you then go to the other notification, my contacts been created. Um, so yeah, so that all the information there. Um, so as I say, this is already still in testing. There's several things we've already flagged that we want to change before it goes live. Um, but the concept is there. Um, John Morgan, hi Johan. When setting up pro prospects forms and selecting a follow-up of one day's time, is the actual follow-up manual or can this be automated, too? No. The follow-up is you ringing that contact. It's you getting hold of them. Um, you don't want to automate that. You need to do it um and speak to them basically. Uh Sarah, so from there, would you send a quote? Sarah, I would I never quote without speaking to them and primarily because that's my first part of my AML process is are they say are they okay? Do I do I even want to not send this person a quote? The amount of inquiries we get where I go we're not for you. I'm not even going to waste my time sending you a quote. You've given me red flags about AML. You're clearly after a bargain service. You don't value me or my time or my team's skill. like we we don't just send quotes to anyone in my firm. We only send quotes if we have qualified that person. So from that point, we would reach out and schedule a call or a meeting with them or have a call there and then and discuss how we can help.

Uh Miriam, general question, not engager. What's your magic strategy/tool for collecting records for MTD? It's a mission for clients like taxi drivers, carers, small landlords, etc. Spreadsheets have not worked for me. Um, I don't find I don't think the technology actually matters, Miriam. Uh, I've got clients that are great with spreadsheets. I've got clients that are great on apron. Um, I've got clients that are using Zero or QuickBooks very very well or free agent. What matters is the coaching of the client to get them into the routine of it. So, we were we've been flagging people, emailing people to get them ready before the deadline. We send an automatic reminder say we've got a week until the month end. Why don't you get a head start on your bookkeeping? Um, we've done we've been doing it from bank statements as well. So, we use analytics to go and email the client to get the bank statement. That's actually quite easy. That makes life quite a lot easier. Um, and then it it's the old carrot and stick. If they aren't going for the emails and they aren't doing stuff, then they get a stick and they get beaten. At some point, HMRC are going to use a stick against them. So, if they keep missing deadlines, they're going to start getting fines and penalties. You can only do so much. I think as an industry we we we hold ourselves accountable and feel guilty for not filing something when it's completely out of our control and we have to accept these people are adults functioning adults or not is a different matter. These people are adults and they're responsible for their own tax affairs. We are there to help them but we can't do it all for them if they're not giving us the information. So we have to kind of build a certain level of I did what I can and they've let themselves down. Like we've got uh so in engager we have a great communication log. We've got we've got a complaint in my phone that came in and they're you know we've now gone through the whole communication log and it's very clear that they've already out outlined all of their flaws in an email in emails over the time and they've accepted oh this was my fault that's my fault. They've now decided it wasn't their fault, but we've got it in writing. It was. So, you just have to accept people are people. You can't help everybody, no matter how hard you try, and not to stay up at night feeling guilty for it. Um, hopefully that helps. Uh, Miam, I've tried all the chasing. They're completely unresponsive. Then what can you do? What can you do? Like if they're not responding, they're not responding.

Um, Katherine Riby off topic, but can you demo account can your demo account show the integration with Adfin? I've just seen an on the integrations page that it's mentioning new features coming soon. Do you know when they are expected to come in? Don't worry, if not, I'll speak with them at Accountex in a few weeks. Um, actually, I think that's us needing to remove the wording. I think we've already done all the features that we were planning. Um, but I'll check with the team and stuff for you, Catherine, and we might just need to change our wording. We might have just not got I think we built it for the direct debits uh mandate request. So, you could request a mandate and then we built it so you could link clients between zero or QuickBooks and Admin and us. I think we just never removed that wording. So, yeah, good spot, Katherine. Sorry about that.

Um,

I I'm going to butcher your name. I'm so sorry. I'm terrible at names. AFTAB. Hopefully I got that remotely close and I've not caused offense. Could you please clarify where we can view all communications linked directly to a specific job? We know we can see interactions under the overall client activity feed, but we're looking for a central place or filter to see emails, notes, and messages attached specifically to a client individual job card. Is there a built-in feature or recommended workflow for this? So what you can see is um so I go to a job

you can see internal communication which you put here through comments. What you can't do is link an email to a job yet. That is something we're looking at. It's on the ideas list but it's not there yet. See, as you've said, you can link all your clients emails to the communication log here, but at the moment, there's no way tagging that to a certain job or certain task. Um, so you can't then see the history of emails related to a specific job. It's on our list and we are looking at it. It's on the ideas list uh and stuff. Um, so yeah, Sarah, can you create a task from an email though? You can. Yes. So Sarah says you can create a task from an email. you can, but it doesn't always track uh that doesn't help them link that to the job like the self assessment and stuff which is what uh AFAB is asking for.

Um Ree, uh I've been using Engage for the past nine months in a small practice, myself and one staff member. I'm really struggling with consistency of where client notes should be entered. Should it be comments section or the job, the communications tab or the memos tab? How do you manage this in my practice? Um, there's no right or wrong answer, Ree. There's a few things to bear in mind. So, if I go into the client, right, I can log emails and meeting notes and calls in the communication log. In memos, I can log as many memos as I like, but you that's no good if you don't look at them. If you go to jobs, let's say, so this is the annual self- assessment client, okay? Uh job, you could log a something that go as a note that turns up on every version of this job. So every year this job turns up, there's a remark here. That's your notes. So maybe it's a don't forget to ask for this savings account interest because uh or something like that. Something that you won't remember unless it's written down here. I'll show you to where to enter that in a second. The other option is to put notes here. Now these notes they go onto the audit log but they disappear when you close this job and you open the next one or the next one opens automatically. The other place is comments. This originally was built for internal communications and tagging each other in it internally. But in my firm, we often put in a comment like um couldn't complete due to missing info. I'd save that and then I'd complete the job and on the next version of this job that will be there. So it acts like a timeline. That's a really good thing for like bookkeeping like couldn't do this month's bookkeeping because we weren't sent the information. I can as soon as I come on to this job again I can see right last month we couldn't complete the bookkeeping because we weren't doing the information. So I need to work further back than norm. So there are the places you can add notes. It's really deciding what's going to work best for you and your team member and how that all flows as to whether how you make it work for you. Um, if you want to put stuff in the general remarks bit, you go to the client, you go to service detail and you put it in the general remarks box here as I say. So, this is like don't forget to ask for the bank statement for this savings account. Um, client had this uh has a pension here. Things that the client might forget to tell us about, we need to remind the client, don't forget this. um or we deal with this income in this way each year for this client like nuances to that client. That's what this is really for. Hopefully that helps a bit, Ree. But as I say, we basically there's multiple options. You need to decide with your colleague how you want to do it and you need to become do it do that as routine. That's got to be your habit and your routine to do it. Hopefully that makes sense. Uh right. And he says, "Thank you. No problems at all. We are out of time for today. Um but hopefully today's session has been helpful. Um lots of stuff coming out, lots more stuff being built at the moment. The pace is picking up with the development team, not slowing down. Um I will be back here next week." No, I won't. I lied to you all. Uh yes, no. Yes, I will. Sorry. I will be back here next week for the weekly live. The reason I thought I might not be is because next week is the Edinburgh Fusion event. Now, Fusions events normally happen on a Wednesday, but this one's happening on a Thursday, which is causing me all sorts of problems. Um so, next Wednesday, we'll be here at half one to go through any more updates and to answer all of your questions. And then next, uh and then next Thursday is the Edinburgh Fusion event. If you've not booked in, Google Edinburgh Fusion event fusion event or reach out to support and we'll send you a link. Um, there's over 100 people booked for that event already. So, if you are within, I don't know, an hour of Edinburgh, you know, hour and a half on the train or something, why not come down, join us at Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh, which is a fantastic venue. Uh you will get coffee, pastries in the morning, lunch uh and refreshments in the afternoon. We've got some great sessions about AI and various other great speakers like area owners coming up. Um there'll be some demos of each product for tax and engager. There'll be some updates on where we're going with each product. Um, and it's your opportunity to network with over a hundred other accountants and bookkeepers that are using engager or andor tax calc. Um, I will be there. I'm really looking forward to it. The fact that we've got well over 100 people subscribed to an event in Edinburgh in Scotland even is phenomenal. The amount of times I've seen events happen in Scotland after people in Scotland complain there's nothing in Edinburgh or nothing in Scotland and then when an event happens no one turns up. We're really pleased with the numbers and it looks like it's going to be a fantastic event. And Rebecca says the Birmingham one was really good. Thank you Rebecca. We're pleased you enjoyed it. Yeah. Hopefully that was a good session guys. I'm going to leave you to it. have a wonderful weekend when it comes. Uh Chris says, "Do you ever come down south?" So, we normally do uh we'll try and do Edinburgh, we've done Birmingham, we've done Manchester, and there will be another London one coming up probably in February because November, December is just so busy. Um sorry, Cla asked that. Sorry Chris, Cla asked that. Um we are look, basically what we look at is our user map. So, we've got a map where all of our users are based and we try and put Fusion events within an hour of a majority amount of our users. Um, so more people that use our product down south, the more likely it is we will put an event down left. Um, so yeah, hope you all have a fantastic week and a wonderful weekend when it comes. And I will see you all next Wednesday at 1:00 for Engage Live. See you all later. Bye-bye.