Clients

Clients are the center of everything else in Journey: every return, request, document, and invoice hangs off a client record. This page covers how you create clients, the ways you can describe and segment them, and where their whole history lives once they're in the system.

Adding a client

Every client has a client type: Individual, Sole proprietor (Schedule C), S corporation, Partnership, C corporation, Trust or estate, or Non-profit. Anything other than an individual carries a business name as well as a contact person (for a sole proprietor the business name is optional). Clients added before Journey recorded the entity type show "Business, type not set" until someone picks the real type in Edit client; Journey never fills it in on its own.

All Journey strictly needs is a name, but adding an email and phone number is what lets you invite the client to their portal and reach them with notifications, so it's worth capturing up front.

Two things happen around adding a client that are worth knowing about. First, Journey runs a duplicate check: if the email you enter matches an existing client, it warns you, so you don't end up with two records for the same person. Second, you can invite the client to their portal right then, or later. They receive a branded email, set a password, and can then upload documents, track their returns, and message your firm.

Services

A client can have one or more of four Services: Tax preparation, Bookkeeping, Advisory and Payroll. You pick them when you add or edit a client, and they show as tags on the client's page and in the clients list. Services are how Journey supports clients who aren't only tax clients, and they shape what a given client experiences. Because of them, Journey stays service-neutral: a bookkeeping-only client isn't pushed through tax-specific steps that don't apply to them.

Behind each Service sit your firm's own service types, the names you use in Settings. An owner or general manager sets which Service each of your types counts as, once, in Settings, Firm, Service Types. Until a Service has a type behind it, it can't be picked on a client, and the client form says so. If several of your types count as the same Service, the client form lets you choose which one applies.

Tiers

Each client can also carry a tier (Platinum, Gold, Silver, or Standard by default), shown as a small colored badge. Tiers are a way to segment your book, whether for prioritization, service levels, or your own reporting. They're informational rather than restrictive: a tier doesn't lock or unlock features, it just tells you and your team how you've classified that relationship.

Tiers do affect one thing: where work sorts in your queues. A higher tier pushes a client's returns and requests up the list, and an outstanding balance pushes them higher still. Renaming a tier does not change that ordering.

Using your own tier names

If Platinum, Gold, Silver and Standard aren't what your firm calls them, you can rename them under Settings, then Firm, then Client tier names. Whatever you type appears everywhere tiers are shown: the client list, the client record, your queues, returns, reports, search results and automation rules.

There are always four tiers, and they always rank in the same order. You can rename them and decide which clients sit at each one, but you cannot add a fifth or remove one. Clear a box to go back to Journey's name for that tier.

Renaming is per firm. If you work across more than one firm, each keeps its own names.

One thing to watch: the client importer still expects Journey's underlying values in the spreadsheet (platinum, gold, silver, standard), not your renamed versions. If your firm has renamed a tier, the import screen shows you which value to use.

The client detail screen

Opening a client brings their entire picture together in one place: contact details, service types and tier, their returns and requests, their document library, billing status, and activity history. It's the hub from which you edit their details, invite them to the portal, start a return or request for them, and manage their documents.

The client library

Every client has a library: their documents organized by tax year, plus a general folder for anything that isn't year-specific. Whether a document was uploaded against a return or dropped into a year's folder, it surfaces here, so both your team and the client have one organized place for everything rather than a scatter of attachments. See Documents & checklists.

Active, archived, and deactivated

There are two distinct ways a client can step out of your active workflow, and they're not the same thing. Archiving removes a client from your active lists, pickers, and counts while preserving the record. An archived client no longer clutters dropdowns, and can be restored later from Archived Records, in the Admin section of the sidebar. Deactivating (marking a client inactive) is different: it flags the client as inactive without archiving them. Reaching for the right one keeps your lists honest.

Importing clients

If you're bringing an existing book into Journey, you can bulk-import clients from a spreadsheet, mapping columns like name, email, phone, and tier (standard, silver, gold, or platinum). It's the fast path from a list you already have to a set of client records ready to work.

Use those four values in the tier column even if your firm has renamed its tiers. The import screen tells you which value matches each of your names.