Assignment

Once a piece of work knows which department it belongs to, the next question is who should actually own it. Assignment answers that automatically, choosing a well-suited and not-already-overloaded person in the department. Just as importantly, it steps aside and raises its hand when the choice is one a human should make. The goal isn't to take the decision away from you; it's to handle the routine cases so managers only weigh in when there's a real judgment call.

What it does

Assignment looks at a ticket's department and picks someone to own it. Your firm chooses between two methods, in Settings under Workflow.

Workload balanced is the default and the one described below. It chooses the least-loaded eligible member of the department, so work distributes evenly instead of piling onto one desk.

Round robin simply takes turns in order. It does not consider how busy anyone is, which is the point: some firms want a predictable rotation rather than a calculation. If you pick this one, the load-balancing described below does not apply.

The rest of this page describes workload balanced, guided by three ideas.

It spreads the load. Rather than defaulting to the same person or to whoever is first alphabetically, it chooses the least-loaded eligible member of the department.

It respects seniority where it matters. Complex business returns (1120, 1120-S, and 1065) are assigned only to senior staff, not to junior preparers, so the harder work lands with the people equipped for it.

And it escalates rather than failing silently. If a department has no one who fits (say there's no senior staff available for a business return), the ticket isn't quietly left unassigned. It's flagged for review and the department's Leads (Supervisors) and managers get an in-app alert that assignment needs a human, so nothing slips through the cracks.

When someone is assigned, they're notified in-app (see Notifications), and the ticket records a short note explaining why it landed with them.

What triggers it

Assignment runs once a ticket has a department, which typically happens right after routing places it. A Lead (Supervisor) or manager can also run it on demand from the ticket itself.

Who can assign

The controls sit at different levels so oversight stays with the right roles:

• Auto-assigning within a department is available to Leads (Supervisors) and above.
• Reassigning a ticket to a specific person from Queue Management is available to owners, general managers, and managers.

Reassigning

Every assignment is a starting point. A manager can move a ticket to a different person whenever the situation calls for it, and can attach a short note explaining the change. That note is recorded as an internal, staff-only comment on the ticket: it's about your internal routing, so it's never visible to the client.

Good to know

• The load calculation is based on each person's current open workload in the department, so assignment naturally tracks who actually has capacity right now.
• Escalation is a feature, not a breakdown. When it fires, it's surfacing a real gap (a department with no one eligible for a certain kind of work), so you can fix staffing deliberately instead of discovering an unworked return days later.