Q&A Webinar : August 29th, 2023

[Music] welcome to the succeed with software podcast brought to you by SuiteDash today's episode is from one of the bi-weekly Q&A webinars to participate live just follow the link in the description to sign up and submit your questions be sure that you're subscribed on YouTube and following us on all social media to get the latest videos and updates about new and existing features all right so let's get started okay welcome welcome welcome everyone this is Mike I'm the founder and CEO of SuiteDash thanks for joining us here on the Q&A webinar all right so as we always do let's get everyone to

Please jump into the chat let me know that you can hear me say hi from tell us where you're joining us from and let's see who's here with questions seeking knowledge doing the work work getting your life back will help you we're helping you all that here Teresa hello from Minnesota nice to see you and Pat from Pennsylvania and Jessica from New Jersey hello hello I have some questions that you guys did submit uh on your way into the webinar during registration so we can start to look at those hello T from Delaware

Proud of myself I know all the state abbreviations uh yes so I have the questions we can do that or if you guys have questions that you just urgently want to uh that's okay we know T from Delaware let me just throw the chat up here if you have questions that you want to jump right into we can do that um what I might do is let's let take a vote first five people to vote get the that's what we will go with should we start with questions or should we look at a recently released feature so we'll let you guys vote one is questions two is feature we can do either

One and sometimes if we at the end of these sessions if we um all right we got two two versus one for questions so far all right let's start with questions and then if we have some time near the end we'll go ahead and just discuss a really recently released feature or something like that we'll try to get to everything okay all right so don don is the first one here to jump in hi Don let's see if Don um I believe Don is a are Don are you the coach coaching and content marketing I see a okay great and it's okay if I can read your question Out Loud Let's

Go ahead and move over to a an account here okay great all right Don says as a coach one of my challenges is being able to track my coaching hours for accredit accreditation this is required to verify one's experience yeah got that so at least 500 coaching hours for level two and so on level three is it possible to download events as a CSV file and is there an alternative workaround okay so don let me understand it's not we don't make it possible to download events as a CSV file because I think what not not a reason that's related to your question but

Let's get to the root of your question and see if we can identify some possible scenarios that would help you use the platform's tools to to do that okay so when you have events I think what you're trying to say is that the events are set from say 1 pm and it's an hourong event and from that export you planned to extract the number of hours scheduled with enduser clients that's my guess and I think you're going to say yes but we're waiting for the confirmation something like that Don or each event is a coaching session which

I want to be able to track got it have you seen our timers functionality Don because I think you might find that it would be a decent way to do that and it would just involve yeah just involve just starting a timer and you can associate a timer with a client a specific client or company and in the case that you one day move into a uh timed invoicing situation that is really where our timers are most um impressive in that the timers are designed to

Be able to instantly move from a completed timer this is the timer widget here so it's really easy to start all you'd have to do is just say okay see this is a coaching session you can fill that in really quickly you don't even need to assign it at the beginning you can just really quickly click this start typing and start a timer and then when you're finished with the timer uh you can assign it to a client you can add it to what we call an accumulating invoice is quite typical and that accumulating invoice will essentially keep oh sorry let me uh move the chat because behind it is where all the things I was trying to show you uh the accumulating invoice is the place where you

Can easily invoice this timer so here this one's running you could have added an hourly rate to it if you wanted you can stop this timer and then now you can invoice it really easily here or you can it's it's added to the list of course if you complete it you can easily switch timers now here you see there's a running timer it's been running for a very long time if you have one that's paused you can switch back to this one really quickly and start it um you can switch between these timers quite easily this is the one coaching session that I had started do I want to stop the current timer so there's a lot of functionality here built in and then these values especially if you add a um hourly rate before you start the timer

It will keep track of the values that you are accumulating there and then easily let you move move them to an invoice if that's your need but for you I would say look at the possibility of quickly starting a timer ending a timer and then you can uh have an accumulation of these timers that will lets you track that I don't know that's the perfect answer for you but I want to make sure you're aware of it so let's let's try that try that and if you have further questions I don't think export of events is out of the question because I see that you do say if not please add this to the road map and exports not difficult

For a CSV for us to build we just want to make sure that we built it appropriately for your needs so that's what I'm trying to understand as well so I think what you need is the duration of the event is an important part right as a column you would need some other items similar to that but you would want the title of the event the duration of the event do you also do use appointments thank you Don that's good if you use appointments uh you may find that um I don't know if you use them or not but maybe I think you're just using events at this point so good so for those of you that are not have

Not used events events work are designed to work as a follow-up mechanism typically on a schedule for clients during a sales or onboarding cycle so what that means is that if you meet someone for the first time and you U put them into your CRM you can you can add events to the uh to that record as follow-ups to remind you so the idea is that you don't have to constant L remind yourself hey I need to follow up with this guy follow up with that person follow up with that lady uh the CRM every morning will tell you what's your schedule is on your calendar uh

Based on that and in conjunction just to highlight the automation possibilities in SuiteDash event generators are designed to help you uh systematize that process okay so for example if you have a standard follow-up schedule that you design or Define something like okay I want to follow up with them in the phone call after seven days again at 14 days and then an email at 21 days this a very simple follow-up schedule you can create that as an event generator right so let's just edit this one an event generator works in the sense of

Here's um using relative due dates okay so what this means is when you add an event generator you are going to schedule this let's say we said seven days for an email seven days you're defining the number of days after this is triggered okay uh and you're setting several other things as well here based on the contact time zone you can uh Define the assign Etc so this is a pre-made a preconfigured um event generator and then when you add a new client you can apply this particular event generator or any other event generator and if say if it had seven events

On this weekly check-ins similar similar to what we just discussed the second you added that client or applied the event generator to the client that's day Zero and the relative days would be added to that day Zero so in in an example where at September 1st then your first week your first event would be automatically scheduled on September 8th then the second one on September 15th and September 22nd these would be automatically created and this lets you predefine these follow-up schedules and then apply them on the Fly and the platform will automatically schedule them for you okay that's what events are really defined for and in fact one day we may we

May inside information we may re name these to something like follow-ups because it's a little more clear and paves the way for future functionality that we are designing at this point called meetings all right so I can get into that if we need to but um are appointments exportable well no we don't have exportable appointments either Don so we we're not really we don't typically focus on exporting data out of the platform we focus more on cross-linking and cross integrating the toolkits inside the platform but I understand why you would need it it's a little bit bespoke as far as the functionality

But again please do your input is heard right now and um we will look at the possibility of making that uh doable for you not difficult just need to make sure again that we're hitting the right data points on the xboard of course that's could be work in progress not difficult okay thank you Don that's good feedback I hope it helped a little bit for you okay so I also see Jessica Jessica hello Jess Jessica is joining us from let me remember New Jersey correct all right Jessica let me look at for your questions here if you submitted any yep okay Jessica I'm going

To read your questions if that's okay uh Jessica is with an organization providing accreditation to Health Care laundry facilities interesting that's cool there's an accredit accreditation for that huh I would imagine yeah something like uh there has to be a certain type of cleanly OB obviously cleanliness stability Factor there that's probably only part of it sure it's much more yeah I'm sure it's much more complex so but that is interesting okay so the summary of questions circles how to get the contacts to have access to a company's projects public information files Etc Great and do all the

Contacts in the company that're added in the circle see others information or can we have a contact added to multiple companies without being the primary contact okay I understand so let's let's deal with the the first one first um circles yes the what what what we don't have or what what we don't enable and and properly so is that anyone in the company to be able to act on behalf of the company okay but what you can do easily is create a company dashboard where the every company member would

Be able to have access to that company dashboard and see public information which which would be defined as public custom Fields about that company okay Jessica so let's look at the uh client side here as an example so you have this user Harrison Ford is logged in and he is representing a company Millennium Falcon okay because he is the primary contact and he can act on behalf of Millennium F Falcon in the sense of submitting forms in the sense of um uploading files doing onboarding paying invoices all the things acting

As a as as a company almost as if the company was on the end of that keyboard and mouse but Harrison Ford is the primary contact in doing that on the company's behalf so so what we cannot do is allow multiple people to have that same level of access in a way that's um loose but I guess is one way to say it so yes you can have multiple people associated with the company uh but they don't all have the same type of access but what they can see if you were to design a company dashboard say for example let's go back and do something similar kind of do something on the Fly here

Uh if you were to design we'll call this company dashboard when you create a company uh we automatically create what's called a company Circle see here these Co colon circles so imagine we create a company circle from lenum Falcon this means that anybody who is assigned to the company as a primary or as what we call secondary will uh have access to resources uh Coach K I'll tell you in just a sec have access to the resources that are assigned to the circle and this is a dynamic structure which means uh someone is associated you have someone in

The company but then you take them out of the company they instantly lose all access to resources assigned to this circle and if you add someone they instantly gain and what that keeps you from having to do is go back through the 10 different pages or folders or whatever you have created as a structure and um assign the person and then go back and re unassign them and reassign a different person you do it all at one time by adding them or removing them from the circle and this is done automatically with company circles okay oh okay okay Coach K L Eva gotcha all right uh so this will be your company dashboard and the and I

Won't have time to explain how these priorities work but in this the way I'm configuring it here it will be the company okay we'll have access to this dashboard and then here you can use you can create whatever dashboard configuration you like or load one from the the uh template library but let's just call this um let just do something really quick here company information and now I'm going to just set this as a header heading one but in the content however you lay it out uh it's quite easy to use placeholders for company public information company public information these are these are custom fields that are set as

Company public can be viewed by any member of the company okay company private information this is a different type of custom field can only be viewed by the primary contact if a nonprimary contact associated with the company lands on this page they these these placeholders will return nothing they'll return blank as if they were not even there so that's just something for you to know but you could build uh these values like uh any one of these testing calculating these are all tests but uh you could build a a spectrum of custom fields that holds data about the company

And insert it into uh data layouts like this and then this let's go and save this this company dashboard can be viewed by anybody that's associated with the company and in this case we can have have Harris from here okay or the company itself and they can see this and then any data that you see that you any Dynamic data by placeholders would be replaced and inserted in this place okay I'm sorry I don't have a perfect example of this and I hope this explanation is a little bit on target as far as that goes

Uh Jessica good can anyone with access to the company see files that are shared with the company ye yes but not yes but you need to design it that way and here I'll I'll explain the way I would do that is uh probably there's a couple ways to do that through the files functionality okay so you could use the files toolkit directly and create a shared folder and share it with the company Circle okay so just in the way I talked about before if you have a shared folder let me find one here just we'll just modify it

Okay so edit the share so this is a shared folder it will be shared with everybody in this list okay um but you can also add use company circles here circles see here's the company circles so same way with as with the dashboard if I share this folder with the company Circle then everybody who is in the company Circle meaning associated with the company will have access to this to this shared folder in any F any folders and files that are inside of that okay so you that means you're sharing the files with the company Circle so that's different in semantically

Than sharing it with the company user which is the company itself which means it's would only be shared with the primary contact I hope that makes sense right so if you if you were dealing in a one-on-one business relationship with a company typically you're not going to be uh well in a primary type business relationship you won't be uh sending and revealing and interacting in a public way with every providing that company you're going to be doing it with the with your one point of contact your primary contact right sometimes those things are kind of sensitive and then and they're just for his that those that person's eyes only so there's

More than one way to do things and that the reason is because that's the practical application in most cases you're going to want to share in a private kind of way with your primary contact but there's also a way to share publicly with everybody in the company in case that you need to do that or if you really just need to create a very very specific uh Circle that's associated with only say six people at the company out of out of 20 you can create a custom Circle and and share only with those six people so there's a way to uh manipulate the system the platform to do just about anything you'd like is there an option to have more than one primary contact not yet Jessica but we do plan to add something like that in the future primary functionality uh

For that is for CPAs and bookkeepers Etc and attorneys and attorneys uh who have the need quite often to have Partners in a business for example or Partners in life um marriages have the need to have two individual users with two individual logins accessing the same exact experience um and seeing the same data so that is the use case for multiple primary contacts and it is something that we do plan to enable in the future I couldn't give you a timeline but yes as well as things like billing contacts and

Other functional type contacts that would have the ability to work in that functional way for more than one company so this is a contact that has one company but if he was the primary contact for three companies then he would be able to switch and say okay I'm currently representing Millennium Falcon but I now want to switch and represent a different company a different company a different company uh Jessica one more question then we'll jump to uh some others I think will there be in the future a way to have secondary contact to be allowed more than one company yes but only if they are a functional contact Jessica okay and I'll tell you why because we have to have this them

If we log someone in and they are part of more than one company unless they choose one of these companies we don't know say what data to show them on something like a company dashboard right so if they run into a company placeholder there's no way that we can look at that person and say okay well they're related to five companies what data do we show here so we can't logically solve that there is not a possibility there so the solution there is to only allow this type of functionality for a person who is functionally working as a functional representative of a company and in that case it it can be

Done because they'll switch into their role for company a and then switch into their role for Company B and because they use the profile switcher here we're able to now very positively identify what company they're representing at that moment and return the proper data if they are not functionally representing these companies then really there's no functional point in having them be associated with multiple companies because there's no functionality so in that case we're not too disappointed that um can't put them on like a company roster really that's all it is and so the functional side of it is

Sol is is technically possible and and planned and will be solvable in the future yeah does that make sense I hope it does it kind of made sense to me as I was saying it okay good all right let's uh let's roll up through the questions I'm gonna throw the chat back up and let's uh move through these okay good I think we are good okay uh T okay I'm in the tax industry and operate as a one-woman show you go girl with the growth I am looking for a CRM to assist with keeping the workflow going

And know where all clients stand from beginning to end of the tax return process can you briefly discuss how this can be done with the software good team all right there's a few ways that you could do this I would recommend and I I don't want to I'm not going to be able to go very very deep into this process but let's let's talk about it in sense of fundamentals circles are a key component of what we do T I'm saying t let

Me get let me try to narrow down a better better one Teresa right Teresa no okay well maybe you can help me until call we'll call it t um what I what I want to say is that for circles that's a way of identifying a type of client or that's just one level one way to look at it but it's also a way of can be a way of identifying say a stage that a client is currently in Camille okay great uh an example might be something like this SEO funnel step one SEO funnel step two step three okay so in your example we're going to call it just tax return funnel uh

Tax return workflow uh you may be able to identify say six different steps eight different steps one is an intro one is a next level one is file uploading one is you know they're in processing mode um that is a is a very good way to think about it when you break this down into your workflow you'll create a circle for each one of those and probably a circle for an overall see how there's SEO clients and then SEO funnel step one so they can be in more than one Circle that is normal and the way to think about this Camille is to think about wristbands at a conference okay say you go to a business conference you get one wristband that lets you into the

Big building and then they give you a little different color wristband that lets you into the VIP room and then you get another colored wristband that lets you into I don't know backstage pass or whatever you want to call it okay uh as you make your way through that convention there's security and gate people and velvet wrot people that are going to be looking at your wrist to see what quote circles shaped like wristbands you are a part of you can have multiple you can only one but these are your keys to get into areas or have access to areas or be identified in a certain way so you'll have your your tax return client Circle which will give them an overall um identification and

Very likely identify them as a as identify them their dashboard or some portal configuration menu configuration access to file folders configuration at a high level can be given based on that overarching Circle affiliation okay so here's a good example this is not tax return but it's payroll so this is what I mean this is a standard a generic standardized dashboard that's uh permissioned to a Payroll Services Circle okay and you can even but see how this is built in a generic way this image is generically programmed to show the

Contacts Avatar and these uh progress charts are generically shown to show the value of a custom field right which is a generic structure but has a unique value for each contact or company in your in on the other side so to demonstrate this if I preview here and I load one of the clients companies the platform is showing the same dashboard to everybody in that Circle but it goes and gets unique information unique data unique to the individual client okay and all of these can be set in a uh Dynamic

Way which will allow you to oh that one's not a good example so move to a different one so see these numbers are different this Avatar is different every time I change to a new company I get a new spectrum of data that's retrieved from that individual company's profile so uh so to go go into it a little further so the the highl circle will identify say the portal experience that gener to all of them then you'll create a stage circle is the way I would do it way I call these stages and on the first or onboarding you put them in step one and then every time they complete one of the uh stages you'll

Use an automation to move them to the next Circle all throughout the platform we have what we call automation opportunities and these opportunities are at places like approved a proposal maybe in your case or uh completed an appointment or you can be manually triggered or whatever happens in your workflow that you design we would prefer that you look for automations right because this takes any manual work off of you and in these places you have access to the automation Suite which we have here and in these places you can remove from Circle and add to Circle so right in our example that we already

Looked at let's just say you you'll in this case you'll remove them from stage one one and add them to stage two and now they've you can change the experience that they're going to have when they log in just because now they're associated with a new Circle and you can design the portal to adapt differently to them now show them different information different folders different um uh log first experience dashboards Etc but not only can you perform this one automation of changing circles but you can also do any number of these other automations meaning sending them emails

Uh changing their sales P person changing their coordinator all these might not be your in your um wheelhouse but something like send file request nice this might be right so you want to send a file request that says please upload your uh W2 please upload your k1s or download your k1s or you know upload your t uh bank statements all of this can be done there's there's a lot of ways to do that but at each stage you would Define a workflow for that stage and then at the end of that stage either by automation or manual preferably by automation you'll move them to the next Circle which defines their stage in your process okay

I think that's as clear as I can make it in the short term but what you can then do on your [Music] side this is a dashboard for a uh super admin but let's go to dashboards if you are the super admin you can always use the super admin fallback dashboard or you can create your own dashboard just for you we're going to call this our uh metrics or uh stage overview dashboard and now you're going to assign it to we'll say you the super admin okay for me I want to see this dashboard every time I log in okay yes you can create it whatever you want but what's what's more interesting is let's say you have um you

Want to add the CRM filter block okay this filter block is designed to show you uh a return of basically info cards of clients or companies that fit a certain description as defined here in ours you're just going to choose this say stage one Circle again this is not I'm I'm jumping between counts accidentally here but so now this is only going to show me people that are in stage one what am I'm going to do I'm going to copy this and move it over here to this other column here and now I'm going to change this and change this to not stage one I'm going to change it to stage two uh let's see

Here for example okay so now I have a different list of of clients yeah and now you can tra create three of these six of these you can set this one up for all the way up to six columns and you can call this stage one make it a nice header you can make this all as nice as you want and that's what you get and you'll have a very easy way to see who's in stage one who's in stage two who's in stage three in addition I'll show you just another quick quick uh try to look at something that would be helpful to you I was there a minute ago let me get back uh here yeah

You can create a custom field that will hold this is not what I want here you can create a custom field that's designed specifically to hold the the progress per percentage through that workflow that you defined okay this the platform cannot know what your workflow is going to be how many stages you're defining it as and then somehow return some progress percentage based on what I mean we have no way no way to know right so what we do is we Define we let you define that so what you'll do is you'll go to custom fields and you'll create a specific custom field for something like here's a good example

Podcast onboarding progress that's what I'm calling it it's a number type custom field so when you're creating it you'll set the usage if you're typically working with companies you'll set company public you don't need this and you'll set a number type okay so this is it needs to be a number type to work in this application I'm about to show so you're going to do this and this is going to specifically be built and created to hold this percentage number why because because here in the chart block that's available in our block Builder and it's one of the blocks you can add here and this is U it's right here or progress bar this is a progress bar block but uh it's this is the pie chart or Arc functionality inside of

It progress type you can adjust all these but the the key is here when you say what is the data source of this chart it can be just a normal value you can set it and it'll always be the same no matter who sees it or when it's seen that's boring custom field number type guess what podcast onboarding progress or in your case tax return onboarding progress and you set a color and what's cool about this it's cool because no ma whichever you can set this as a generic dashboard and it doesn't have a progress until you tell it which client are you you looking are you asking me about you know who

Are you saying who are you who do you want to show this to well when milennium Falcon sees it it set at 25% okay why is it set at 25% because that's part of my process that I built and designed same as the way I designed the circle changes now let me let you know what how what that means so when I go back and when we showed you the automations and I'm only only going here to this automations uh because it's the fastest place way to get to this uh automation Suite widget but understand that everywhere in the platform everywhere that's possible we create these automation opportunities in

The sense that if you go and edit an invoice or you're building an invoice or any an estimate or proposal you have these here they are assign automations and this in this case all the automations that you assign here and create here will be triggered when this invoice is paid right so not just the circle change but also uh custom field value this is a good example actually this is perfect example I have set this automation that it's going when it when it's triggered it's going to move my uh podcast guest to stage two and it's going to incre change the value of this custom field which is currently 25

To 35 or whatever you define 45 52 it doesn't matter anything you put here so as your people are going through stage stage stage right you are using automations to okay now I'm moving to Circle two Circle three Circle Four I've increase their percentage of progress but at from 25 to 35 to 45 to 75 and what they are seeing whether who cares how it is abstracted what they are seeing is a it's a very nice process a very nice indicator of their progress every time they come to the portal it recognizes what stage they are currently in and you can present a different uh

Experience to them understand that custom Menus can be adjusted every menu item here can be shown or hidden based on the um based on Circle so you can hide it from everyone you can show it to everyone or if you say I only want to show it to certain circles like SEO funnel step one or I want to hide it from I want to show it to everybody but I only want to hide it from SEO Circle step two so you can build an entire logic so that as they move from Circle to Circle to Circle certain menu items even ones that you build from scratch can be um

Visible or not visible based on their Circle at that moment Circle or circles yeah at that moment all right so usually this is where the oo and A's come in but um anyway this what you can do is essentially unlimited um so what I would recommend is for sure to understand your process first which is always a good first step you you did a good job at explaining it here um workflow and I think you did a I think let me look at the question you submitted because I think there was even better probably had more time there I

See okay uh so you say sending engagement requesting documents completing the tax return that's your part I think review the stage finalize the stage invoicing and sign off yeah so each one of those you want to break down and say okay how am I going to do that okay you can use sending engagement is a document template that you're going to send them as a contract that they sign I assume right on the signing of that contract cont there is a yes uh automation opportunity which you of course would use to move them from one Circle the other and change and

Trigger whatever other automations you have probably an email to yourself to say you know this client completed stage one and has now moved to stage two I'm a big fan of including these these emails to admins or to the appropriate person in your staff see these uh email internals right so now you can specify who will receive these emails because what this does it makes your email inbox like a little status update uh box and as you're sitting there having breakfast and having coffee as you're watching uh people move through your automations and the emails are coming in it's

A nice feeling because you know that this is work every that I get that lets me know that one of my automations is doing work for me is pretty nice because I know that there's at least 15 minutes if not more manual admin work behind used to be behind what that email now represents and so that's where the magic happens when you build these automations and you build the workflows you build the funnels you refine them over time they won't be immediately perfect and this is one thing I definitely want to say for anyone that is hearing this kind

Of thing for first time definite as you see me build these ugly admittedly ugly first beginnings of these dashboards this is okay right this is okay and in fact you ought to say in here uh this is stage one and they land here after X you know and and just Define it we call this an MVP it's an MVP build it's a skeleton build right you want to you want to do this and because too many people will get caught up trying to say okay I'm on stage one and I need to make stage one perfect and I need to figure out how to make this perfect and that perfect and every pixel work perfectly and

Then they burn out and they never even actually put it together you know and that's that's a shame what you should do is create skeletons MVPs really work it uh and focus on the process get everything working in a very ugly way just admit it to yourself it's GNA be horrific it's not going to look good at all but what I'm interested in seeing is I'm interest interesting in the wiring the plumbing I'm interesting to see it all work and when you see it all work that will be all the motivation you need to go back step by step or I'm also a big fan of once you have the wirings wired up uh it's very easy then

To hire someone who has web skills you know making things pretty skills and bringing them in and say okay here's what I have here's the data I need to people you know web people can work pretty easily after you after all this you know you know your business you know your workflows it's your job to put them down on paper it's your job to figure out how what's acceptable to you from the workflow side it's not your job to build beautiful portal pages and dashboards necessarily you can certainly get a good start coming from uh the template library and everyone needs to be aware of the template Library there's great examples here that you can start with here's a good one at tax preparation dashboard right where you can just

This used as our download block and I'll show you this in just one second uh let's see I think I have it I will have it in one moment so we have a file upload and a file download block that help you uh kind of bypass this files functionality and present a very straightforward and simple uh Dynamic way for these files to be uploaded so this is the file download block not the upload block but let's demonst straight so let's say you um Camille no not Camille uh whoever my CPA is tahala

Tahala sorry thank you um or maybe it was Camille sorry T okay yes I see Camille uh so when you complete the returns yes either you you can train either you or your staff to upload the returns into a specific folder associated with a client right or company and that's it they don't have to go into some other portal or some other place because you already built this um dashboard that your client has access to you already put the download block here

And you already opened the download block and this is this is a beautiful segue into a recent feature release this is it you already told the download block I want you to go to the user specific Dynamic path which means of the company or or contact look in the repository parent folder and here's this destination path and any files that are in that path for the logged in client I want you to display them here for download okay so what does that mean it means that if I go here your staff has access to the files and they go to a company's files and they go to I believe this is the one I was using for this and here's the repository that we've

Referenced in that download block we're going to go to outbound because we're talking about downloading here's the folders created let's go to 2022 corporate returns there it is okay so look 2022 corporate returns Buzz color repository let's look back 2022 corporate Returns what we're telling this download block is when the when a the when a client logs in I want you to look this is the logged in client this the only one I want you to look at look in their specific path associated with them in this case this is the client Buzz cola if there is a file there I want you to display it all right let's look at the the preview if

There are no files there it will display this but if buz Cola logs in it will display their returns and any other files you put in that in that um folder so in the end all you have to do when you're finished with the returns or whatever you're trying to deliver in whatever play you're trying to deliver there's so many options here that I don't want to make it sound like it's some simplified process it can be simple but it also can be as complex as you need and flexible as you need so what you C all you will do is go to the this place here and upload the files and that's it you're done you don't have to

Go and add them to some portal or some other folder this is trainable this is replicatable this is your staff going okay okay I just need to go to this client who I just finished these returns for find this path and upload the files done and the very next time that buzz Cola logs in they're going to be able to download those files and guess what they will never have to call you or email you for their tax returns ever again when they go to buy a house when they're trying to get a line of credit any am I preaching Camille am I preaching I mean is this not the bane of all CPA tax tax prep Professionals in the

In the world hey can I get a copy of my 21 2020 19 18 17 16 tax returns Federal and uh personal oh my God there's three hours of my time gone gone and guess what they don't want to pay for that they won't pay for that so you have to re them in you have to find a way and this is a way that you can do it in a dynamic way replicatable trainable automatable that when they log in they'll have instant access to those files and yes some will fight you some will fight you clients will always try to fight and say I don't want another login well you know we have

Uh Magic Link login we have every kind of um ability to make it easy easy for them all they have to do is put their email address and it's one click to log in but I will tell you here's a little tip we have I have an an accountant that I'm that I'm acquainted with and she was using the system and she had some push back and so as we and I will recommend the same strategy to you so well why don't you just send out an email and say you're raising your prices by 10% unless they want to use the portal and then the prices will remain the same and she said that's all it took they came in droves They begged

To use the portal they wanted to use it and then of course you know at two three times after using it they're like hey this is great I didn't even have to email you uh I didn't have to call you for my tax returns I just got them and they there they were incredible right it's progress It's the future this this cannot go any other way right and the the reality is whether or not you're using SuiteDash or some other mechanism to accomplish this it makes sense that if you your business doesn't get moving and on board with this type of technology and Automation and streamlining and and those kind of things in your business then

You are at a disadvantage to your competition because they will and if you are spending any brain Cycles throughout the day digging up tax returns and doing things that can be accomplished accomplished in an automated zero cycle way with a portal then for sure you are at a disadvantage to someone who is ripping through their day doing things that only they know how to only they can do that is always the way you want to be in business you always want to be only doing tasks that only you can do right and your whole organization needs to be structured in the same way soon as if there's something

That someone else can do you need to what they call delegate and Elevate delegate it away or automate automate is the first first preference so automate then delegate so first you want to see if you can automate it and if you can't automate it then you delegate it and you need to get your task down to only the things that only you can do and that's when you're efficient if you're spending all day doing admin work as a professional uh that's not efficient and it's not there's no way you're going to be able to scale your business or scale your profit uh that way I know you all are probably super hard workers but you can't 10x profit because

You can't 10x your work you can't 10x 40 hours a week the the only way to 10x from where you are now is to automate and streamline and take 90% or 75% or some very large percent hopefully work away from you into somebody else into some other process ideally an automated process so yep so whether it's s Dash or another mechanism i' I I I leave that to you uh but I would definitely recommend that you move in that direction but I can say that SuiteDash was built from the ground up to do this okay we're all we're an all-in-one from

Day one I like to say we are not some website builder that decided to build buy or bolt on these these functionalities after the fact and they're kind of cloy they don't work that well little janky uh we were the plum huming and the electricity and all the uh vital networking was put in place before the construction started and you will you will see that in action in a specific way to see it is really in the the autom the automations the way that one part of the platform can trigger another and you can build an entire uh workflow that

Helps you automate as much as possible around your business and let me close with just one more thing um I like to show this I think I've shown this at almost every webinar for the past few weeks this is a good a good example of how of how we build so we recognize that no business can be automated fully that is a pipe dream anybody that tells you that is crazy we know that humans have to be involved but what we what we encourage you to do do is think about it in terms of the target this is the person who enters the top of your funnel think about everything you're doing in terms of trying to put them immediately into an automation slide I call this and

Then when they come out to place what we call a checkpoint a human interaction checkpoint uh okay one sec please show me how to get LMS products to my clients without the funnel please okay well you'll need to get them into your system but as soon as you get them into your system it's quite easy to add them to an LMS product and the delivery is pretty well automated at that point kach K or uh sorry I'm losing track of all the uh people but the automation slide this is where SuiteDash is working on your behalf the balls in their CT it lands here onto a human interaction checkpoint we encourage you to try to distill the choices here

Down into some reasonable number of scenarios 1 two 3 four say for example and then you can build what we call an auto template to for each one of those scenarios so that when you're at this place all you have to do is choose scenar Auto template One auto template two Auto template three Auto template four which as we showed previously can include any number of individual automations so let's get back to the here should keep more tabs open just don't to jump around but so this is an auto template right so I'm building this Auto template and I can conf I can trigger this Auto template anytime I want manually for a specific company

Or contact so if I build this this uh say call this scenario one or scenario two in relation to this uh workflow then what I can do is build multiple changes here multiple triggers I could start a send a fire request move deal to a new stage shoot an email Cannon Grant an Elm product we we're looking at here all these can be automated and I could trigger this from here so basically my human interaction is identifying the scenario with my human brain and selecting the auto template three or four clicks and I am done because then that now moves them back on an automation slide balls

In their Court they have to work their way through and this is how you can build a practically Automated Business can't be fully automated but if you go and build what needs to be built to achieve this practical automation we literally get emails from people who say I don't I I kind of don't know what to do with my time because I wake up in the morning I watch these emails come in I see the ones that I need to be at be a part of which is these but I've built these Auto templates that then put them back on the slide so they spend 30 minutes or an hour maybe a little more in the morning evaluating checkpoints triggering Auto templates

Sure a few more things but then they can kind of walk away for a little while because they're waiting on their clients to fulfill their side or maybe this is where they do that on that that work that only they can do you know but the point is what they don't spend is a bunch of time doing um admin work you know Co duplicating a proposal from the previous client and digging through it to try to make sure that they don't leave any data about the previous client change all the places and stressing out about that then you send that out then you answer more emails then you you know spend half of your day and most of your brain Cycles just keeping

Things from breaking down whereas when you build when you work on your business and not in your business you can build mechanisms processes systems and automations that do that for you in a way that's replicatable every single day without using your brain cycles and that my friends is a much happier life that's that's what we call Sweet Freedom hash sweet Freedom that's what you're going for uh and that's what we work for every day that's what we're building for that's why we're here to help you so uh what's the difference between doing automation templates versus using flows so they're they're pretty different um

Camille and I let me jump to it real quick so automation templates uh are automations that are triggered based on a completion event a flow is really simply a an it's much like an onboarding mechanism for a specific uh onboarding or a specific process so what a flow is is a multi-step let's let's look at a different one I think would be better a multi-step process that can include different types of steps that you can put your be a part of your workflow and in fact some of the of the things that we've talked about like file upload and

Signing and all these things can be accomplished in a flow the preview is not a perfect representation but is a good example uh so this is a signing step they can sign and then move to the next and this is design flows are designed to be an onboarding process that can be completed in one sitting that's usually what we recommend so this would be something that you're thinking that this this is small enough light enough that maybe they can do it in in one session doesn't have to be one session there are way that we we provide very intuitive ways to get back here if they leave on a specific step they can definitely pick back up so I don't want to I don't want to say it like that but it's I don't want to act like it can't

Be used that way it certainly can but it's it's not designed to be a life of the customer type of step by step uh this is kind of a one or two sessions I'm going to I want you to upload your logo and then here's a plain text like a explanation of the next step so these are just illustrating some of the different types of steps that are available this is just a preview when you add a new flow step it can be a form an eign an appointment setting step where they set an appointment with you uh file upload or download or a Content block we call the a Content step where essentially it's used to embed save video or it's like a just a a text block essentially

And you can explain people use it to oh okay good job on the last step The Next Step you need to maybe go and collect all these documents the next step is a file upload step so you might want to do that here's good example what comes next and then they move to the file upload step then you have a uh okay great job what come next step and you can move them through this flow now to uh finish the answer your question each step of a flow is can has a automation opportunity associated with it so as each step is completed then you can say you can configure automations to be fired based on the completion of that step and you can configure automations to

Be fired based on the completion of the flow as a whole so this is similar to the construction that we talked about earlier with the circle changes although that is a little more flexible and long term for the for the uh journey of the client all the way through through from birth to death for lack of a better way to say it a flow is more designed to be like a early in the relationship early in the process data collection type of mechanism but you can trigger again autom to be Tri to be fired on each step completion so even if you wanted to use these emails these automations just send an email to the Target say

Hey great job don't forget to do the next step hey great job don't forget to do the next step or you know the possibilities are endless there's anything any number of things you can do here just another another cool Lego in the box of Legos that you can employ based on how you perceive your workflow the needs of your workflow yeah okay Coach K uh or uh you sorry I just keep I'm getting I know it's not Camille So Coach K is Teresa can't sorry yes please

Please um contact help.com I'm sure we can work it work it out with you there's there's no nothing going on it's probably just a small small tweak and Caitlyn is correct that is a pretty common uh thing to overlook even though looks like you haven't but yes it's fairly common to overlook the publishing and active status of the course and the product yeah okay all right everyone oh oh oh the background good so you guys notice we um have these I have these uh in these sample accounts these demo accounts these backgrounds that you know look they look pretty good I think in most cases uh if you do something like let's

See where how can we see it best I think here so you see the background we call this the frosted glass effect and you saw the same in the other accounts and in this one as well uh let's go to platform branding and here's where you'll see uh you can set for the entire platform a background and enable the this effect here and you can also set custom loaders and all sorts of ways to really white label the the the platform and more more of these type of of things are on the way we're just constantly finding and and building new ways not only these things but we're not ever going to pause

On these really really unique white label elements that allow you to uh customize your platform to be uniquely different and uh brand to your business in a way that gets attention impresses this is what we're after we're building soon some uh custom login Pages uh options each on each one of your dashboards you can set a unique background image so here's one here but notice that on the uh see on the portal pages each one can have a unique background you can set custom CSS on each portal page on each dashboard as well any dashboard that you're creating and when I say dashboard just

To be clear is the dashboard that someone finds when they click this dashboard native dashboard button uh menu item so you can set the uh primary background here custom CSS and JavaScript many many options and uh a constant Improvement and iteration extend extending in those directions is happening so based on our ideas of course but also based on feedback from the community we are constantly uh interfacing with the community from the voting board the community um the s- community the VIP Suite Etc working with you guys as a community to provide what exactly

What you need uh so please don't think that just because you don't see it it cannot happen feature requests are something that we Thrive off of and hopefully can um gauge properly the interest from the community as a whole and when we notice that it's something that can be universally useful and beneficial and it's within the scope of something we can achieve with our resources we're happy happy to do it and turn it around as fast as possible not in every case don't hear that but definitely those are things that happen on a regular basis okay everyone I have I have enjoyed it

I sometimes say this is the easiest hour of my day because I just get to talk about something I really like yeah I this is not my first day in business and especially not in client related businesses if you don't know history behind SuiteDash this this is kind of like the dream that this is like a dream that I would have dreamed of back in the day to have this but now I get we get to build it and and hopefully um make an impact for for people like you so thank you Teresa thank you coach K and Jessica and Camille out there wherever you are all

Right right thank you thank you everyone I appreciate it we appreciate you we take a lot of value from your suggestions and your feedback and just enjoy meeting and and getting to know everyone thank you for um attending you're welcome to come back any time so if you have a new question please bounce back anytime Tuesday and Thursday is a schedule normally sometimes we have to to reschedule or uh change those up but that's what we're going really try hard to stick with for the foreseeable future okay thanks everyone have a great rest of your day see you later [Music] bye