Request & return routing
One of the first things Journey does with any new piece of work is decide which part of your firm should handle it. Rather than leaving new returns and requests in an undifferentiated pile for someone to sort by hand, routing reads what the work actually is and drops it into the right department automatically, the instant it's created. For a firm of any size, that's the difference between work quietly landing where it belongs and a manager spending the first hour of every day triaging an inbox.
What it does
Routing looks at each new ticket and assigns it to a department based on the kind of work it is. The rule it uses depends on whether the ticket is a request or a return.
Requests (where a client is asking for something and there's no tax form attached) are routed by their category. A request the client filed under "Document Request" can go to your Documents department, one under "Billing" to whoever handles billing, and so on. Returns are routed by their return type instead: every 1120-S can land with your Business department, every 1040 with your Individual department, whatever mapping fits how your firm is organized.
This happens no matter how the ticket was created. A staff member using the New request dialog and a client submitting from their portal both pass through the same routing, so the department is already set before anyone opens the item.
Email is the exception, and deliberately so. A message arriving in your connected inbox is not routed, because it is not yet a ticket: it waits in your Intake queue until someone turns it into one. Routing runs at that point, on the ticket they create.
What triggers it
Routing runs automatically at the moment a ticket is saved. It's built into the creation of every ticket rather than being a step someone runs afterward, so by the time the work shows up anywhere in Journey, it already has a department.
How to set it up
Routing only acts on the rules you give it, which you manage in Settings under Workflow:
- Request routing maps each request category to a department (for example, "Signature Request" to Documents).
- Return routing maps each return type to a department (for example, 1040 to Individual, and 1120-S, 1120, and 1065 to Business).
The categories clients and staff choose from are editable in the same area, so you can shape the list to match how your firm actually talks about work. The default set is General Question, Document Request, Signature Request, Advisory, Billing, and Other.
What happens when there's no rule
If a category or return type has no matching rule, the ticket is still created: it just arrives without a department and shows up as unrouted for a manager to place by hand. That's a useful safety net rather than an error, but it's also a signal: if you're regularly placing the same kind of work manually, it's worth adding a rule for it so it routes itself from then on. Setting up rules for the categories and return types you actually use is what keeps the unrouted pile empty.
How to change or turn it off
Because routing only fires when a matching rule exists, removing a rule turns off routing for that category or return type: new tickets of that kind simply land unrouted instead. And since routing only ever sets a starting department, it's never the last word: you can move any ticket to a different department by hand after the fact, whenever your judgment differs from the rule.
What happens next
Routing decides the department; it doesn't pick the person. Once a ticket has a department, assignment takes over to choose who within it should own the work.