The thing we like best about Senta is that it can really help you express your practice's true culture. You can add jobs and services for onboarding, client care, VIP clients -- as well as all the compliance work in your practice.
One of the best ways to get started with enhancing the jobs in Senta is to change what's there, and it's really simple to do. Once you've started to change existing jobs, you might then want to get stuck into more advanced configuration. And if you want to start doing this straight away and don't feel confident, you can always ask for help from Senta support.
Changing existing jobs
Senta comes with many existing jobs, covering much of the compliance work you might offer in your practice. We've added these jobs with "typical" steps that might suit you, but many practices want to remove - or add - steps.
Finding jobs
All the jobs are under the Settings menu. This is available to you if you're an administrator on your Senta site. You can find the settings menu by clicking the gear icon at the top of Senta.
Click on jobs in the menu to see a list of all of the jobs you have.
Editing jobs
Click on the job you want to look at.
You'll see the general job details:
Each job has a job name and job description. Ensure that it describes the job accurately, as it will be shown when you are choosing jobs in other parts of Senta settings.
It also has a job date description. Ensure that it describes the job date properly, in case anyone ever starts this job manually: the system will prompt them to enter a job date and your description will be very useful, e.g. "Client's year-end date" or "Date of incorporation".
Adding tasks
Click Add task to add an extra task to the job.
Task type
There are different types of tasks. The most basic one is a manual task – an instruction to someone in your practice to do something – but there are more clever task types too, which Senta can do automatically.
You can find out more about task types here
Assigning tasks
Each task is assigned to someone. Mostly you can let Senta decide who to give the task to and it will be decided at the right moment. Or, you can make sure that the task is given to the same person every time. For example, if one person does, say, all the invoicing, you could have a "send invoice" task go to that one person every time.
If you assign a task to Senta, Senta will complete the task without any intervention. If you assign it to a person, then the person is prompted to complete the task. Obviously some tasks aren't actually completable by Senta (filling in a form, for example), but others such as notifications and emails are.
You also have the option to make a task 'Unassigned' by default. This can be useful if you have tasks in your job that are assigned to different people after they have been created.
Start and due offset
Normally, tasks are just done as and when, but you can add timings to your job tasks if you like. This lets Senta know how soon a task can be started, and when it has to be finished.
Optional Start Offset and Optional Due Offset are used to tell Senta when to schedule tasks. When a job is started, Senta gives it a job date to use. Every task in the job is started relative to the job date and is marked as due relative to the job date. For example, "start a task 2 days after the job date" or "make a task due 5 days before the job date". You can find more about this in the support centre.
If you don't enter a start offset, all tasks will start as soon as Senta creates them. If you don't enter a due offset they won't ever show as overdue – you can just do them as and when.
To enter the offsets, use codes like:
+1d = the task will start / be due 1 day after the job date
-2w = the task will start / be due 2 weeks before the job date
+1m+2w+4d = the task will start / be due 1 month, 2 weeks and 4 days after the job date.
We have a full guide to date offsets here.
Task dependencies
If you like, you can also set up relationships between tasks, so that a particular task won't start until another has finished.
Filters
Ordinarily, every task on the job will be started for each client who ends up using the job. However, you can add criteria to alter which clients the tasks are Applicable to.
You might want to use this to fill in different forms for different types of clients, for example. "Company details form" could be applicable to, say, limited companies, and "Partnership details form" could be applicable to, say, just partnerships.
Adding and removing filters
Click the Add filter button and choose what field you want to filter by. Next, choose the values that you want to match. Whenever this job is in progress for a client, the task will only be scheduled if the client matches the filters.
N.b. You can choose which fields appear in the filter dropdown, by setting Can this field be used as a filter? to Yes in the form field settings.
Click the X button to remove a filter.
You can find out more about filters in How do filters work?
Changing the order of tasks
Just click the up and down arrows to move a task up or down the list.
The order of tasks in the list doesn't make a difference, except while you're setting up the job: When you set a task to depend on another task being completed, you can only pick a task that is above it in the list. However, it's better to put the tasks in the order you intend to do them, because it makes it easier for everyone to understand where they are in the job.
Removing tasks
Click the X button next to the task to remove it from the job.
Show on Calendar
Show on calendar lets you mark tasks so that they'll be shown on the calendar. For example, if you want to highlight due dates for accounts tasks, just tick the Show on calendar tickbox. All tasks of this type will be shown on the calendar.
Saving or cancelling your changes
No changes to your job will be saved until you click the Save button. Don't forget to click Save when you're done.
Similarly, if you decide you don't want your changes, click Cancel at any time. Any changes you've made (including deleting tasks) will be ignored and the job will go back to how it was.