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Set-Up Guide

A step by step process for setting up Financial Cents

Shahram Zarshenas avatar
Written by Shahram Zarshenas
Updated over 9 months ago

This course is designed to help owners or admins quickly set up their account

Course Outline

Optional: Before setting things up, create a fake client and follow the "Test Drive FC Features" project on your workflow dashboard to learn our core features and experience Financial Cents from both a Firm and Client perspective.

1) Adjust Your Settings

2) Import Your Clients

First, you need to import your clients and their information to set everything up. This should only take a few minutes.

There are two ways to import your clients quickly:

Import with QuickBooks Online Accountant

This will import the client, keep their information in sync with QuickBooks Online, and allow for advanced features like syncing time tracking with QuickBooks Online and Uncategorized transactions.

Import with a CSV File

You will learn how to import your clients and their information with this CSV Template.

Important Tip: If you want to import additional information, check out the articles below. (Highly recommended)

3) Invite Your Team

Next, we recommend inviting your team to Financial Cents because they can help review and set up the templates in the next step.

User Permissions

This will control what your team can see and do inside Financial Cents.

Invite Your Team

It is common to invite your team members to review or help with the template creation process to ensure the processes are set up correctly.

4) Set Up Your Workflow Templates

Important Note: Before you can set up your workflow templates, you need to have your firm processes documented. If you haven't documented them yet, you can use our workflow templates, our AI checklist creation tool, or document your own processes with our 10-minute process documentation course.

If you decide to use our templates, they will have the features below already applied, making it easier to set up. Our templates can be customized to fit your processes.

The Process

Decide how to structure your processes in Financial Cents

Before you start creating your templates, you need to understand how they work and the best practices for setting them up.

What is a project, task, and template?

  • Project

    • A recurring or one-time work item for a specific client

      • Ex: weekly bookkeeping, monthly bookkeeping, Payroll, tax return

  • Tasks

    • An individual step in a project's checklist

  • Template

    • A generic outline of the process that will be used to create all the projects for all your clients

How to structure your processes in Financial Cents

This is a recommended best practice for setting up your process in Financial Cent, but it is not required. You should structure the work in a format that works best for your firm.

Set up your Workflow Templates

This will help you create simple but powerful templates to streamline your processes.

Recommended naming conventions for templates

Best practice naming conventions for templates

  • Add the work type to the template title. Ex: Bookkeeping, Tax, Payroll

  • Don't include a time period in the template title. Instead, use accounting periods

  • Don't add a client name to the template title

Create your task checklist

A checklist documents the steps your team needs to follow to complete work. There are several ways you can create a checklist.

  • Copy your existing Excel, Word, OneNote, etc. checklists into a template

  • Customize our existing workflow templates and their checklists

  • Use our AI tool to create checklists

  • Or create your own templates from scratch

Add placeholders roles to the tasks

Placeholder roles will make it easier to delegate projects (work) and assign team members when you create the projects (work).

Add task automators

There are two types of automations you can set up to happen when a task is completed:

  • Change the status of the work/project

  • Send a templated email to the client

Add resources to the template

Add important resources to the template so your team can easily access everything they need to get their work done within the project (work) itself.

Some common resources added are:

  • Links to apps used to complete the work

  • Links to SOP documentation in OneDrive, Google Docs, or other online documents

  • Links to videos with information on how to complete the work or related to the work

  • Links to your firm's Google Drive, One Drive, or other online document storage systems

Add client tasks/requests

If you typically request information from your client for a work item, then add client tasks/request items to the template.

If you want to notify your clients in advance about how you will use this feature to request information, we have tips for notifying them in this article.

Default template settings

Default template settings are not required but recommended. They will streamline work creation and allow you to automate work creation to reduce admin time.

Below is a short overview of how template settings work. You can learn more about how default template settings work in this article.

5) Create Your Work

Important Note: Once you create your work from a template, you can customize each project to each individual client's needs. These changes will stay on the project and future recurrences of the project but not affect the template.

Other advanced features:

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