Backdate a service to catch up on prior periods

Practice managers, senior accountants, and firm owners can use a past Service Start Date to bring a new client’s outstanding prior-period work — unfiled tax years, unreconciled bookkeeping months, missed HST filings — onto a pipeline board alongside their current-period work.

This guide assumes you already know how to add a service. See Services on a client record for the Add Service steps and the Service Start Date, Fiscal Year, and Frequency fields, and Pipeline triggers for how a service’s tag connects it to a pipeline and a job template.

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What a backdated start date does

A pipeline trigger normally creates one job for a service’s current filing period. If you set the Service Start Date to a date in the past instead, Assisterp works out every filing period between that start date and today and creates a job for each one that doesn’t already exist — as soon as you save the service, provided its tag matches an active pipeline trigger.

For example, setting a monthly bookkeeping service’s start date 18 months back creates 18 jobs on the pipeline in one save, one per month, instead of a single job for the current month.

Bring a client’s backlog current

1. Open the client’s Services tab and select Add Service.
2. Choose the Service Template for the outstanding work (such as a monthly bookkeeping or tax-return template).
3. Set the Service Start Date to the earliest period the client still owes — for example, the first month of unreconciled bookkeeping, or the first unfiled tax year.
4. Set the Fiscal Year and Frequency to match how the client actually files.
5. Save the service.

Make sure a pipeline trigger already exists for this service’s tag before you save it — otherwise no jobs are created at all. See Pipeline triggers to check or add one.

Confirm nothing was missed

Once the backlog jobs are on the board, use View Audit on the service row to confirm the schedule and the generated jobs line up — see Audit service health with View Audit for what each summary count means. Missing flags any period between the start date and today that still has no job; Duplicates flags periods with more than one.

Going forward, the same service keeps generating jobs for new periods as they come due — there’s no separate step to move a client from catch-up into ongoing maintenance.