monday.com for accountancy (CPA) firms | monday.com webinars

All right, welcome! Hello everyone, hello, hello! Happy to have a lot of you joining us for monday.com for accounting firms. So, we'll let everyone join the room. We have a lot of you joining today, and we're super happy to have you. We'll make some quick introductions in a moment. And if you don't mind, while you are joining, just, uh, perhaps put in the chat where you're from. Would love to see who's, uh, who's joining us today. We are at 100. Hello, Asheville! I'm actually in Raleigh, so nice to see you. We have some Arkansas folks in the house. Wow, very nice. Somebody from Alaska! So, I love it. Maybe colder than Minnesota. I'm based in Minnesota. Oh, Wisconsin! Nice, very cool. Hello, hello! Thank you, guys, for joining. We'll give it another minute. Amazing to see you all. Some Canadians, eh? I love Toronto! Stephanie, shout out to Toronto! Oh, DC! I see we have Avi from LA. We have Ann from San Fran. We even have a joiner from Brazil! How about that? So, Daniel, we'll give it maybe 30 more seconds. Everybody's time is very precious, and it's busy season. So, how about that? That's right. Uh, all right, 30 more seconds. Hello, hello! And thank you so much for spending, uh, some time with us. Even some folks over in Europe. I saw Denmark and the Netherlands. Amazing!

All right, so without further ado, hello everyone! We're so happy to welcome you today. My name is Sarit Chalamish, and I am a Channel Partner Manager here at monday.com. And we're super excited to be hosting you today and having you join us for the webinar about accounting firms, CPA firms, and how they could best use monday.com. So, without further ado, I would like to tell you what's happening today. And I would love to say, first, uh, firstly, I will put here, um, well, you guys all know where the chat is. So, if you have any question whatsoever, um, I just wanted to encourage you all. It's gonna be a very dynamic, um, event today. So, Daniel and I will be monitoring the chat for questions. And then, if for some reason you have a question that you would like Daniel to respond to offline, I am throwing, um, a link to a form, which will then feed to a monday board, as you can imagine. And Daniel will take them offline. So, by all means, feel free to ask questions. Um, and then, if you have any questions, um, I guess in the technical realm, just let me know in the chat box as well. Uh, last but not least, we will send you a recording as a follow-up. So, worry not.

And with that said, I would like to welcome Daniel Moshe of Tech Guru. Please take it away! Thank you so much, Sarit. It is an absolute pleasure to have, uh, the opportunity to, to get to work with you. Uh, and thank you. Uh, so here's what we're gonna cover today. Uh, first and foremost, we're gonna talk all about monday.com. I'm going to give you a little bit of background. I know most of the participants on the, on our webinar today are already using monday.com, but just to make sure that we're all talking the same language, I'm going to share a little bit about terminology and some of the, just the really basic things about monday.com. A little about my background, and so you know, I'm not just like, um, testing things on you today. This, uh, everything I'm gonna be sharing from you is from real, uh, life expertise. Um, and then I also want to share with you, like, um, the reason we're here today is that because we at Tech Guru started using and just fell in love with monday.com. It started in our marketing team, and then it evolved, and we started using it. Our engineering team and our operations team, it's just, it just kind of took off. And so the discovery was the realization was, like, wow, this would be an amazing, amazing platform to share with our clients, of which are mostly CPA firms. And sure enough, it made, it makes so much sense for CPA firms to be using monday.com, and I'm going to share all about that with you, uh, in just a moment. So, we're going to be covering, uh, the bulk of today's presentation is going to be a live demo. Real live demo of, uh, workflows that, uh, our team have created, uh, in monday.com for a tax return, monthly bookkeeping, and a sales pipeline workflow. Uh, and then I'm going to share with you a couple of next step items, and we're going to be answering questions throughout. So, please include your questions in the chat, and then, if it makes sense, and I can weave them in, uh, to the conversation, I certainly will. So, that is our agenda.

A little background on me and our Tech Guru is that we support over 500 accounting professionals every single day from a technology standpoint. We're a certified monday.com partner, so we're helping build these boards for CPA firms, uh, across the United States. And we believe firms should get more from their technology, and technology should serve them better. And so that's really what, uh, we are here to do: to make a difference and help CPA and accounting firms be more successful so they can continue to have an even greater positive impact in the business community, help them be more financially successful in their lives. A little bit more about me, I've been in the IT space since 2001, including starting off by riding my bicycle, and I had one of those Nokia ice cream sandwich type smartphones, uh, or not smartphones. This is not a smartphone. Um, that's how I started my, my life, my career in technology. Um, and then the other thing I like to share is I bring a real business savvy, uh, angle to all of this because I work with leadership teams as a leadership team coach, and we're all about process and building solutions and solving problems. And monday.com is just a really, really amazing way to accomplish that.

So, let's go ahead and, uh, jump into just a little bit more about, um, just like I mentioned, that real basic background about some of the reasons we feel monday.com is just an amazing, uh, application. First and foremost, monday.com is the Work Operating System for teams. Uh, what that means is it fills in the gaps in that white space between all those other tools that you use day in and day out: Microsoft Teams and Slack and practice management software and email and tax software and audit software. It fills in those gaps where little, uh, problems can hide, and roadblocks and obstacles can be, can kind of be hidden. It helps you break down the silos, keep everybody on the same page, increase the speed of your business, remove all of those kind of like hurdles and things that are slowing people down, especially when they're working remotely. And it really gives your team the ability to act on data and information that otherwise might be hidden away in a shared drive or a file or folder that people just don't even know is there. I also like to share and make sure that you're aware that not only is there a really great browser-based version of monday.com, but the mobile app is awesome. In fact, my kids and I use monday.com to plan our weekends together. That's right, I'm so nerdy, I know, I can't help it, I love it. So, they use that, they use the mobile app, and they're moving things around. This is what we're going to do today. Uh, and, uh, and I'm like, "Okay, what's next?" Like, "Have you checked monday.com?" I'm like, "Oh, okay. All right, I get to get up to speed on that." Uh, so tons and tons of applications here.

And so now, let's bring it down even a little bit more down to the ground and talk about, uh, how monday.com works for CPA firms. It makes sense for CPA and accounting firms, and really, what it does, it creates a system, and you're going to see this in just a moment, that increases team collaboration and team communication in context. I'm going to show you all about that. It helps you identify where are roadblocks and bottlenecks happening in your processes and in your workflows to keep things moving forward. The fact is, the stacked files and folders, uh, workflow management system, it just, it doesn't work. It has, it was already on its way out, and now it's, now already completely defunct because that doesn't work when people are more flexible in their working environment, in and out of the office, as you know. Um, not only that, but it makes sense for CPA firms because there's a lot of communication that needs to happen with clients, and a lot of that communication can be automated. And I'll show you how. Uh, it also gives your team members the ability to communicate in context. So, when you're chatting and communicating and working and collaborating on a client, a workflow, etc., it's gonna help your team, uh, stay in the loop on exactly what's going on, where this is at, without having to waste people's time and, and energy going around and, "Hey, what's going on with client A? What's going on with client B?" It's all right there, um, to see. Um, also, it can be customized to your heart's content. I'll show you all about that: columns and, and different ways to set up boards. And this is the most powerful point I'm going to make today: well over 4,000 firms are already using and leveraging and getting the benefits of monday.com today.

So, without further ado, uh, let's take a look at our first workflow. And so, again, I just want to point out that this is a live demo. So, not everything always works perfectly every single time. I'm going to do our best. So, what I want to talk about with this first, uh, first workflow is it's a tax return workflow. And as you know, we're all getting into busy season here, so this is the perfect time to be talking about this. And the one of the main points I want to make is that there is no one way, and there is no right way to build anything in monday.com. The only right way is that it serves your firm and serves your team and makes your workflows work better. So, in fact, I'm not going to show you just one, but two ways to do a tax preparation workflow in monday.com. And so, and the really cool thing about this is we kept it really simple. Uh, we took some of the, just the best things that monday.com has to offer, we put it together, and it can be something that can be put together and built in really a short amount of time. The other thing I want to point out, and you'll see, I'll have a link to this a little bit later, we have packaged up everything that you're going to see here today, and you can click and download and install it. And skip the download, you don't have to download anything to your computer. You can click a link and actually install everything that you're going to see here today in your monday.com account for free. We're giving it away. And so, we'll have a link for you that you can download that. The other thing I want to share with you today is, believe it or not, building a great monday.com workflow doesn't start in monday.com, in my humble opinion. It starts with thinking about the best way to get something done. And so, we've created also a workflow planning document. It's a Word document, it's totally fillable, you can, you can fill it out. That will also provide to you for free. Just click on that link. It's going to be shared a little bit later today in our workshop, on our webinar, so you can get both of those tools for free. And so, we started thinking about, "Hey, what is the best way to get a tax return out the door and have a happy, raving customer?" And so, we broke it down. There's two different types of scenarios. One scenario is that you've got a kind of a high, high volume, uh, workflow. You're doing very similar types of tax returns, uh, for your clients, and you're just kind of, they're all kind of very similar workflow, the same thing needs to be done for each client. And so, that's exactly where I'm going to start. It's our 2020 tax return board. And yes, I'll share with you a little bit about some of the terminology I'll be using. These items here on the left are boards. This is a folder that you can use to organize your boards because once you get more than a handful, it can get a little bit crazy. So, you'll see in the second solution that we built, we put that in a client portfolios board, our group, excuse me, folder, excuse me. And then in this board, it's a one-board solution for the tax return because each of those tax returns is very similar. So, I'll walk through that in just a moment.

Another couple of items or terminologies that I'm going to be using is a group. So, this 2020 tax return is a group. Groups can be collapsed, groups can be expanded. It's another way to organize information with the, with the key thing being having the information that your team members need to see come up first and be the focal point. Okay, so groups help you do that. And then each of these are columns: preparer, reviewer, return status, due date. And one of the things I just love about monday.com is that you can add, move, change, uh, columns with incredible ease to really, uh, allow you to configure the workflow to work exactly the way it should for your organization. And, and there is no doubt about it, just like every snowflake is completely different, even though each and every one of you, uh, has an accounting firm or CPA firm or providing these types of services, without a doubt, every single one of you would build your tax return workflow in monday.com a little different to serve the needs of your team and your organization. So, let's start.

Daniel, oh, yes, quick question. Um, so one of our, I think this is asking whether it would be possible, um, to to make it, you know, for guests to see only specific groups or boards? So, perhaps you could address this, and it's obviously coming with item permission. So, just wanted to highlight that. Absolutely, absolutely. Yes, we will get to that in just a moment. I'm glad that you asked that. It actually makes a little bit more sense in the next, uh, tax return workflow where you have a little bit more of a high-touch relationship and custom relationship, and we actually organized the workflow into boards by client versus having one big board with all of your clients. So, amazing, hold me accountable. Amazing. I wish about that. Okay. Um, so in this case, right, it wouldn't make sense to share this board with a client because you've got all of your clients' information. But I'll show you that, that option in just a moment. So, you've got all these tax returns that have to get done. You've probably got a list of your clients somewhere, right? So, I'm just thinking about how you would kick this off for the year. monday.com includes the functionality to import items from an Excel spreadsheet. And I know everybody on the call, all 144 of us, love our spreadsheets. And so, while of course, there's other ways to get rows and items created, of course, just by clicking "Add" here, you can import items from a spreadsheet if you have a list of your clients already. So, that can increase or reduce, I should say, the time to getting up and running, uh, with your very first, you know, very first workflow.

Another way to add new, uh, clients to this table is using what we call a form view. And so, uh, and so it's great because Sarit already shared a form that you can use to submit your questions. But a form, what it's going to do is, uh, going to allow you to share a link with your clients and allow them to upload their, upload their documents and set up their name. And so, here we go. Add a file. There we go. Random file. Hit submit. Check it out. It's already going to be showing up on the main table. And as we scroll to the right, you can see that one of the columns that we added is a file column. And there we go, there's the document that has been uploaded. So, we can see, all right, this is ready to go. We set up a couple of columns in this workflow, this board for you. First and foremost, is the preparer. So, this is the person who is responsible for getting each of these steps done. And the reviewer is the person who's going to be signing off on it. So, check this out. In the return status column, and these are one of my status calls, are one of my favorite things because it's so visual, it's so human, um, really just gets you the opportunity to see at a glance where things are at. So, once things are set to "Ready," uh, what's going to happen is a notification is going to be automatically sent to me, the preparer. And in fact, if I can scroll over just a little bit on the notifications on the left here, you can see, "Mrs. Beasley is ready for preparation." It's letting me know. It also sent me an email to let me know, "Hey, it's time to get started on this work. It's ready to go, right?" And so, we had assembled. Once that has been done, that notification is going to be sent to the reviewer. And you'll see again under notifications, "It's ready for review," or we'll say, "It's ready for review to the reviewer." And you can see. So, we've used statuses to create some automations, but there's a lot more you can do with this as well. So, for example, you could tie an email to go to a customer using an integration, saying to the customer, "Hey, wanted to let you know, Mrs. Beasley, we just got your tax return, uh, ready to go," or "It's assembled," or "When it's approved," or "It's been sent," etc. You can set up automations to send, uh, emails directly to the customer, saving you time and headache and hassle. And this is the favorite, one of the favorite things about monday.com is they say, "Why, why do the repetitive things? Leave those to the robots, right?" And I'm going to show you automations in just a moment so you can see how some of those things can happen.

Some other things, some other integrations that are possible, uh, then you can tie, uh, those integrations to be kicked off, uh, to statuses, would be connecting it to Slack, so you could have a Slack channel for your team that says, "Hey, Mrs. Beasley is ready to be worked on. Who's going to work on it?" Another option is with a Twilio integration. Believe it or not, you can really easily send text message notifications as well. So, many clients, I mean, let's be honest, everybody's inboxes are overflowing, but people respond to text messages. They won't answer their phone. Oh boy, will they look at a text message, right? So, you can send a text message to your client, and then you can be that CPA that is getting talked about at the cocktail party when we have those again, like, "Hey, I got my tax return done. Check it out. My CPA texts me." That's pretty cool. Um, so, listen, those are just a couple of examples of integrations. Thanks to Reid for fielding those questions in the chat. That's awesome. Yeah, maybe we can just give some highlights because I'm not sure if everybody is able to see them because I'm receiving them on my side. I'm not sure if anybody is able to see. So, maybe we can, um, we could just give a couple updates. Would you like that, Daniel? Uh, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, so a quick question here was regarding the types of emails that, uh, monday supports. So, I replied, these are either Gmail or Office 365. We can integrate with. And we also have a native integration with Mailchimp for those who want to do like a marketing campaign or an email campaign. Um, in terms of running multiple boards, you'll talk about dashboards, so that could summarize data across the boards. Um, and we'll talk about, um, about that. And also mirroring, we can also mirror across boards. And one last question, I just wanted to highlight is regarding client PDFs. Can they be stored? And the answer is absolutely. You will see it shortly. We have a file column. So, Daniel, just, uh, if you could touch on those. Thank you. Yeah, there you go. Oh, thank you, Sarit. Awesome. Anytime. Uh, so where we left off is, of course, due date. So, this, of course, we are due date-driven, uh, types of organizations. So, what's really cool about due date? Can set it here. It's tied to the person who is responsible for getting this task done. And we have an automation, which I'll share with you in just a moment, that will send a reminder if that due date is approaching and work has not been started yet.

We also have a time tracking column because it can be very handy to get an idea of how much time we're spending on these different, uh, parts of the process. And so, what's really cool, as you can see, you're getting a total at the bottom as well, total time spent, as well as how much time is being spent so far on each of these items. Some other automations that we created, I'm going to show you behind the scenes in just a moment. When an item is sent to client, it auto-magically populates the sent date. And that's right, automagically is the word of the day because that's, that's what it's all about. And then when an item is set to completed, you can see that completed date column is also automatically set. So, it's all about saving time and saving clicks and helping you spend more time on driving value and focusing on your clients.

So, let's take a look under the hood, behind the scenes. And I know automations can, can be a little bit, seem a little bit scary, but I want to share with you that these are so easy to understand and easy to set up, and they're, they're human understandable. There's no code required. So, here we can see that when a new item is created, we're notifying Julie. Julie's in charge of keeping this process moving forward, and so she's going to get a notification every time a new item is created, either through the form or manually created on that list. And I also mentioned, hi, how, how we set those dates, statuses based on the status, automatically. And so, check it out. When return status changes to "Completed," we set the complete date to current date. And so, here, this is what it looks like inside one of these automations. Return status, that's the field, that's the status field. And what do we want to have happen? Changes to "Completed." And then, here's what happens: set the completed date to current date. And so, I'll show you a few more examples of automations here. Uh, we have two of those. And we have two more automations that are for notifications. You can see there's a little bit of a bell, a little bit of a bell there. And then there's a stacked, the stacked item kind of looks like a hamburger, is when it's a status column. So, when a status changes to "Ready," notify the preparer. When status changes to "Assembled," notify reviewer. So, the right people are getting notified at the right time that it's their turn to go in and do their part. And I also mentioned there was a little alarm bell that we have. So, that if something is not completed three days, by three days before the due date, you're gonna notify the reviewer and be able to get in there and update it, get started. So, I just want to share with you, not to overwhelm you, but there are a lot of different types of automations. And so, almost anything you want to be able to do, it's probably, there's probably an automation already here, ready to go, whether it's about due dates, notifications, or things that are going to be recurring. We're going to talk about recurring in a little bit. And if it's not there, fear not, create custom kind of automations. When something happens, what do you want to have happen? No code required, all in plain English, easy to understand, and easy to implement. Uh, so a couple of the things I want to point out, uh, we talked about board members. And so, this is who can have access to. If they have a little crown, they can edit the board. Uh, and then board permissions. And then here is a really great way to see board activity. Here's the log. Everybody who doesn't love audit, audit logs and audit trails? It's right here. We can see exactly what's happened, happening, by when, and who done it. So, uh, it's really easy for us to have a sense of, of where things are at and who's been working on what.

So, Daniel, can I interject for a quick question? So, I think a really good question here that was asked: "How do you handle this at scale?" So, let's say I have 500 customers, how do you handle this at scale? And would love to hear your take on this. Yes, that's a perfect segue into what I was about. Amazing, because yes, imagine, you know, what we have 10 columns here or 10 rows here. Imagine if there's 500 or a thousand, right? And so that's where board views come into play to give you an understanding, uh, that there's other ways to look at information. So, I'll give you a couple of examples of board views. Uh, here's one. So, let's say that you're able to spread your work out by month. Here, we created a board view based on what's called a filter, uh, that allows you to just see, "Hey, here's what needs to be done this month." And so, here you can see due date filtered by this month, right? So, that really kind of narrows it down, makes it so it's easier to see the things that need to be focused on this month. But you could just as easily do this month, this week, as well. Uh, another way to look at the information are the things that you or a particular team member are assigned to. So, in this case, we're using a filter, create a filter of all the things that Julie is assigned to. So, Julie can just see the 3 or 10 or 20 things that she needs to see and needs to be working on, allowing you to better organize, understand, and see the information that needs to be acted on right now. So, using board views and filters, it's going to give you an idea or a sense of the things that are most important and poignant editing at a given time.

Another thing I want to mention here is that on every item, there's a little conversation bubble. And as I was mentioning previously, it's all about communicating and collaborating in context. So, this communication bubble, start conversation bubble, is relevant only to this item. So, when I put something in here and I do "@mention Julie," "Hey, I have a question on this," uh, it's gonna be notifying her. She'll get a notification item on the bell, and she's going to know exactly what it is that I'm talking about. I'm talking about misinformation. A little joke there. Misinformation, you know, talking about that item. So, it was funny. I do have to give it to you. Uh, all right. So, that's, this is, uh, this is the tax return workflow that we developed for, uh, you know, more of a volume practice, you know, those simpler, just the 1040s, you know, just getting those things out the door. I'm going to show you what a workflow might look like if you took the, uh, took it and you kind of flipped it on its side, and instead of organizing it by task or type of work, we organize it by client. And so, here is an example where maybe you've got a group of clients that are high-touch, more custom, have a bunch of different schedules, need to file in multiple different states, and have a more complex engagement. It's not just the same thing over and over again, um, like with the more, you know, simpler kind of clients. And so, that's where building a particu, building one board per client can make a lot of sense. And this, to that previous question, is where you can set up a shareable board. So, you can invite guests to be able to view and understand and have access to the information that you want them to be able to see and have access to. So, I'm going to walk you through this, uh, walk you through this workflow. So, here, what we've done is we've grouped it into the type of engagement. So, here we have a 2020 tax return engagement, and we have a 2021 bookkeeping, and we've actually got it set up for future months as well. So, this client, we're going to do their tax return, and we're going to do a monthly bookkeeping engagement. I'll start with the tax return and show you how we've set that up. Hopefully, we'll inspire you to use maybe some new column types you haven't used before, or try some things that you haven't tried before. And also, just a way to kind of pull all things, all these different types of information together. Um, and then after that, I'll go ahead and share with you how we built this, uh, recurring monthly type of engagement, the bookkeeping.

So, first and foremost, the 2020 tax return. What you can see here is we listed out the tasks that need to occur and need to happen to get this tax return out the door on time. And we did it, we did some different things, uh, this time. We have some new abilities because we have each item as a row, uh, in this, in this workflow, versus being under the status column in the workflow that we looked at previously. I'll also introduce you to the idea of a template right now. And when you have a template, what it allows you to do is get things set up with everything, all the things you might do for somebody, and then simply add a new board, excuse me, add, uh, choose from template, see more templates. And here you can see your organization's templates. So, when you get a new client, all you do is, "New template," uh, "Your organization," says, "Say, this will say the name of your organization." And then you'll hit "Use," and that's all you have to do to create a new client in your system, and all the tasks are all set up, ready to go. And this is what it will look like. So, we take client A, we build out all the different tasks that need to happen, and we establish due dates. Now, I'm going to share with you a type of column we haven't talked about yet, which is a dependency column. So, this is, uh, where one task has to be done before a previous task. And so, in this case, all this is a linear workflow, which means every task needs to be done before the pre, after, only can be done after the previous task. And so, one of the things we did here is, once we set that up, we added an automation. So, that if one of these due dates needs to change, so let's say, for example, "Meeting Review," they need to reschedule, they want to move it out a week, it's going to automatically change the other dates. I don't know if you can see that, it was very subtle, but you can see the "Transmit this tax return" and the "Archive documents" all moved out a week automatically because we had to move that meeting with that client out. And so, I'll scroll to the right, and here's how you can see that date dependency. And all we're saying is that "Archive documents" cannot be done until "Transmit the tax return" confirmation and compress was sent to the client has been done.

I'm going to show you another really cool view, a way to look at this information. It's the Gantt chart view. So, it takes what you're seeing with all those dates. And this is a relatively, uh, recently updated monday.com feature. Let me, uh, throw that slide that over there. And so, here you can see with the tax return, what is being done and by when. And making, kind of a visual view. And then the same thing happens here. If something needs to get moved out, let's say, "Oh, let's move that tax return authorization." If we move that out a little bit, it's going to automatically update and move out the dependent items as well. So, really great way to see and manage team capacity by looking at it in a visual way using the automatically generated Gantt view, which is really next level. Daniel, this is really, really nice to see how you guys put this together. Thank you.

So, a couple more things I want to talk about, uh, and again, I will, I'll go ahead and go behind the scenes and under the hood, so to speak, and show the, uh, show the automations behind this. But the way that we are going to automatically notify the next person that work is ready to be started is that we use automation. When this pre, when the, uh, item is done, the dependent item automatically changes to status "Ready," and that's going to also notify the person responsible that, "Hey, the previous item is done. It's time to go ahead and get started on assembling that return. Everything is here and ready to go." And so, just think, that functionality alone, how they can keep everybody moving forward and getting things done. And so, we also included, like the previous workflow, a time tracking column, uh, a documents column. And then, if you're wondering, I'll show you how we did the status, how we did the status automation. When this is done, the dependent item is going to turn to "Ready," and the way that we did that is using this status dependency column. So, let's take a look at the automations behind the scene that are making this all, all this magic happen, uh, and not having to just think, "I got this done, I have to now manually communicate that to somebody." No more of that. It's all going to happen automatically. So, that due date adjustment automation is happening with this automation: "When a due date of an item is adjusted, reflect, uh, reflect to make changes and it's the date of its dependency item." So, it's going to happen all automatically. When an item is created in client documents, we want Julie to be notified so she can go ahead and take a look and keep things moving along. When a status changes to "Done," here we go, there's that automation for the status update, dependency, status dependency to "Ready." And then, when the status changes to "Ready," notify the person responsible. So, this is where that magic is happening. So, just think how much time, right here, is going to be saved having these things be automated and be totally able to be seen in a visual way. And then, of course, we have our, uh, last stitch, like reminder here, two days before due date arrives and status is not done. Like, let's make sure we remind somebody to keep things moving. No more having to manually, or managers have to manually check on the status of those items.

All right, so let's take a look here at a couple of other ways to look at this information. So, the main table has everything, a lot of information. So, we used views. I already showed you the Gantt view. So, we're using views to take a look at, "Hey, what needs to be done this month?" And so, we're using a filter here to show only items that need to be done this month. But check it out, if we wanted to do a filter instead on items that want to be done that are, uh, overdue, here we can have an overdue view. And look how easy it is to save something as a new view. So, it's going to show overdue items. It's already saved as a new view, right? It's that easy to make a filter. Um, you can also organize things by a particular person. So, here we've got a filtered view by person that's only going to show the items that need to be worked on and focused on by that particular person. And so, you can see, "All right, this is done." The other cool thing about a deadline column is that it's going to show you if it's been done on time. And you might be asking, "What the heck is a deadline column?" So, a deadline column is any time you take a due date column and convert it into a deadline column. Now that we've already done that, we can't, you can only remove deadline mode. Deadline mode connects the person responsible with the due date and a status to help you see if these items are getting done on time, every time.

So, let's take a look now at that monthly bookkeeping workflow that I've mentioned previously. I'm going to go back to the main table, the master table. And so, we did something very, very similar here. We organized this information for every month, and then we just duplicated this, uh, group right here, duplicate this group, duplicate the items as well for the entire year on this board. And so, what's powerful about that is we wanted to see a history. We wanted to make sure that we could go to our client and say, "Hey, this is getting done consistently on time, and we're getting our client on-time financials." So, let's say we always want to have that monthly financial review meeting in January. Let's do it, you know, by the 16th, right? And so, the due dates are going to automatically update here to provide ample time to get those tasks done, to make sure that we can, we can hit that, that deadline. Otherwise, the January bookkeeping is very, very similar to the, um, to the other one, to the tax return workflow. But what's powerful about thinking about your client engagements and having everything in one place for that client is you can see everything that different teams are working on, allowing you to break down silos and have teams be able to collaborate and coordinate together.

Sarit, are there any questions you want to address live before we move into the, um, I want to do a little bit of a sales pipeline demo? Sure. So, we've been, uh, we've been going through them, um, the timeline view. I can see it be viewed, you know, as days, weeks, months. Yeah. So, I guess that was a question or a statement. I'm not quite sure. Let's see. "Do you have timers, or does time need to be manually entered?" Is it a question you want to take, or we can take this, you know, as we respond to people? You know, I know there are some automations off the top of my head, uh, for timekeeping, uh, that we can probably assign to the. Yeah, yeah. Otherwise, it's as simple as hitting play, correct? And we also have somebody else, I think it was Chuck, was asking in the chat as well about the time tracking and whether it's possible to automate it. And I, I just answered, you know, kind of broadly, it's more of a technical answer, so we'll, we'll be happy to answer it offline at support.com. So, one last question here, uh, from Lawrence: "Is there a way to sort the board and filter by board?" So, I think you showed some sorting, right? You showed some filtering. We definitely have a very, a very robust, uh, filtering capability. So, yeah, yeah. And the sort column here, we haven't really talked about that yet, but you can sort by any column on this board. So, sort by due date, status, and so forth.

So, I would be remiss if I didn't show what and how a way that we could fold all this information together and look at it at a little bit of a higher view using what's called a dashboard. So, we established a dashboard that is rolling up information from these client boards and showing us, uh, at a glance, where is everything at using what we, this is called a battery widget. We can see where each client is at, who has which tasks that are in which status. Uh, and then here, as well, is a way to roll up multiple boards into one Gantt chart view. So, it'd be very easy to kind of move things out, saying, "Oh boy, we've got a lot going on here on the 12th. Maybe we should move that, move one of these clients out a little bit to kind of help balance and manage our workflow." You can see this one's already moved out. Um, and you can see, "Boy, this is pretty, this is pretty full right here, um, a lot going on here." So, let me, let's move that out and balance and, and set expectations accordingly. These are just three of the many different types of widgets, uh, including the llama farm widget. I invite you to play with the llama farm widget, that's a lot of fun, uh, of the many types of widgets they can use to visualize information. So, we talked, I talked about when I was teeing this whole thing up, is that it unlocks your information and makes it much more, uh, easy to use, view, understand, and most importantly, uh, take, um, on those items. So, you think you mentioned I was going to show tasks shortly? Yeah, we can touch on "My Week." "My Week" is another way to show what you need to work on and when. And so, check it out. I can see which tasks are assigned to me, what's going on this week, what's coming up in the future. "My Week" is a really cool functionality that's built into monday.com. And you can also take a look at other people's weeks. So, I can see, "Hey, what's going on with, you know, what's going on with another member of my team, or what's going on next week?" Uh, really, really, just another way to kind of filter, view, and look at information, uh, in a, in kind of a simplified, streamlined manner.

All right, uh, I think we're going to go ahead and talk about sales pipeline. And so, it's great, we've got some great clients, we're doing bookkeeping, we're doing tax returns. Now, wouldn't it be great to help automate and streamline how we bring new clients and build our practices? So, the way that we use that, and I built a very, very simple and streamlined monday.com board for the sales pipeline. And so, uh, what this is going to allow you to do or enable you to do is keep track of those conversations that you're having with clients and people who you've been referred to or been referred to you, and make sure that balls aren't getting dropped, and that we're continuing to build those conversations, uh, to add clients to the firm. And so, there's just one view I've set up here. I've kept it really simple. And so, here you can see we've organized this into groups of active leads, one leads, and lost leads. And so, lost to me just means not right now. So, they're definitely worth continuing to keep track of and to continue the conversation at a point in the future, maybe, maybe providing some nurturing follow-up campaigns from time to time. So, let's talk about active leads. Once again, we have that same functionality where we can have a conversation, uh, internally about that particular lead, who it's assigned to internally in the organization, who's going to be the partner in charge of it. And then, again, this is customizable. You can use whatever terminology makes sense for you. You can indicate the date that you last contacted this particular, particular client. And then here is your sales process, right? And so, everybody's sales process is going to be a little bit different. In this case, we have contacted, proposal, contract, and payment. And then we have custom statuses for each of these columns. So, contacted, oh, we need to call them again. Our email was sent, or we can, we've already won them. That's great. Uh, uh, proposal sent, was it sent? Approved? There are negotiations. Contract has it been signed? Payment has it been received? So, what's actually kind of cool, we built into this board a, uh, summary status column. So, as this, uh, sales process moves along, and things start to turn green, you can see, "Oh, now it's 50% to winning. Oh, it's 75% to winning." And then, ah, we've got that to, uh, move to the "Won" column already because, uh, payment was set. And I'll show you the automations behind the hood as well. So, it automatically moves down to the "Won" status, uh, when that goes to a hundred. I'll show you another couple of columns that are really helpful here. Uh, we're showcasing the phone call. So, it makes it really easy just to, uh, click and call, you know, really, even right from, uh, the application. Here's your address, so you can follow up with a thank you card or thank you note. And then, of course, you have email address, which you could use to integrate with your email platform to send, uh, emails to those clients as well. This is available as a template? Absolutely. That's a great question. And, um, it's right in here, I believe. Um, so, forgive me.

I'm not gonna know right off the top my head, but choose from template. See more templates. Correct. I'm just gonna say it's so intuitive, right? I think it's right here. Um, so you got me. I didn't get that creative on this one. I went and looked through all the sales pipelines and I thought this was just the simplest and cleanest one. So yes, you can, you can just hit "use" and literally install almost like we haven't really made that many tweaks to this. Uh, you can install almost exactly what you see here into your monday.com account, uh, for free. Yes, it's a really great. I just really love this. It's just the simplicity of it.

So let's take a look behind the, behind the scenes, under the hood, at what are the automations that are making this work. Uh, so check this out. Uh, five days after last contact arrives and when that date arrives, uh, if it's not one, um, note, we're gonna send a notification to that partner who's been assigned. Uh, five days after last contact, um, if it still haven't been won, that's like the nudge, "Hey, check in with this person. You should follow up." All right.

Um, payment changes to loss, movement to life, any of these items, any of these statuses move to loss and automatically is going to move it to a group. That's what this arrow means. It's going to change the group to the lost group. And when it contact, contact it changes to one, it's gonna also automatically, we saw that before, automatically change that to the right group. And there's so much more we can do with this. We could add a notification when its status changes to one, notify billing. Or there's just when you're tracking and managing a process in this way where everybody can see and be on the same page about what's going on, the possibilities are endless. You can just totally break down those silos and keep everybody, keep this, keep this process flowing instead of having balls getting dropped or hiccups occurring.

Same thing here. I'll just briefly touch on the fact that filters are also available to you here. And so we could say, all right, for all of Julie's items, uh, we're going to filter that here and save to a new view. And we're going to say, "Julie's leads." So done. Julie's now got a board only showing her leads. That's literally how easy it is to make another view that shows you just the information that you need to see. And once again, we can see here's all the activity, who's been winning business, who's been losing business. Uh, here's the, you know, there's the sales log. And again, thinking about the integrations, you know, the integrations are, you know, almost endless. Uh, we could connect Stripe and have automate payments. Uh, we could have it, uh, send a text message notification, "Hey, welcome to our firm," an email notification. Uh, tons and tons of options for integrations to make these things happen behind the scenes without you have to having to manually, uh, manually keep things moving.

Hey Daniel, yes, on that note, just one other question that came about regarding a specific CRM and whether we can integrate to Monday. And the answer is, we have about 40 native integrations, like you just mentioned. And then if you don't see what you're looking for right there, because we have an open API, that's something that we can do. Um, you know, either you yourself, or if you have technical capabilities, through a Zapier or Integromat. And one last question that I'm seeing several times, Daniel, and you can catch your breath, um, is regarding an onboarding board. Is there an onboarding board? I've seen you do it before. I'm not sure that the deal will show on today, but people have been asking whether there is a client onboarding board, which I think is beautiful. So it's a great, um, maybe in the next, maybe our next, next one. Yeah, I feel like we have so many questions and then we need a follow-up. So just fyi, I think I think client onboarding, employee onboarding, these are all fabulous things that because it's a, it's a tip, it's a common workflow. There's a, there's a great, there's a best way to do it. There's your firm's special way to onboard a client and make them feel the, the experience that you want them to experience, have working with your firm. So creating, I think it'd be something very similar to this kind of template where we created before, um, with a list of items that need to be done by who. You could even, if you choose to share this board with your client, allow them to see the process along the way. That is how we, that is what we do at Tech Guru when we onboard our clients. We literally show them, uh, and share with them what we're doing and how things are going. I don't have one ready to go right now to show, unfortunately. Um, but I would be, it's just this is yet another example of a great application of Monday.com, uh, to help manage. Uh, that is another example of a perfect workflow, um, to use Monday.com for plus marketing, marketing initiatives, HR, um, so many great ways to use it. And I'm so excited that we kind of got you thinking about other ways to to use, uh, Monday.com.

So I want to, uh, uh, now share that link that I mentioned previously, uh, about how to get the boards that you just saw here. Uh, so if you want to install this, the client portfolios, the 2020 tax return, and of course, the sales pipeline, we package all of this up into a Monday app, which you can install for free. Uh, so all you have to do is go to techgurut.com forward slash Monday. Uh, and what that's gonna prompt you is with just a little form to fill out. Uh, we will not sell your email. We're gonna use your email address to send you the instructions, uh, for how to download, install. There are just a couple of steps that you have to take. It's not too difficult. It's totally worth it though. And so you can take the work, the heavy lifting that we've been, we've been working on this for weeks for you, and skip all of that and then just go into customizing it for you, for your firm, and for your team and workflows. Uh, so that and install them for free. And also will include, uh, the Tech Guru, uh, workflow planner template, that Word document that I mentioned at the beginning that you can use to just kind of get your mind wrapped around the process that you want to use that works every time, who is involved, and gives you that ability to go in and start building that board with confidence, knowing that you've got, you've got a really good idea of what it is that you would like to build. Uh, so I, from at this point, what I'd like to do is, uh, maybe share a couple of, or Sarit, if you'd like to share this additional support and resources, and then we've got a few minutes for Q&A.

Great, wonderful. So yeah, I think we did a pretty good job tackling most or all of the questions, right? Um, I also put here in the chat for those of you who ask for beginners webinars, we do have them. I know that some of you are new to Monday, so this was a lot to take in. Um, and I think the, the beauty of those is that they happen on a regular basis and they're held by Monday, and you can join them and then you can take advantage of what Danielle showed today. Uh, the other thing I put in here again is the form. If you have additional questions for Danielle, and, and that's pretty much it. And then obviously, if you have any questions for Monday, you can always email us at support@monday.com, 24/7. And in multiple languages, I should say, which I'm really proud of. We, oh, we're very proud of our support team. So yeah, let's see if there are any other questions. Yeah, well, while you're doing that, I'd, um, I'd like to show the where the help functionality is that's built into the web app and gives, I don't know, I've just found like every time I have a quick question, somehow it just knows what I'm looking for. And so let's say, you know, you've got a question about, uh, you want to learn about dependencies. I mean, I literally, um, here we go, "How to set dependencies on Monday.com." I literally use this article to learn and I watch this video, and this is how I was able to learn how to set up dependencies, uh, and then automate them. So I've been really, really happy with the, the in, the built-in, uh, help functionality. And these videos are like just a couple of minutes, but they just get right to the point and give you everything, um, that you need. So anyway, I've been really, really, uh, really happy about that. And here's even like an example board that's kind of built in that you can play with.

Yeah, and, uh, one more thing I was going to say, and I don't see that question now, I think it was Cameron who asked, and I think the, the rest of the folks here could benefit, um, he asked something along the lines of like archiving, uh, let's say, you know, archiving, let's say all of last year's repo, you know, the, the tax filings, etc. And I think we, we've done some work also to archive to a board, right? Like with an automation. Yeah. So there's two ways we can do archiving. Uh, the downside with using the built-in archive function, it can be a little bit hard to kind of dig, dig what your, dig for and find what you're looking for. So the way that we've talked about doing archiving in the future is having a separate board called Client Archive and using this functionality, "Move Group to Board." So let's say, let's say it's February, okay? January is a wrap. Uh, it's going, let's go ahead and move this board to the Client Archive. We don't need to look at this anymore. However, in the event that you do need to go and find something about that that's been done historically or in the past, it's as simple as going and looking at that archive board. So there's a couple of examples of way to archive information because yes, the more you use this platform, the more you're going to build and list and lists can get longer, longer. And so it becomes very important to archive information. Another thing that you can do in the short term is just collapse groups that are no longer, you know, need to be looked at as frequently. And so therefore, it's taking, it's a lot less scrolling that you have to do, but it's still really easy to, you know, either search for what you're looking for or go and expand that group to take, take a gander. Those are all great questions. Thank you.

Uh, let's see. Leonard would like to know, can I store client permanent file documents that are regular using Monday.com? Absolutely. I think I, I forgot to show the document view. And so it's really cool. If you go the client route, and we, there's a client documents view. So it's going to only show all the documents that are associated with that particular board. So really easy to click and see. And it's secure. When you, when you have clients using this form, if you share this form with them, they can upload files up to 50 megabytes, and it's SSL encrypted, so it's secure. Uh, secure file upload that you can use to exchange files with your clients. I know how important, uh, important that is. And what's powerful about this is this link is going to upload files to this board. So it's, it's linked directly to this board. Yeah, great question, Leonard. Thank you.

Uh, well, what do you think, Sarit? Any other questions you want to cover? This was a good one. Um, yeah, I'm checking to see other questions. Yeah, there's a question regarding an income tax board with several groups. If there is a way to automate the value for a particular column to be equal to the name of the group. I'm not sure this is something that could be done out of the box, just like from reading it. We might ask you, Avi, to to reach out to support to double check, but my gut feel says no, this is not doable in this moment in time. Uh, let's see what else. Is it possible to time track on multiple boards in one place or through on click? Uh, is that something you want to take? Go ahead. Um, I think I've seen that done, but again, this is not something that is super common. So I would again advise to reach out to support. Let's see. The, the file documents. Yeah, maybe if you have any other kind of, you know, final thoughts, recommendations, how to tackle 2021 with all the rigor that you just showed us. This is amazing. I think a lot of us are just like coming out of this very, very full, you know, full plate and kind of, uh, really excited to to tackle all those challenges coming ahead of us, right? Um, absolutely. Yeah, I can. What do you think? Yeah, I'll share some closing thoughts. The powerful thing about Monday.com is it's never completely done. And so I always think about starting with a, uh, creating a setup, creating a board, inviting your team members to it, and then just getting started using it. And then using what I call an iterative process, okay? And so when you're preparing a tax return, this, it doesn't work that way. To do things in an iterative way, it's got to be done right. It's got to be done right the first time, every time, has to be done right. Monday.com isn't like that. You can go in and play with it and start using it and build lists and add columns and change and move things around and kind of like, kind of changing, changing things up while you're using it. And so that's why I invite people to just go in and try some of the things out that you learned today and just play with it and have a test board, or we call it our, we call it our playground. That's literally what this is. We, we call it our playground. Set up test boards, try things out, and then when it's ready for prime time, invite the rest of your team members to it and get, and, and show him, show them how to use it. The other thing I want to mention is if you do have any questions, we are, we at Tech Guru are helping firms set up their Monday.com boards, teach their people how to use it, and incorporate it into their business operating system. So just know that there's lots of help and support along the way. And if you need any help or have any questions, that this is what we, what we do. We're here to help, you know, CPA firms. Uh, so with that, I just want to invite you to give it a try. Play with it. You can't break anything. Uh, and always, you know, worst case scenario, there's that helpful undo button in many cases. Uh, so I want to, uh, deeply, uh, express my gratitude to Monday.com for hosting this. First to read for, uh, co-hosting with me. And, uh, we look forward to following up on other questions that have come in after the fact as well. Uh, and so, yeah, uh, thank you all very, very much. Thank you.

Yeah, I just wanted to again, thank you so much, Daniel, for walking us through this really robust number of workflows and for all of you for this active participation. It's just wonderful to see, um, so many people, so many like-minded people, and, and listening in together. And let's, um, let's stay in touch. Thank you again, and we look forward to hearing from you if you have any follow-up questions. Thank you, and have a great rest of your day. Bye-bye. Let's make this your best busy season yet. Amazing. Here's to 2021. Bye-bye.