This is your way of welcoming one of your new clients into your firm. Each company will have their own way of doing things, so you can use our ideas below or keep to your current way of doing this. A good thing here though, is if you haven’t reviewed your onboarding process, get some time in and do so.

These are your first impressions so a welcome email and then 17 other emails all sent out in 24 hours, is going overwhelming and quite frankly annoying for the client - additionally, your Calls to action are being lost along the way. 

In our example, we decided to use a combination of Phases and Checklists to keep the onboarding process flowing and also be a better experience for the client.

Head over to Settings - Jobs - Services

We’re creating a NEW Service here, so select ‘add custom service’

As it’s more of an internal process, we’d recommend changing the following:

Add make sure the ‘Checklist’ is enabled

If you have features that form part of your Onboarding process that are chargeable, then obviously change this and then start building your fees and pricing in the next section. An example of this could be you register your client for PAYE / VAT etc

If that’s the case, perhaps consider creating individual NEW custom services for these, to separate them from your INTERNAL onboarding. 

Now give it a name

Phases

This is where you can start to build out your individual steps of onboarding clients - remember, you can also assign actions to certain team members and trigger emails to the client once a phase has been completed - super handy - just make sure you’ve built your custom emails first - if you’ve not done this before https://help.engager.app/hc/en-gb/articles/18592201576210-8-of-10-Enhance-Communication-with-Custom-Email-Templates 

Remember what we said earlier, we don’t want overwhelm clients as their first experience - we get it, we want to get all things done quickly so we naturally have a habit of sending out multiple requests in one go - it could look something like this in your Phases

But this means you’re doing all the above emailing and contact points in one go - we don’t recommend doing this. It’s fine to have these as your process, but we’d perhaps consider spreading these out and this is where we can look to use Checklists inside of our Phases

So we switched it up, our Phases became Days and inside these days, there will be a Checklist of actions to do. This ensures that it’s a smoother journey for the end client

Once you’ve defined your Onboarding journey and added your Phases to represent days, we need to build our Onboarding Checklist. 

Head to your Settings - Jobs - Checklists

Now you’ve created the Checklist, let’s get this turned on as a Service

Locate a new client or Prospect - then you’re looking for Section 4

Enable the service

Then we need to tell the system that it’s a one off job and enter the date that you want to complete the onboarding for the client - head to Section 5

This should now appear on your Deadlines like below:

Click INTO the job card, then you’ll see the Phases one by one and who they have been assigned too

But for this example, let’s take a look at the Checklists as well - hit the ‘+’ 

You can now see where we are at with what has been actioned on within the job so far, by looking at the checklist

Remember, when you’re following the steps and working out of the job card, you can simply fire out emails to the client as you go, then update the checklist, keeping everything in one place

So there you go!

Why not consider adding in a phase for 3, 6, 9 & 12 months as well? A catch up with your account manager is a great way to retain and instil loyalty, and also provide a next level service to your clients. 

People don’t want reactive accountants anymore - using Phases is a great way to get ahead of any niggles and show massive value to your clients. 

As always, have a play, tweak as you go and find what works. 

Don’t forget that you can assign phases to other team members and also trigger your custom emails to your client when completing the Phase.