How work fits together

Anyone new to Assisterp can read this page first: firm owners setting the system up and employees starting daily work. It explains the words that show up everywhere else in this help center, and how they connect.

If you’re an employee, the first section is what you need day to day. If you’re setting up your firm, read on to see how the setup pieces turn a client’s services into that daily work.

What you work with every day

• Client — an individual or business your firm works for. Each client has a status (such as Active or Inactive) and up to four assigned staff roles. See Clients.
• Job — one piece of client work, such as one period’s HST filing. A job belongs to a client, sits in one stage of a pipeline, and has a status: Open, In Progress, Missing Info, or Completed.
• Pipeline — the board a job moves across. Each column is a stage, and each job card sits in the stage it’s currently in.
• Task — a specific action someone has to do. A task can stand alone or belong to a job, and it can be split into subtasks. See Tasks and subtasks.

So the job shows where a piece of client work stands, and its tasks show what’s left to do. See Jobs and pipelines.

How a client’s services become jobs

You can add a job by hand from Jobs or Pipelines. Jobs can also be created automatically from a client’s services:

1. Service — a recurring engagement on a client’s record, such as annual tax returns or monthly bookkeeping. It’s added from the client’s Services tab with a frequency and, when the template uses them, a service tag. See Services on a client record.
2. Service template — the reusable definition a service is created from. It sets which client types can use it and which reporting periods it allows. See Service templates.
3. Pipeline trigger — the rule that watches for services with a particular service tag. When a matching service is saved, it creates jobs on a chosen pipeline. See Pipeline triggers.
4. Job template — what each generated job contains: its title, dates, priority, tasks, and invoices. See Job templates and stage automation.
5. Stage automation — actions that run when a job enters a stage, such as creating a task or sending an email. With Automove turned on, a job moves to the next stage by itself once the items in its current stage that count toward Automove are finished.

In short: a service with a service tag matches a pipeline trigger, which uses a job template to create jobs on a pipeline, and each stage of that pipeline can add tasks as the job moves along.

Where each piece lives

• Clients, jobs, pipelines, and tasks are in the left sidebar, for daily work.
• Service templates, pipelines and their stages, job templates, and pipeline triggers are under Settings > WorkFlow Setting or Settings > Templates. Usually only administrators can see these.

For worked examples that put every piece together for a real engagement, see the automation guides, such as Automate HST & GST filings.