By default, Senta will allocate client work to the account manager. This works for many practices, but you may have a different way of allocating work -- to colleagues in your practice who look after particular types of work, such as VAT, payroll, accounts or taxation.
Senta has a couple of features that can help you.
One person does all of the work of a certain type
If one person always does a particular type of work, you can simply update Jobs to always assign work to them.
For example, we find that many practices have account managers who look after the clients' general work... but have a payroll specialist who looks after payroll, end-of-year reporting, and so on.
In this case, you can just edit the various payroll-related Jobs and change the task assignee.
Instead of picking the Account manager role, just choose the individual in question instead.
Various people do work of a certain type and you need to choose for each client
Other practices have groups of people who have specialisms, but the work is allocated to them for particular clients. For example, suppose you have several payroll specialists. You can choose which payroll specialist will do payroll work for each client:
Acme Limited
Account manager: Alison
Payroll specialist: Bob
Zenith Limited
Account manager: Alison
Payroll specialist: Chiara
You're not limited to payroll, of course, but can have as many types of specialists as you need.
Setting this up is quite easy. There are two steps.
Step 1: Add fields to the client form
Firstly, you need to add new fields to the client record. There will be one field for each type of specialist. You will then be able to choose the appropriate people for each client's work.
Go to Settings > Forms > Client details
This is the main client editing form. You will see that the fields and tabs on this form match the fields and tabs that you see when you look at a client.
You can either put all the specialist fields on a new tab, if there are quite a few, or you can just put them on the General tab if you like -- that's where the account manager field is.
Pick your tab (or add a new one) and then click the Add field button. Add your new field like this:
We always advise you to enter a field reference. You don't have to, but it will mean you can refer to the field in emails in the future, for example:
Hi {to.firstname}
The person dealing with your VAT will be {client.vatspecialist}.
You will need to do this step for all the specialist roles you decide to set up.
Click Save once you're done.
If you go to any client and edit it, you will be able to choose the specialists for each area. You will need to do this for all your clients.
Step 2: change the jobs
You need to change the jobs so that work is allocated not to the account manager... but to the specialists.
You will need to decide what tasks are going to be allocated in the new way. When you first get Senta, all tasks are set to go to the account manager. You might leave some of the tasks to be allocated in this way and just change some of them.
Go to Settings > Jobs and decide what jobs you want to change. Then, for each jobs, you need to change the Assignee for the tasks. You will see that the Assignee is usually set to "Account manager". You can now change this to use the new role.
Here's an example from a VAT Job:
As you can see, this has been changed so that the task will be assigned to the VAT specialist for the client, not the account manager.
Once again, click Save when you've made the changes to each Job. It may ask you if you'd like to update existing jobs -- click Yes there.
It will take a little while for existing jobs to update. Future jobs will have their tasks allocated in the new way.
If you have any questions, or would like help with any aspect of using these features, please let us know.