Q&A Webinar : July 20th, 2023

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 alright so let's get started okay welcome welcome everybody this is Mike I am the founder and CEO of SuiteDash welcome to the easiest hour of my day this is the uh SuiteDash q a webinar it's 11 A.M Thursday let's

Start off by getting you guys to jump into the chat let us know where you're joining us from and a little about your business Niche maybe just a couple General sentences of how you are looking at using the platform and we can get started while you're doing that I will go ahead and just say if you haven't started free trials three dash I would encourage you to do that that's the best way for you to get your feet wet in the platform and start to understand how it can help you uh so I see uh some folks in here from all over and a few different niches some of the questions that were submitted during

Your onboarding for the webinar we'll use those to guide the conversation hi Linda how are you Linda says she's joining from northeast Pennsylvania just launched my account HR consultancy and in the trial period of SuiteDash hey Linda that's perfect okay um awesome so free trial is great this is what we're hoping to achieve with the webinar to give you a place that you can start to ask questions and get some ideas we won't probably be able to help you build out your entire well that's for sure but the idea is to give you some light bulbs some things that you can take away and start making some progress you can come back to every

Webinar that we hold and get a little bit further uh you also have access to more than likely Live support sessions and things like that hi Matt from Toronto nice work for a small I.T Consulting and yes I see your notes Here Matt and also I see your notes Linda and I see a few others joining us that we have similar guidance on how we should proceed okay so of course guys as you are getting up and running please do pay attention to the documentation help.SuiteDash.com there is a lot of hard work that goes into keeping this accurate and helpful I would encourage you just to type your questions into the search doc search box here right at on

The home page there that will lead you to articles which should help you through Concepts and get you a little further along and then there's also Kevin AI which is a work in progress it's basically chat gbt trained on our help documentation this is again a work in progress you may get answers here that don't make sense or seem somehow inaccurate that is something that we're working on ironing out and as we all know this is a new technology and has some gray areas as to if it's accurate if it's not so everyone is kind of aware of that so but but it's helpful but this is a helpful way to shortcut yourself

In some cases but just keep in mind it may not be perfect uh and also from your free trial you can always click Academy from your flyout menu you see I have a few extra prophetic links let's call these um and I won't expound further unless we have some extra time later today but here if you switch if you click Academy you'll be taken directly into the SuiteDash Academy here where you can click sat series and this is the best place for you to start and start working your way through one at a time I saw some questions about white labeling I think in the questions this section here white label 101 is

Excellent and there are videos here that will each one of them for example has a video that's very descriptive links to the documentation directly and also resources just to help you in case you need some guidance or some shortcuts to for example having your logo converted to an SVG if you don't have an SVG logo they are quite nice to have they give you a very high resolution logo and it's very nice looking as compared to something like a mismatched or mis-sized ping or jpeg so these are things that you may or may not know if you're you know everyone can know everything and so file formats and their appropriate use

Cases are something that are that web Publishers and developers and those kind of people know but you you don't have to know so this this helps you shortcut that okay let's go ahead and start working through some questions I I see um let's start with Linda because I Linda jumped into the chat first we'll have an honorary Linda here so Linda says I'm going to share a little bit Linda if that's okay you've already said you're an accountant HR consultancy and you're asking about the best use cases for solo practice just launching so here I have a nicely um themed environment here

For accomplished CPAs let's just really quickly look at some of the white label aspects of the platform as we did have some questions about this this is a fully white labeled login page uh as you can see there's no indication of SuiteDash all the way down to the URL with this is what we call a custom URL you can even look in the source code here and you won't find any mention of SuiteDash so this is a way that you keep your brand directly up front and throughout the platform that is something that is continued logging in either whether it's you or your clients you'll log into an environment that looks similar to this meaning your logo your colors your background images those kind of things the

Menu can be adjusted based on who is logging in you as this is a super admin that's logged in here you're going to see everything you're going to have everything but then it gives you the platform gives you controls to manage what every other person will see when they enter based on roles which is something like Prospect or client and then in that's in that sense of prospecting client you can further segment using what we call Circles and then the platform is designed to adapt the presentation The Experience based on Circle affiliation primarily uh as we go beyond roles so you'll see in CRM you have

The circles menu here and this is one of the primary the primary segmentation it's a functional segmentation we call this which means access to specific Pages dashboards file folders menu items are regulated based on their affiliation or their their being in or not being in a circle and one of the ways to think about this is wristbands so if you go to say a festival or to a corporate um some kind of event a big corporate event or uh you know convention they may

Put a wristband around your wrist that is red or is purple or is green and then maybe you'll get an additional one for the VIP room and all the security people in the people work in the Velvet Rope or whatever it is will check your wristbands band or bands and say okay yes you are authorized to enter here you are not because you don't the right one think of circles in that same way in fact they even kind of look like wristbands so just keep that in mind So when you say best uses for solo practicing practicing Linda I'm going to just go ahead and kind of combine that question and answer into a more General five minute explanation hopefully maybe a little bit longer that will

Help everyone understand the best way to get started with the portal does that sound okay yeah and and we'll I think this will help the very best way now you can add a contact or a company typically I think you'll be working with a company so you want to add a company into your CRM you're going to name the company okay so this can be any name Acme Incorporated we'll say you are ready to do business with a person let's just kind of skip these things we can get to them later but let's just say their client we're ready to go we I've had a phone call with them they want to take advantage of our services let's get them going in my funnel okay so now you can uh create a primary contact this is the person that you will be um

Interfacing with at the company at the primary and there are additional company details here some location information now this is where it starts to get you can assign circles salesperson coordinator all these things you can do here manually one at a time that is not what we would recommend okay so what we don't want you to do is every time you add a client to go through here and okay yeah and just the very granular make these selections and uh this becomes something repetitive and and you know honestly time consuming for you as you check or uncheck or assign or unassign them to specific proposals and those kind of things right what

What I would rather see you do is concentrate on what we call a kickoff form okay so kickoff form is designed to um embed on your website or be a standalone landing page and I'll give you a good example here I think I have one right here here now here here this what you're looking at now is a kickoff form okay this is modified with some HTML and you know this is built with our same tools that you have access to this is the form section of it this part is HTML like a Content block added above it and when this is submitted

It launches it starts a workflow imagine this is the first step in a funnel that you are creating that will guide them through a workflow and collect the information that you need to accomplish your work right so a kickoff form can be as beautiful and pretty as you can make it with your skills and how you want to present it or it can be very plain in the sense that you want to embed it in a website and this is a really fast way to get things started but let's go back and I'll explain a little bit more so now we're going to create a kickoff form and you're going to start with first you're going to when you first start a kickoff form it's going to

Have default information first name last name primary email you'll see that here default fields everything beyond that is going to be a custom field okay so the questions that you want to ask how many corporations are you dealing with how many bank accounts how many credit cards these may be things that you need for pricing right you need to collect that information so you want to ask these These are going to be custom fields that you can create from from here and add them so say we want to create a new custom field for the company and we'll say all right this one is how many employees and I am just spitballing here uh do

You have that's the question that's how we will say how many employees that's how we understand it it's a reference for us but down here is how many employees do you have this is the question it says it here prompter description okay let's set this this is the usage this is something you'll have to learn what it means but it is not difficult to understand type we want to say in this case we can use a number type custom field and then we say Okay can this contact edit this info in their profile we don't really need that do we hide the placeholder this is also something you can understand but not needed in this case I'm going to click add so when I do that what I'll get is now

I have a new that custom field has been created which means now there's a new column in the in the database for every one of my clients from here forward and from previously there's a new uh sell for data for all my clients okay and now I can ask as they come through the this form as they complete that form the data for the specific what we call a Target as they complete the form we're going to insert the data into the cell that column four whatever their first name is whatever their last name is whatever their their company is called Etc okay so what we're doing here is we're collecting information and

Filing it in the CRM saving it in the database then you'll be able to use this data later in in a variety of ways as triggers for if this data equals x then do y or you can display it to them on a dashboard and say well this is the data we have for you allow them to update it or change it so you're creating now you're creating a profile for this person okay I'm not going to do a lot of not going to try to make all of this super fancy I'm just trying to explain the concepts here okay now here this is going to be the form okay this is all the form information this

Is the data we're collecting here is where you're going to start categorizing the targets which means it's the random user that's on the other side of this form who's looking at the form they fill out the data and they click submit we call them a Target because we don't know much about them yet and they are the target of these automations and assignments so now we're going to assign them the role of client anyone who that Target we're going to assign them coordinator anyone who completes this form we can assign them a circle we'll say okay well this form I'm going to put them in the bookkeeping Circle they'll get treated uh based on that Circle affiliation you can generate documents for signing here documents start with what we call a document

Template which allows you to create a dynamic template and then the data that's submitted here can be inserted dynamically and on the fly into that template the document is then generated and sent for signing immediately if you choose this option and then there's a whole variety of options here that all that integrate all parts of the platform all the toolkits things like proposals you can immediately generate a proposal from a what we call proposal generator which is a mechanism that again is somewhat like a template it's a pre-built pre-created proposal that has all the elements included in it we just need to know the client

The target give me the Target give me the data so for example you might create a proposal generator that has all static items except for there's Dynamic pieces in there that are designed to be populated by the data collected in this form or another form or some series of forms that you create that create the data properly um and all of these I can't get into each one of them individually or it'll slow us down but then you can send the email immediately for for access to the portal what we call our portal access invitation uh here or you can notify the coordinator when the when the target is onboarded for you know making sure they know that they need to be in touch with

Him um ostensibly them paid portal access means you can require payment to access the portal now that is for what we call unknown Targets this means that when this form is submitted the email is unrecognized we do not see this email address in your CRM and therefore we treat this submission as an unknown Target however if it's someone that's already in your CRM that makes it back to this form in whatever capacity your workflow demands we have a separate section for known targets so now you can Define what happens to someone who is already in your CRM who comes through this form so for example if

You use this form uh to kick off a process of uh website updates say you want to use this as a website update form and it kicks off some process that you have maybe you're you have some clients who come through that are requesting website updates that you've never dealt with before but then you have repeat clients that might come through the same form and we might have a different process to deal with them so as you see here a coordinator no change assign the salesperson no change sign a circle no change but you may add create an additional Circle to say oh this is a repeat client and I want to put them in a new circle now I want to give them a new wristband and maybe their I adjust my processes

As it relates to them based on that new Circle that new wristband okay so again this is a little bit of a thing you'll need to learn and understand and see if it applies to your use case but the tools are here and then you can additionally create emails that get sent separately and and triggered by the submission of this form there's conditional logic there's um this is the list of submissions this is where you do the link and embed you can customize the portal access invitation content of that email to this specific form so if you're creating multiple kickoff forms with multiple entryways into your businesses or multiple Services maybe you create different

Pages on your website for bookkeeping for wealth management for tax prep you may have a separate kickoff form for each one that makes sense then you would customize the email that gets sent to them you know welcome welcome to our tax prep program here's what you can expect here's the next steps that would be a separate email than say the wealth management one so here you can customize the emails that are sent from this kickoff form and we could go further we could go deeper but what I want to make sure that you understand is the next um one second yeah so I've anyway I'm just going to abandon these changes because they're not really important I

Don't want to take time trying to um fulfill that validation there so here we are this is a form but one thing I want you to understand is now that we have gone through this form and we've um standardized what happens when that form is submitted what we've also done is change is is avoided this manual one at a time entry in of adding companies and constantly each time having to select select select select select these settings and circles right we've standardized it we've we've created a formula we've pre-created and said okay when this form is submitted all of these things need to happen at once

Simultaneously automatically that's great because that kicks off your funnel kicks off your workflow immediately like as soon as the form submitted so imagine that you you your website you have this kickoff form there or a landing page or whatever that's that's all pre-created pre-configured and starts this workflow and starts emails go sending out to your staff and everything starts happening a proposal is automatically generated and sent a document is automatically generated ready for signing uh they get access to the portal where they land on a dashboard where do you explain your services and if and Define what's next and you know really they're all ready they're the second they click submit they're already inside your

Designed experience they're impressed they're impressed you do that and they're like whoa okay all right yeah good this is nice uh unusual impressive but nice as opposed to your competition who has a regular form on their website that when it's submitted it sends an email to somebody on their staff and that's it because that's typical right so let's just say that your potential client you submit the form at the same they've submit the form on your website at the same time as they submit the Forum on your competition's website who do you think is going to win that business because on the competition website it's going to go into an email inbox and sit

There until somebody has the time to answer read it formulate some response which is probably just an email response and then you'll start whatever kind of old school non-automated non-process driven interaction back and forth okay yeah that might work but your side is going to win almost certainly with just a little bit of work a little preparation a little bit of Automation and guess what it also saves you all that time you don't have to do that manual back and forth and coerce and then help that client understand your services over and over and over again right uh

Matt we'll get to that in just a second uh but I definitely want to get to that but here's another uh yes sir another advantage that I I was kind of building a a construction so that you understand even if if the client fills it out but we also have something called staff submit okay and this is really powerful as well so just think you're taking a phone call now staff submit is the same form that you would embed on your website but now your phone your your assistant your phone person can take this phone call and fill out the same information and when they in Click submit and guess what all the same assignments and

Processes get started in fact we have many many customers who will custom build a kickoff form specifically for the purpose of being a in-person or phone assistant to that assistant or person so that when the phone call comes in they have a very guided process to collect data collect information and click submit and when they click submit any number of these automations and assignments can be configured that will happen automatically imagine kicking off 10 processes at once that would when they hung up the phone would typically then take what another 30 or 45 minutes to execute

Minimum minimum if you're talking about developing a uh getting a document ready for signing how many of us have have spent time okay let's go to DocuSign let's start this let's do that okay now let's go to this other platform let's re-enter this data okay now I need to create do a proposal okay now I need to send an email to so-so all that happens in a millisecond in SuiteDash once it's configured so you have the capability of of making a self-registration path essentially from your website so that all these processes happen uh all these automations happen or internally you can create these kind of processes that

Help you collect data kick off automations and and assignments and processes in milliseconds instead of many minutes um depending on what it is okay Matt Matt says can you onboard new employees with existing company uh can with an existing company don't kick off or mandelier yes it can be done with the kickoff more mat so if you bring a new company I think what you're asking is on the client side if you bring in a new company and we've never seen them before we're going to assign that first person as the primary contact anyone else that comes through that company will be assigned as what we call an Associated contact but yes they can come through the company now there's a couple of things

That you'll want to be aware of and that is you'll see this in CRM settings uh this company match percentages is one okay so when you have a first first we can't provide on the kickoff form side a select box for them to choose from companies because that would reveal to anyone in the public all the companies that are in your CRM so that's not an option so we have to leave a blank field for them to say okay I'm with Acme Incorporated but what if they type out incorporated or what if they you know that's an easy one but what if they type the the business name the company name a little bit differently but of course it's the same company they just don't get

It exactly the same as it's in your CRM we provide you with a company match percentage that's default set at 75 and essentially it's an algorithm where we try to match the companies uh based on the similarity of what's typed in so uh there will there might be cases where we would create a new company because the similarity match wasn't good enough even though they might really be trying to say the same company but they left out a word or whatever so let's just be aware of this that there is this dynamic in that company matching as they fill out the kickoff form I don't think that's it's not problematic and in most cases we don't even see we see very few customers changing this percentage it works pretty well

Uh not yet Matt not yet but that is on the way that is something that we we do plan to add the primary contact will be able to um manage the company information as of now let's do a private window here remember and I'm doing this Incognito private window because everyone please remember that you can't be logged in as the same user in or I'm sorry it's two or more different users in the same browser same session so what I'm doing now is using an incognito browser which is a creates a different session and I'm logging as a client okay this client is actually this they're

The primary contact for this company Millennium Falcon Incorporated and that's the company that that that's the profile that's loaded now if they have if they were the primary for multiple companies they could switch companies here and be the primary for multiple companies this is important for uh accountants and attorneys typically who are dealing with customers who have multiple corporations but here you'll see that they can edit the company information as the primary and coming in the future will be the ability for them to add other users company that worked for also Millennium Falcon Incorporated for example so yes that is something that's in the in the in the works also thought and I wanted to

Hit on it initially I thought you were asking about staff members onboarding staff members we don't have a kickoff form for staff members but we do have the capability for uh when you add a new staff member let me switch back to here when you add a new staff member you can uh assign them to things like flows update forms document signings things of that nature so that you can use many of the same tools and increasingly more and more we're moving in this direction to enable all the Automation and process tools on the HR side so

That even when you're onboarding staff members of a certain description you can put them in a specific funnel as a specific workflow that prepares them for that job even down to the point of LMS courses that can you can assign create training courses run them through these courses have them sign documents non-competes non-disclosures whatever it is and all in a process driven way so that these things can be um if streamlined and save time that yes that's correct that's for your staff that's what I mean so when you're adding staff members you can select LMS products onboarding

Flows document signings is something that is also possible now teams this is what we call teams this is the staff side equivalent of circles so on the staff side they can also wear wristbands and be segmented into different groups in the in that which will affect the way that the portal presents itself to them and that's called teams on the staff side okay I am going to continue down this road please ask questions as they come but I think we are really logically in a really good place to keep going and let's go next

To dashboards okay so you guys have asked your questions a lot of them revolve around uh onboarding and the ability to use in how to set these kind of things up the next thing you'll want to pay attention to is dashboards and I want to bear with me while I also open okay good this is a client that's logged in representing the company's Starbucks uh famously from The Simpsons this is a dashboard that's built around [Music] uh payroll dashboard it's it's not functionally

Accurate maybe for many for some businesses but the idea of it is what's important to understand is that this this is built generically and is using Dynamic data everywhere and in fact this picture is dynamic this name is dynamic the company name is dynamic the data that powers these charts is dynamic and the data here is all Dynamic and when I say Dynamic what I mean is and I think the best way to illustrate is to go here one sec this is actually accomplished through pages payroll dashboard this is it and I'll explain quickly the difference between the portal pages and dashboards soon

But here is a perfect example okay so just what I showed on the other side with Josie this is what powers it so it's a it's an image image type you can upload your own or you can choose I want to choose the CRM custom the contact profile image right the avatar okay and that's what's going to power this and what it means is whoever accesses this page which has who has permission to access they're going to be logged in right so imagine it's just like Facebook we we don't need to know who's going to be here we only need to know at the moment that they log in and then it's down to one person in

This case Josie which we saw earlier but let's do a preview and this will really Hammer home the logic okay we start the preview and you see here forms do not show in preview unless a contact is previewed please select a contact to see the data so again this is all generic data but if I go back and choose Starbucks as we saw before [Music] there's the data for that company if I choose another company there's the data for that company if it exists in this case I don't think it does let me try a different one yep so some of this is not populated as far as the charts but here's one that is so this data is different than the other so

Why is this important what this means is that you can create um experiences that are associated generically with a Circle right so in this case this page is assigned to the payroll Circle and it's set as the start page for everyone in the payroll Circle so what that means is is that when any user I'm sorry client or Prospect who is assigned as the payroll in the payroll Circle when they log in they are immediately redirected because of the start page two that

Page to this page there's could be 100 different clients in this circle and you as you can see here um now this data is not Dynamic just so you know this is static but the this chart is populated by a custom field of number type and that is the data is read from the profile of the logged in user so it's just a good example so now we've created one experience based around the circle but it dynamically adapts itself to into whichever client is logged in as we see in this example also notice that the dashboard or

The the menu items are much smaller than what you would see say in a an admin in your in your portal this is also affected by Circle affiliation any of these items can be turned on or off you can create new menu items that are custom designed and for the based on Circle affiliation so you can create a portal that morphs that adapts that directs that um and then gives feeds dynamically the data based on the logged in user does that make sense everybody

Following so it can be as complex as this or it can be as simple as the defaults which are something like you might see I think here this is a really kind of a very default this is a custom menu item but this is kind of a default look for clients as they would come in they can go and see their invoices and estimates any proposals if they don't have any uh you know there's no list here if they do have them they're here if not there's nothing to see but you can turn all this off and on based on your preferences has to be some default configuration for you but

It's very easy to turn on and off and let's look at how let's go to custom menus and here in custom menus you can basically design any menu configuration for any Circle so let's just say uh that one that we were just looking at say proposals just you're going to say you know what I don't need to use proposals I'm not using them let me just turn them off for clients and Prospects okay that's it done that menu item is no longer showing this is a sub menu item if you decide that you're not going to use projects let me turn this back on because I suspect that I will uh get fooled by that if you

Decide not to use projects you can easily turn that off for clients right and then they will not see projects and never will so all of this is really simple to manage and understand how to change if you're in the legal profession for example we have sometimes people will rename this cases or matters right and then change maybe change the icon that's okay that's easy to do so now this change in real time matters now or whatever you want to call this you can create new menu items if you have if you have Thrive or Pinnacle you can link directly to specific portal pages to a start page to

Projects to client talk there's a lot of options here these are all no code options for ways to connect your clients and Prospects to various parts of your portal and these also can be managed once they're created they can be managed let's just show Circle managed and we'll re just say we want to link out to Google for example obviously not but um there's these other there's many other things here that you guys can one day understand but we don't have quite enough time to cover the whole platform obviously here it is circle managed let's just drag

It at the top for fun you'll see it reflected and now we can manage the visibility client Prospect yes or no but we can also say Circle and notice when I click Circle clients and Prospects is now grayed out now it's dependent yes client and Prospects yes depending on whether or not they're in uh a specific circle like vendor attorney or bookkeeping so in this case we'll allow all these people to see this circle right okay so a lot of powerful options as on creating designing and implementing a portal for not just one type of client but for many

Types of clients okay I used a lot of time there but I think those questions are pretty Universal and probably helpful I hope okay because one of the questions was how do you make a portal so generically um I think the last 35 minutes is essentially that okay best uses I see Linda is here I've seen Linda says good hello good Linda okay so you say best uses for solo practice for just launching Linda it can go I I'll be very vulnerable here and say um

SuiteDash is an ambitious project an ambitious concept okay we generic we are a generic platform attempting to solve the problems of smbs of every description so what we provide is a is a very powerful very flexible set of tools that can be applied in just about any way that you can imagine that means a lot of great things but there's one thing that it doesn't mean it means there's no step one step two step three for every one of our clients we cannot Define for for really any in particular client this is how you do it because in your business or in

In another person's business workflows are very different even in the accounting field right even in accounting uh or you know Consulting the way that you do it the way that you proceed through your through your workflows and and onboardings could be quite different from another account and so yes we can provide workflows but in general I think what you concentrating on let me get back to dashboards I will as soon as I do this but concentrating on the idea of this kickoff form as a concept that can be very helpful to you by standardizing the initial workflow

As it relates to a specific type of client okay so what I mean is let's just use bookkeeping Prospect okay let's just we're going to call it that you can now uh as they cut if if you categorize them as this as such you can set their Circle you can say the coordinator so you set their Circle as as bookkeeping you can generate a document for them to sign if you have an initial document you can create that document template and you do that here in documents you create a template and you're going to assign that they're going to you can even uh see these placeholders let you dynamically name it based on the submission data so when that submit button gets clicked all of

These things happen immediately the documents created it the dynamic name is applied to it that relates to the client specifically uh the you know let's say the document says I comma first name last name agree to um you know these things the first name and last name in the documents filled in just like a mail merge as if you've if you've been around the block a few times you know what that means all that happens immediately and the document gets generated immediately sent for signing or available for signing and all of these other things are quite quite powerful as well each one of them requires a few minutes of explanation but that's what SuiteDash Academy is for that's what our documentation is

For but suffice it to say you can start them down a marketing marketing path you can assign LMS products maybe you don't really need to train them but you can use an LMS course in the aspect of what to expect you know uh here's how to prepare for tax season here's how to run your books every month you know maybe they'll find that information from you quite powerful and helpful and also it establishes you as an expert as a guide and they'll want to do business with you if you can help them feel like they are being educated and cared for and this

Is all happening inside your branded portal also remember you can launch projects you can immediately generate proposals you can schedule automations this is also quite powerful uh email can is form Cannons all these things have a story you'll want to understand how they all work and then understand that that is it fits the way that you do business there's a great video in the academy on the differences between these invoice generators I would definitely highly recommend that so this lets you standardize the onboarding for these clients and kick off that first set of processes now you can add to that this is we'll call this stage one you can add to that and then as

You grow in in understand more about what you need you can layer new functionality new automation on top and as I tell everybody that starts this journey really think in terms of 10 to 12 months okay is 12 months if in 12 months you were able to automate 50 of your workflow of your admin tasks would that be acceptable would that be awesome in your book I think most people would say yes give yourself some time to get used to what we're doing here and what you're trying to build you're building a machine that will save you money and time it starts with a kickoff form it's appropriately named it kicks off a process

It gets you to step one let me show you it's a diagram that I use for a video let me get to the right one okay good here we call this concept practical automation okay so the idea is remember we said Target enters kickoff form we set them we we execute in the kickoff form we're defining all the automations that immediately happen okay but what we understand is that you can't automate an entire business every single step humans have to be involved so we create what are called Auto templates that lets you batch or record or not Define automations that are that are ready

To be triggered manually by you or your staff based on a decision Matrix that you that you design it around okay so kickoff form automation they basically the ball's in their Court then it comes to what we call a human interaction point a checkpoint where a human being needs to look at the data and say okay now next step is going to fit scenario A B C or D you'll create an auto template that uh is appropriate create four different ones each one appropriate to see scenario A B C or D and then the human the goal is that the human can assess this information decide

Which scenario is most appropriate and then in about three clicks trigger the auto template that's appropriate for that scenario and the goal here is that that then kicks off in another automation slide we call it uh balls in their Court everything's happening automatically the documents sent for signing um a form is sent that needs to be filled out now we're in another phase of automation which then kicks us back to another checkpoint where we have another set of Auto templates designed to constantly streamline and kick back to an automation now this can take some time to build but once it's built this is the magic because you can now all of these admin tasks are

Taken care of not only that but you can train someone to assess these scenarios and make three clicks based on the identification of the scenario this has the potential to completely if not or I don't know about completely but substantially free you from these things right from these manual admin type things right okay let me uh return to where we were here and Matt says can the primary Contact track who still has to complete courses or has pending docs for esign Matt you're

A little further you're kind of operating in a layer a paradigm where the company then gets to kind of have this platform extended to their usability level uh SuiteDash is really more designed on a two-layer concept more traditional you as the owner of the software and the the configure of the software are the business your clients they're your clients it's meant for interaction between you as the business and them as the client it's not necessarily meant to enable uh functionality for your client down to their clients or or staff okay there is

Some of that happening as we go in that direction to to simplify uh for example when you're working with a team and on a project right you're not you might be working your company might be working with another company on a project and that that other company who is your client they may have five people that need to be involved in this project uh and those five people might change over the course of a month or course of the project so what we'll move we move towards exactly so that the uh the primary would be able to manage their side of that that by uh editing company information adding and removing uh staff members or in our case they're called clients as well but they're associated with the company so they're all five of those people would

Be a client in our system but they're grouped together by the company uh rapper company container and therefore we create I think you might have seen earlier when we were looking at um uh let's go let's go here and I can start this conversation I can segue here not here but we also had have company circles what are called company circles when you create a company we Auto create a company Circle uh which functions exactly the same as a traditional Circle except that it's it's Dynamic

Based on who's associated with the company so you can for example create a dashboard just for a company in a shared folder just for a company and that all that is controlled the permissions are controlled by the company Circle that way if you remove someone from the company they instantly lose access to all those resources if you add someone to a company they instantly get access so this saves you the the trouble to CR of creating those on your own and associating them properly and then having to manually move people in and out of circles so the company circle is super powerful if you need to make company specific uh data resources like dashboards portal Pages or shared folders that kind of thing okay or or menu maybe

In the portal but let's get to dashboards and and I think this will kind of close our portal let me let's Linda let me read your read your question I'm going to stage with my new client to send contract to close the deal a lighthouse three dash creates the flow without needing to use multiple aspects of the tech stack that's great it's this practical automation graphic or something like it in the academy um you know where you can find this I believe that was used in what is a portal this video I think is the is a really good place to start let's see if we can see it in here actually

I don't think I got to this one I wanted I was I planned to pop a follow-up to this but this is a good place to start to understand what's a portal um so so please watch this one um to understand Auto templates there's automations 101 is down here and you can look at Auto templates here I think I probably reference it in that video as well uh there is a video here I need to when you we just launched this this is what we call Academy 2.0 so this has been launched recently and uh my apologies if some of this some of the items don't quite have the videos added

Yet but yes you you you will come to understand exactly I love this idea this as you pointed out this practical automation concept because we have a lot of customers who have taken this to heart and have sat and built and done the done the work it does take time I'm not gonna lie it's gonna I mean anything that has this kind of power will will need some investment to get the return and the return is super powerful is freedom and and Automation and streamlining which leaves you to work less or run more business through which means you can be more profitable so you know you can choose which one you

Want but it certainly enables more of of more bandwidth through your process that's not limited by the number of Cycles you have available to you in the morning when you wake up as we all know there's only so many cycles I can process every day okay uh but yes exactly what you what you are asking for is you'll be able to accomplish with SuiteDash for sure yes Matt like a client PM who manages their team exactly one thing you'll notice in in projects uh that there's a primary assigned client

And secondary clients so that's similar really quick on dashboards okay uh and then I think we're we're close to time but I'm happy to answer questions if you need dashboard is this default menu item that you see here okay everyone has it from by default and what they see is going to be dependent on how you configure and how you build okay we'll start off with what's called a fallback dashboard this is default for every user except for the super admin and the super admin has their very own fallback dashboard so these are the ones that are default however you can create any number of additional dashboards and build them out any way

You'd like with brand new uh blocks and all these things and when you create a new dashboard you're just going to give it a name so we'll say new dashboard but the important part is how you assign it okay and it uses our block Builder there's all kinds of Juicy options here that you can have fun with but this part uh it takes a tiny bit of explanation so let's let's handle this they can only see one dashboard right there's only one so what do they see on the other side say your client you can you set that by a priority system okay the lowest priority is by their role so say for example you say I want to assign this if there's

No other instruction if this person is a client show them this dashboard by role was very generic this is the lowest priority on top of that you can say okay I want to show them to clients if no other instruction exists but here's where you can give another instruction that supersedes you can say if they're in the payroll Circle that supersedes this instruction so now the system says okay they're in payroll let's divert them to this dashboard and then there's only one other instruction that can supersede Circle assignment or team assignment and That is direct assignment so you could have a client who is who is a

Client they are in the payroll Circle along with say a hundred other people but you want to show them some very very specific data based on who they are now you can say okay but for Buzz Cola they will see this dashboard okay so in the end this dashboard is really only for Buzz Cola but if it's not Buzz Cola it'll go to payroll payroll clients will see it barring any other conflicting or higher priority assignments from other dashboards this can get a little bit logically crazy if you if you want it to if you try to break it if you try to think of scenarios where it can be complicated it can be but in general in general use

Cases you're not going to run into that you're going to create dashboards for like uh a specific type of client you're going to create Dynamic data on that dashboard very similar to what we created here or what you saw in the uh the page with which I've moved away from of course this one so generic dashboard for all the types of clients but it has Dynamic placeholders here that customizes it to them and feeds them their own data these are button blocks that allow you to make no code Direction in the in the portal so see click action so now you don't have to do this kind of uh you don't

Have to know how to code and how to push people in One Direction or the other we make all that very easy for you by providing these options and each one of the options in the case of appointment scheduling pop-up we then we then we adapt the rest of the form to say okay which which appointment types do you want to offer when they click this button and then in the case of this let's go back and just see I say uh I'll schedule an appointment boom now they can schedule an appointment I got logged out somehow but yes this is how it can all work and how you can create a portal that's very customized to your workflows and the way that you do business okay any last minute questions I hope

That direction was good I moved further away from answering super specific questions and tried to be generically answering the idea of what is a portal how do you make a portal how do you figure this out yes ma'am Linda I would uh so subscribe to our YouTube channel this will be a YouTube video also the succeed with software podcasts is available let's do a couple of quick reveals if you guys have two minutes um this is a you'll be able to adjust the fonts in your platform soon

Using Google fonts you'll have a choice of these thousands of fonts that you can choose from you'll be able to say oh yeah I want to use this one or that one or whatever they look like but you'll be able to go to Google fonts and get a good preview and then readjust using any one of these options that you like right and that's just secondary headers also you can do any of the general text and just match it to you to your personal style or to style your business okay that's one and then what else do I have oh is this support tickets I think so support tickets is really close this is just an interactive piece

Of Dev this is on dev environment where you can see support tickets so here's a nice little preview functional preview it's very close it'll be on the Pinnacle plan for those of you who are interested okay Matt has a question subscriptions can it be implemented for a company regardless of the number of users in the company changed once not once per user in the company let me ask a couple clarifying questions Matt are you do you mean your clients you want to set uh have them pay a subscription your your the external

Users the clients that sign up with you as a business your clients that pay you yes okay one monthly charge yes so in invoicing let's go to office so you can create you want to create subscriptions that's definitely doable so you want to go to subscriptions could have one or more users it won't matter about the users it won't matter how many users either unless you create multiple plans so subscriptions is based on a plan and when you create a plan you're going to define the um the the variables here and then that plan can be offered to your end

Users and when they quote sign up for the plan and enter their credit card information then all the details associated with that plan change into not change but becomes a subscription in which case it's just like your Netflix subscription they will we will um take the money from that credit card based on the subscription details but we don't have something that say that has like a selector where it can be like how many users do you have is that kind of where you're going I think the only though the approach there if you needed that would be to create a plan that had like one to five users and then six to ten users or something like that and then offer them

In a uh in a dashboard or a portal page as as a spectrum of choices that which they could then choose but it's certainly just to be clear would not be something that would be dynamically adjusted based on how many users are in that company I think that's where you're going I can tell you're you're you're thinking not looking Dynamic okay it feels like which it which I totally get uh and we are moving in the direction of so I'm not discounting this the ability to create a you're creating a platform that um becomes a service to some end user is

What I kind of feel like we're moving towards yeah okay we're doing our best to move in that direction we hear more and more of that as I was saying before sweet touch is really built around a traditional company client company slash client relationship two ways um we have more and more movement towards what what I call a three a three layer or a three-way relationship a three-legged stool where you have the company that's you you're the facilitator and then you have two other uh sides of the business one is the client and the other one is what we call the collaborator and in in in our Theory and as we think

Going forward and typically when someone is looking to build something like I think you're moving towards is they're looking to facilitate the relationship between the client and the collaborator in some way or multiple collaborators so yeah I think that's what's happening stay tuned and also go on our road map uh Matt and and look at the collaborator offering that's there in the road map I think it describes similar to what you're thinking about it's something that we are it's it's such a key thing that we've been talking about it for for a lot many quarters actually it's

Been on the road map for 18 months at least and really it's about us collecting data to try to understand the best way to approach uh to to enable this kind of functionality so as you can imagine each person's needs will be very very different so we're trying to hear and collect and that's what these webinars are quite valuable for hearing collect data and ideas on what is trying to be accomplished so that we can start moving down that road without painting ourselves in a corner which is always the danger right we want to create something that is flexible and generic enough that we can move forward and not build something that doesn't allow for that

Yeah but good I'm I I hear you and um as one thing you should know and it doesn't happen in every case but we had a webinar on Tuesday where something came up uh with one of our clients and it's already in the pipeline in fact I think it's already in testing one of one of the items so by next week one of one or two of the items that we talked about and brainstormed out together in the webinar will be on live will be available for for that gentleman yes but also for all the other people who just didn't happen to be in the webinar but probably need something like that so whenever we find something that's a short short row or short run for

Us it's achievable with some realistic amount of effort that can bring advantages is generally judged to be advantageous to a large number of our client base or some substantial sufficient number of our client base then we we can move on that pretty quickly okay great thanks for everyone's time thanks for the questions thanks for the input thanks for the responses I hope it was helpful for you yes ma'am Linda I I would be very happy to uh if it was helpful and that you moved it you're able to move ahead but please come back as many times as you want like

I said at the beginning this is kind of like the easiest part of my day I could just get to discuss and talk to clients and be off the cuff and very relaxed and informal that's what we do here and I I enjoy this part of it so thank you really really happy to see you I hope to see you again all right thanks everyone have a great rest of your day see you later bye [Music] thank you