How the automation works
A lot of what makes Journey feel effortless is that it does things for you in the background: sorting work to the right team, building document checklists, nudging returns forward, telling the right people when something changes. That's also the part that can be confusing the first time you see it, because work seems to move "by itself." This section exists to take the mystery out of it. Each page below covers one automated behavior in plain language and answers the same four questions: what it does, what sets it off, how you configure it, and how you turn it off.
If something in Journey ever happens that you didn't do yourself (a return lands in a department, a checklist appears, a status jumps forward, a teammate gets assigned), one of the automations below is the reason, and its page will tell you exactly why. If you're still getting oriented on the different kinds of work these automations act on, The four kinds of work is a good primer.
The automations
| Automation | What it does, in one sentence |
|---|---|
| Request & return routing | Drops each new request and return into the right department based on its category or return type. |
| Document checklists | Fills a new return's checklist from your template for that return type, so the client sees exactly what to upload. |
| Stage checklists & auto-advance | Gives staff a task list at each pipeline stage, and moves the return forward when the required ones are done. |
| Assignment | Hands a return or request to the best-fit, least-loaded person in its department. |
| Notifications | Tells the right people when something happens: clients by email, staff in-app. |
| Workflow rules | Runs your own "when this happens, do that" rules, like creating a task when a document is uploaded. |
| Tax-year rollover | Opens the new tax year for your clients on a date you choose. |
| Questionnaires | Assigns tax questionnaires to clients automatically and tells the preparer when one is done. |
| Scheduled jobs | Background jobs on a schedule: payment reminders, sales-tax nudges, status updates, seat reconciliation. |
Two things that are true of every automation
Two principles hold across everything in this section, and keeping them in mind makes the rest easy to reason about.
The first is that the automation is yours to control. Routing rules, checklist templates, stage checklists, workflow rules, rollover, and questionnaire auto-assignment are all configured in Settings, and most of them can be switched off entirely by leaving them empty or turning a toggle off. When a page says a behavior is "always on," that's because it's part of how the pipeline itself works rather than a feature you opted into, and even then, it never does anything irreversible on its own.
The second is that automation only ever gives you a starting point. It fills in a sensible default and then gets out of the way. An auto-assigned return can be reassigned, an auto-generated checklist can be edited, an auto-routed request can be moved to a different department. Nothing the automation decides is locked in, so you never have to fight it. You just adjust it when your judgment differs.