Action Queue

Action Queue is where the things that could not sort themselves wait for a person to make a call. Everything else in Journey, a request a client submits, a return you create, flows straight to a department and a staff member automatically. Action Queue is only the exceptions: a ticket nothing had a rule for, a document your scan flagged as not trustworthy, a QuickBooks transaction a client never categorized. Clear the queue and the automatic paths keep doing the rest of the work on their own.

Every firm role, Owner, General Manager, Manager, Lead (Supervisor), and Staff, can open Action Queue from the sidebar. What each person can actually do once they are on the page depends on their role, covered tab by tab below.

The three tabs

Action Queue has two tabs everyone sees, Unrouted and Needs review, plus a third, Transactions, that only appears for some people.

The heading at the top of the page ("Action required, N items need routing") adds together the Unrouted and Needs review counts. Transactions is not part of that number, because it is not the same kind of exception, a transaction a client has not categorized yet is waiting on the client, not on your firm.

Unrouted

A ticket (a return or a request) lands here when it was created without a department, because its category or return type had no routing rule set up for it. See Request and return routing for how that assignment normally happens and what "no rule" means. A ticket already marked resolved, closed, filed, or completed never shows up here, even if it never got a department.

Above the list, a separate panel, "Documents need routing," shows client uploads that arrived through your connected inbox and could not be matched to a return on their own: a client with more than one open return, no open return at all, or no client match. These are the same pending items you would find in Intake; Action Queue surfaces them here specifically because they need a routing decision, with one-click buttons to send a document straight to the right return, or to start a new return for that client when none exists yet.

Every list has a "Show escalated only" toggle, and every row has an Open button that jumps straight to the return or request.

Who can do what:

Routing a ticket to a department, one at a time or in bulk with the checkboxes, needs the Lead (Supervisor) role or above. Staff do not see the Assign Department button or the checkboxes at all, and the server checks the same role requirement again even if the button were somehow clicked.
Escalating or de-escalating a ticket is open to anyone on the list, any firm role. Escalating notifies the next role up: a Staff member's escalation goes to the Leads (Supervisors) and Managers in that ticket's department, a Lead (Supervisor)'s or Manager's escalation goes to the General Manager, a General Manager's goes to the Owner, and an Owner's goes to the other Owners.
Routing a client's uploaded document to one of its suggested returns, or creating a new return for a client with none open, is open to any firm member; it carries no extra role check beyond being part of the firm.

Needs review

A document lands here when an automatic check on what the scan read back could not confirm it, not because the system was unsure how clearly it scanned. A document that reports very high confidence can still be flagged if it contradicts itself (an impossible code in a box, two boxes that do not agree), and the reason shown on the row explains the actual problem rather than repeating a confidence score. If a reviewer already left a note, that note is shown ahead of the automatic reason.

Accept and Reject are both open to any firm member; there is no extra role check beyond being signed in and part of the firm. Accepting or rejecting records who made the call and when. Each row links straight to the return the document belongs to.

This tab is empty until something is actually flagged for review, and that is by design, not every document gets a second look, only the ones a check could not clear.

Once anything is waiting, a search box above the list lets you narrow it down by document name or by the processor that read it. The line above the list always says how many documents are shown out of the true total, so if a firm ever has more flagged documents than one page can hold, that is stated on screen rather than left for you to notice on your own.

Transactions

This tab only shows up for a Lead (Supervisor) or above, or for a Staff member who belongs to a department of the Bookkeeping & Accounting type. It lists QuickBooks transactions a client has not finished categorizing, grouped by client, with a count of how many are still pending, how many the client has responded to, and how many staff has already reviewed.

Who can do what:

Pulling new transactions in from QuickBooks needs the Manager role or above.
Choosing a transaction's final category, adding a staff note, and saving is open to anyone who can see the tab.
Syncing a transaction's final category back to QuickBooks needs the Lead (Supervisor) role or above; anyone below that sees the Sync button disabled, with a tooltip explaining why.
Resending the notification to a client, and generating or regenerating that client's 30-day transaction review link, is open to anyone who can see the tab.

The number badge next to Action Queue in the sidebar only appears for Lead (Supervisor) and above; a Staff member sees the Action Queue link with no number there. That is a sidebar quirk, not a sign nothing needs attention: open the page and the Unrouted and Needs review tabs show their own counts to everyone, whatever role you hold.

Action Queue versus Queue Management

These sound alike but solve different problems. Action Queue is for tickets that do not have a department at all. Queue Management, by contrast, is for tickets that already have a department but no one has picked them up yet, and it is used to reassign and balance work between the preparers already in that department (see Assignment). Getting a ticket out of Action Queue (by giving it a department) is what makes it eligible to show up in Queue Management next.

See Role structure for exactly which role unlocks which action described above, and Request and return routing for how a ticket gets a department automatically in the first place, and what to set up so fewer tickets end up here unrouted.