Our favorite timesaving micro automations

How efficient is your tech stack? Is it set up so automations are, well, automatic?

We surveyed members of the Intuit® Tax Council and here are their favorite timesaving micro automations.

Dawn Brolin, CPA, CFE—Powerful Accounting LLC: This one is easy … Bookkeep for all e-commerce and other businesses using payment methods such as Stripe, PayPal, Square, and others.

Diana Crawford, CPA—Crawford, Merritt & Company: We use Calendly for scheduling and SmartVault for an online portal:

• Calendly saves the time of leaving messages and the back and forth of who’s available when.
• We implemented SmartVault in January 2020.  I’m not sure how we worked remotely without it, and we certainly wouldn’t have made it through the pandemic as well as we did without it. With clients across the country, it is easy to work with clients from anywhere.

Al-Nesha Jones, CPA, MBA—ASE Group: We teach our clients to use the “Mark as Done” feature in Intuit Link. It seems so tiny, but it cuts down on so many “Are you ready for us to begin working on your tax return?” emails! We don’t start a tax return until we know that the client has completed their organizer and uploaded their documents. We’ll review Link for any questions or comments they make, but we don’t begin work until they say they’re done. This helps us to prioritize the returns to prepare first and also reduces the amount of “touches” needed to get the tax return across the finish line. 

We also set up workflows in Calendly to auto-confirm our meetings with clients. This has saved my admin hours each month of calling and emailing clients to confirm their calls. It also tremendously decreased the number of “no-shows.”  We also use it to automatically send clients a reminder to schedule their next advisory call shortly after the last call. And because we’ve set the availability up in Calendly in advance, they can schedule up to 6 months in advance, and can only schedule on the days/times we make available.

John Jordan, CPA PA: We have been using RightTool for QuickBooks® Online this year, and it has really improved our bookkeeping productivity by allowing us to be more efficient. The browser extension lets us navigate QuickBooks Online faster using a customized menu, and they have added short cuts, embedded links, and other tools to solve the most common issues accountants face when working in QuickBooks Online. It has made fixing accounting errors so much faster with their bulk delete feature.

Kristen Keats, CPA—Sherwood Tax & Accounting: Karbon has been the biggest game changer. We can keep track of our projects, and there are automators to move it to the next team member so nothing falls through the cracks. It also has a time-tracker that we use for capacity planning for the following year. 

Tatiana Tsoir, CPA—Linza Advisors: I signed up with Ignition last fall, and just recently ignition has been added to Zapier, which was AWESOME because it made our onboarding process so much easier and faster. We’ve connected through a zap, Ignition to Tax Dome and Basecamp:

• 1—A new proposal is signed in Ignition.
• 1.1—The team member gets a reminder to login and create all the tasks on the engagement letter (recurring tasks).
• 2—A new to-do thread is created in Basecamp, in Tax Prep to-do lists for the business.
• 3—A new to-do thread is created in Basecamp, in Tax Prep to-do lists for the individual main taxpayer.
• 4-—Create a new main contact in TaxDome.
• 5—An email is sent to my Client success manager with 10 steps to create other items manually.

I cannot wait for TaxDome to add more functionality so that it creates a new account(s).