Tax-year rollover
At the start of a new tax year, every client needs a place for that year's return and documents to live. Rolling that over by hand across a whole book of clients is exactly the kind of tedious, easy-to-forget chore Journey is built to remove.
There are two separate pieces here, and it is worth keeping them apart, because one runs on its own and the other you run deliberately.
The automatic piece: opening the new year
On your firm's rollover date, Journey creates the new tax year for your clients, opening the record for that year so returns and documents have somewhere to go. Clients who already have the new year are skipped, which means the process is safe to run more than once and never doubles anything up.
This piece creates the year, not the returns. It gives each client a container for the season's work.
A scheduled job runs on the rollover month and day you have configured, and does the work for every client whose new year is not already open.
The deliberate piece: creating next year's returns
When you are ready to start the season, go to Settings, then Workflow, find the tax rollover card, and choose Run Tax Season Rollover. Owners and general managers can reach it.
That screen is what actually creates next year's returns in bulk, carrying forward the return type and assignment from the year before, so you are not opening several hundred returns by hand. Each new return gets its document checklist as it is created, the same as always.
Show the preview before you commit. The screen previews exactly what it will create, and the preview and the real run use the same logic, so what you see is what you get. You can filter by return type first if you only want to open part of your book.
How to set it up
The automatic controls sit on that same card in Settings, under Workflow:
- Rollover month and day set when the automatic year creation runs.
- Auto-create tax year turns that automatic year creation on or off.
- Auto-rollover checklists is reserved for a future capability. It has no effect today, because document checklists are defined per return type rather than per year and are added automatically when each return is created, so there is nothing year-specific to roll over. See document checklists.
- Notify staff on rollover is covered below.
Notifying your team
Notify staff on rollover is a firm-wide switch. With it on, each preparer gets an in-app notification for the work that lands on them, which is a real notification and not a placeholder.
Two things shape whether a given person actually sees it. The firm-wide switch has to be on, and that person's own notification preferences have to allow it. Preferences are per person, in Settings under Notifications, and owners can set the firm's starting point there too.
It is an in-app notification rather than an email, in keeping with the firm-wide rule that staff are notified in Journey rather than by email. See Notifications.
Good to know
Running either piece again after it has already run does not duplicate anything. Clients who already have the new year are skipped, and the return rollover skips clients who already have next year's return. That makes both safe to re-run if you are ever unsure whether one completed.
If you open the Run Tax Season Rollover screen and the preview is empty, that usually means the work is already done rather than that something failed.