Previous: Setup 2/5: Managing users

In the previous lesson we looked at managing your users, including inviting users to your firm and assigning roles!

Procedures vs checklists

Gone are the days of having a single lengthy checklist for your workpaper. We believe checklist items should be specific and contextualised to where they're relevant. To accommodate this in Workpapers, we have introduced the notions of Procedures and Checklists. 

Items related to specific accounts in the trial balance belong in Checklists, while all other items related to the preparation of the workpaper are contained within Procedures. You'll learn more about checklists in the next lesson Setup 4/7: Setting up your firm's checklists, and Completing a workpaper 8/19: Worksheet checklists. This lesson is all about setting up your firm's procedures.

What does a procedure look like?

For context, a procedure looks like the following:

Figure 1: Sample procedure

From the example above we can see the procedure has a code, name, description and role. It also belongs to the category Private Companies & Trust Entitlements, and is scoped to Trusts.

When creating a procedure only the name, description, and role is required. The code is automatically generated, and the category and entity type are optional.

Procedures without an entity type will show up in all workpapers, while procedures with an entity type set will only show in workpapers with the matching entity type.

What are firm procedures?

So now you know what procedures are, what are firm procedure?

How many times have you been working through your procedure list thinking "Half of these items aren't even relevant for this job"? We want to eliminate that thought, and firm procedures are the answer. Firm procedures allow you to create separate procedure lists that can be applied when creating a new workpaper. 

For example, if your firm has a large number of clients operating in the farming sector, you might want to create a procedure list called "Farming" with items specific to the farming industry. When you create a workpaper for one of the farming clients you can then select to use the "Farming" procedure for that workpaper. 

Currently we provide a basic default procedure list you can use as a foundation, which we encourage you to build on to better suit your firm.

You can override the firm default to your custom procedure list, with plans to give you the ability to allocate a default procedure to be used for an entity or group (Follow our development roadmap to keep up-to-date with this item).

Creating a procedure list

From the Firm Management screen, head to the Procedures  tab.

Figure 2: Procedures screen

From here, click the New Procedure button and you'll be directed to a form allowing you to name the procedure list and download a csv of the procedure list for you to fill out and import.

Figure 3: New procedure form

The procedure list will request you to fill in the following items:

• Procedure Name
• Description
• Category (optional)
• Workpaper Role
• Entity Types (optional)

Once you've filled out the csv file and uploaded it, if there are any errors the form will notify you of them. Once you've successfully uploaded the csv file and clicked Create Procedure you're all set!

Managing your procedure list

Once you've created your new procedure it will now appear in the Procedures list, where you can select the procedure list to set it as your firm's default or delete it.

Figure 4: Newly created procedure list

Clicking into it, you will be able to add new items and categories, set it as default, and sync to active workpapers. Additionally, you can edit/delete categories and item information.

Figure 5: Custom list overview

Updating a procedure list

If you make changes to the procedure list, you may wish to push these changes out to all active workpapers. You can do this by clicking the Sync to Active Workpapers button, which will prompt you with a confirmation dialog before pushing the changes to all active workpapers using the procedure list. Workpapers that used the list but have been completed will not be updated, as to maintain the integrity of the completed workpaper.

Figure 6: Sync to active workpapers prompt

Next: Setup 4/5: Setting up your firm's checklists [Coming Soon]

Phew, that was a lot to cover! Luckily most of this carries over to the next lesson, with a couple key differences.

Next, let's learn more about checklists and checklist items and how to go about setting up your own checklist.