So what is a Checklist and why use them

A Checklist is exactly what you think it is, a Checklist - it’s there for you or a member of your team to work through a process one by one, ticking off boxes methodically and without missing any critical steps.

A Checklist acts almost like a sanity check for the jobs that you need to do.

Imagine you’re filing your 37th Self Assessment for that day in January - you’re about to mark the job as complete but then the Checklist grabs you and forces you back into that Self Assessment - maybe you’ve missed something, maybe the Client actually had some Self Employed income that year - You’ve been on auto-pilot but the Checklist has acted as your safety net here. Phew!

So head back into your Checklist and review:



Similarly, Year End - you could have Juniors working through preparation and production on a set of accounts, you want them to follow YOUR way of doing things. Write these down in the form of a Checklist, one by one, helping your staff member to be compliant and build confidence moving forwards

In the example below, we’ve created a starter for 10 with what a Checklist could entail for Preparation of Year End Accounts.

What’s the difference between a Phase and a Checklist - Checklists act as your more granular level of control, versus a job phase. 

When a Phase changes, it can trigger an email to a client - keeping the Year End theme going, when you mark a Phase as being ‘awaiting records’ to ‘records received’ as an example, that Phase change can fire an email to a client to say ‘Hey, thanks for your information, we’ll aim to have the accounts completed within x weeks - we’ll let you know when they’re being reviewed’

So Phases can trigger emails to clients, Checklists are your internal measures and controls. 

Want to learn how to trigger emails based off of status changes in Phases, search for Setting Up Status Emails

Checklists sound great - where are they??

They are quite innocuous when you’re on the job itself but in the below, you can see where you can complete the Checklist. 

I love Checklists, how do I make one!

Head on over to your Global Settings as usual, on the left hand side Jobs - Checklists

Because we’re such a thoughtful bunch, we’ve created a whole series for you to play with or even start over from scratch

Simply hit Edit, then tailor yours to your practice’s standards and processes. 

In this example, we handle clients with US Dollar bank accounts - I want a failsafe so that my Juniors don’t miss this as part of the preparation / reconciliation process. 

Simply select ‘add point’ and the complete your new item

Import a Checklist

If you have a section of a Checklist that you’d like to use on another Checklist, we’ve got you covered there too - Import Points to this Section

Then select where you want to take a portion of that Checklist from then simply tick off what you’d like to import into your NEW Checklist

Custom or Tailored Checklists

You can create custom checklists against each individual client also - super handy where you have just one or 2 clients that bespoke needs so you don't want to have to run these for 99% of your client base, just the anomaly. 

What you need to do is set this at the client level - you can't create in Settings - Checklists and a global level and apply to the bespoke clients, you need to do it at the client level. 

So locate the client in question - then on the left hand side - Tailored Checklists

From here, CREATE

Add / remove your checks from the screen and then save

Just make sure to name the NEW checklist and to select that the Tailored Checklist supersedes the Generic

We don't currently have a duplicate button for you to then apply the bespoke to another similar client.