Canopy Workflow

ACCOUNTING WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT  SOFTWARE

Workflow

Instantly know what each team member is working on.

Less Clicking. More Doing.

Canopy Workflow helps you focus your time on the right things.

Visibility

Gain visibility

No more, “I thought you were working on that!” Know exactly who is assigned each piece of work, what’s been finished, and what’s outstanding.

efficiency_svg

Improve Efficiency

Wash, rinse, repeat. Create templates, assign tasks in bulk, build automation everything you need to free up more of your brain power to work on harder things.

Accuracy

Improve Accuracy

It’s easy to forget, slow down, miss a notification, and so on. But when you’ve got a software with automation on your team, your human error rate goes way down.

Workflow + Client Engagement
Workflow + Document Management
Workflow + Time & Billing
Better together

Workflow
+Client Engagement

  • Directly create tasks from an email, attach an email to a task, and comment on tasks

  • Build singular and bulk client requests into automated workflows

  • Automate email updates based on task/work progress (image on left)

  • Create pooled/queued work with Role assignments

  • Simplify client creation processes with roles built in to client record templates

Better together

Workflow
+Document Management

  • Workflow template - include client requests, fillable PDFs, eSignatures

  • Create workflow automations for reminders, status updates on client requests,

  • Send bulk clients requests to collect documents

  • Recurring tasks - automate client requests for documents on a schedule (image on left)

Better together

Workflow
+Time and Billing

  • Create and manage time entries per task/subtask

  • Profitability reports

  • Capacity planning (image on left)

  • Comparing billable vs. non-billable hours

  • Internal tasks (write up/write down, send invoices, clear WIP, enter/manage time entries)

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Workflow Automation

Why keep trying to do it all alone when you can automate?

Reduce the mental load that goes into managing tasks and subtasks in your firm’s workflow by automating parts of your process. Choose from a list of different conditions and actions including:

  • Once a task is created then send a client email or notify an assignee
  • When a task status is changed then create another task, record a date, send a client email, send a team member a notification, or set an assignee
  • When a task or subtask approaches a date then send a reminder to a team member
  • And more

Customizing these triggers can help keep your team informed, efficient, and freed up to focus on other high-value items (not to mention how fantastic it feels to offload busy work).

Need a document, a question answered, or something else from a client? Send an electronic request, which assigns a task to your client, and can be sent as a one-off or built into a template as a standard part of your processes. Also improve the process by automating client requests. Similar to tasks and subtasks, you can set rules on client requests to initiate additional client requests, set a due date, notify when an upcoming date approaches, and more. Let Canopy work harder so you don’t have to.

Apply automation rules to tasks, subtasks, and client requests within your preset workflow templates. Choose from a variety of different conditions and actions to automatically initiate custom, specific actions. This can help you and your staff save time and streamline your process.

Canopy’s tax organizer or survey is your place to learn everything. And, because it helps you quickly and easily gather all the information from your tax clients needed to complete their return, everything’s in its place.

Our highly-rated client portal and mobile app facilitates the tax organizer and client request process between your firm and your clients. We make it simple for everyoneyou, your firm, your clients—to get work done.

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Process Management

Whether it’s repeatable tasks or one-offs, Canopy puts the flow in workflow.

Speaking of flow, Canopy helps you create a set of tasks and subtasks, assign team members, set follow-up reminders, organize the template with the order each task/subtask should be completed in, and set due dates to automatically calculate after the previous task was marked complete. Layer on automation, and now we’re talking! That should get the work flowing.

Once Canopy helps you create a unique task (or one from a template) you can set the interval you want it to repeat at as well as start or due dates. After the current task has been completed, Canopy auto-creates the next task for you (isn’t automation great?). That should keep the work flowing. Additionally, you can create a recurring task based on a due date and have it automatically generate tasks before due dates to help you see and manage recurring work more efficiently.

Bulk up! It’s easy to create tasks (or task templates) for several clients at once. With Canopy, all you have to do is use tags that apply to specific groups of clients, or pick individual clients from your client directory. Templates and automation make this a breeze.

Avoid bottlenecks. Empower firm members to easily grab work or client records and maintain fast turn around times for your clients. No more individual assignments and things getting stuck when someone is sick or on vacation. Easily follow through on a first-in-first-out mode of operation with roles on tasks, subtasks, and client records.

 “We use Canopy to create and manage internal tasks outside of standard engagements.  Specific follow-ups, customer requests, internal research tasks, and other to-do items can be quickly established, assigned, and tracked to completion with straight-forward steps. Staff can readily pull up their task lists, update them based on progress made, and request assistance or review.”

Rodney Schmisseur

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Project Management 

Goodbye, sticky notes and version 9e_greg of Excel docs.

It’s not a project until there are tasks, right? Canopy makes it easy to create tasks and subtasks so everyone can clearly see what needs to be done. Then it’s all about “divide and conquer (or do expert accounting, whatever).”

It takes a village to take care of a client. And by “village” we mean “the ability to add, assign, and share among internal team members, set timelines, track statuses, and a whole lot more (all of which Canopy offers)."

  • Assign to a client's record
  • Add internal team members
  • Set dates
  • Track statuses

Time is money, so it makes sense to budget your time (and track it like a hawk). Canopy helps you do just that, creating a time budget for every task and subtask, then letting you track time against that budget.

Sticky notes are dead, long live Canopy! We let you quickly and easily make notes or collaborate with colleagues and even clients on individual tasks. Gone are the days of scrambling to find the right little piece of paper or trying to interpret someone’s (or your own) scribbles. It’s all right there—in Canopy.

Organized by client. For your whole firm. All tasks for each client appear in the tasks tab of their client record, giving you a holistic view of what your firm is working on for each client.

You know the thing in movies where the hero is in some techie control room, looking at some multi-screen overview of absolutely everything and then says “THAT ONE! ZOOM IN”, pointing at one screen? That’s you with Canopy—seeing a global view of all the things (tasks, clients, team members) and being able to zoom in on individual projects close-up.

The Canopy mobile app does just what you’d hope a mobile app would do: let you see all your tasks (current, overdue, upcoming), create new tasks, see any client’s profile and all its tasks. And it lets you do all of this easily and on-the-go.

Look. If we have to describe what a notification is/does, congratulations, we unsarcastically bow down to the last person on earth with no notifications in their life. But, yeah, Canopy will send you an email or notification in Canopy (or both) whenever there’s an update to a task.

Canopy lets you review a history of all the actions and changes made to any task. It’s like a chronologically-accurate paper trail, minus the annoying paper.

Put more flow in your workflow.

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Reporting

Keep a pulse on the health of your firm with live data, easy to read visualizations, and the ability to save and share insights.

Dive deep into budgeted and logged data to better understand resource assignments in your firm. View each assignee and see who has more work than they're able to complete. Break this down by week or month, project or task, or client owner. With data from Workflow and Time & Billing, capacity planning has never been easier.

Get a look under the metaphorical hood of your firm. See how work is adding up and how they're progressing. Filter by due date, assignee, or client owner. Set alerts to help you manage the amount of work your firm has. Schedule reports to be sent to partners and stakeholders so they can stay up to date (and you can spend less time updating).

Quickly visualize your data. It’s as easy as identifying your data points and pushing Enter. Your data will display in a recommended visualization style that you can then change or refine to help you find the answer to your data question. You can discover even deeper insights by clicking directly on the visualization and selecting the data point to refine your search for answers.

Get the most out of your data and visualizations with filters that can show what's most important to you and your firm. Create a filter for each employee, role, assignment, services, month, location, etc.

Turn your Liveboards into presentations in a matter of seconds. Each visualization gets its own slide so that everyone can easily see. If anyone has a question mid-presentation, you’re still presenting live data! You can drill down and interact with it to help guide the discussion to where it will benefit your firm most.

Automatically keep stakeholders informed on firm initiatives. Emailed reports will include either a CSV or PDF of the Liveboard visualizations being shared. Whether you access the raw data directly in the product or via download, you’ll always be able to see and access your data. It’s your data, after all.

Monitor changes in Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) with scheduled alerts. Receive notifications for your KPIs at your preferred cadence—on an hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Create thresholds and indicate whether you want to be notified if it increases, decreases, or changes by a certain percentage. We said "finger on the pulse of your practice" and we meant it.

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Views & Filters

Because project management isn’t just what you look at, but how you look at it.

Filters change the way you look at things. Canopy gives you a global view of everything your firm has in the works while also letting you get super-specific and see what you want to see when you filter by assignee, client, status, date, time, etc.

And if all those trusty filters aren’t enough, Canopy will also let you stack them to create customized views or reports. You can even save settings for later and have them auto-refresh as your team updates, changes, or adds new tasks that fit that criteria.

Once you save your custom filter views in Canopy, you can quickly tab between them just like you would in an internet browser. Why reinvent the wheel, er, tabs when the intuitive way works just fine?

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Productivity
Management

The first step to measuring efficiency is measuring. The following functionality requires Time & Billing and Workflow.

Canopy offers a built-in timer to track time against the task or subtask you or your team are working onautomatically. What’s next? Bio-trackers for every worker? (No. C’mon, this is accounting software, not a post-apocalyptic dystopia.) Oh, and if you need to enter your time manually, that’s also an option to do that in Canopy.

If you need to enter your time manually, that’s also an option in Canopy. That's it. That's the blurb.

What’s the saying about best laid plans? Well, Canopy tries to keep them from going awry by showing the aggregated time from our automatic, built-in timer and manual time entries on each task versus the time budget that was initially created. So you and your staff can always see how close you are tracking to plan.

How productive is your firm? How productively do you handle your clients? Canopy helps you answer those questions more definitively, by allowing you to see productivity at a high level or drill down and see individual projects (or clients or team members).

Frequently Asked Questions

Can’t find the answer you are looking for? Reach out to our support team.

Yes, Canopy allows users to set automated conditions and actions on tasks, subtasks, and client requests as subtasks. Additionally, these automation rules can be implemented inside of templates, which will help save your firm time and reduce human error when you are dealing with repeatable processes or one-off tasks. 

Canopy offers everyone a holistic view of your firm. You and your team can see a birds-eye view of what’s happening with a firm-wide dashboard and related notifications. Additionally, Canopy helps eliminate excessive client communication because they see their account status update as you work through their associated documents, tasks, or assignments. 

Yes! You’re on-the-go and so is Canopy. Utilize our intuitive mobile app to view, follow up on, or update tasks so that you don’t have to be back at your desk to keep your firm moving forward. 

Yes! We provide 37 task templates to help you get started with workflow so you don’t have to start from scratch. The rest of the templates are personal preference, but your specialist can help you with best practices and recommendations.