Getting started
This is the short path from a brand-new firm account to your first return actually moving through Journey. There are four things to do (set up the firm, add your team, turn on the automation you'll lean on, and create your first client and return), and none of them takes long. The order matters a little, because each step makes the next one smoother, so it's worth doing them roughly in sequence the first time through.
Set up your firm
Start in Settings, where you tell Journey who your firm is. The most important field here is your firm's legal name, because that's what prints on engagement letters, §7216 consent, and other legal documents. Get it right once and every document downstream is correct.
While you're there, add your logo and an accent color. Journey is white-labeled, which means your clients never see the word "Journey." The portal they log into and every email they receive carry your firm's name and branding instead, so these details are what your clients actually experience. Finally, set a support email and phone number. Those become the "Contact staff" options in the client portal, so a client always has a clear, correct way to reach you rather than replying to whatever address an email happened to come from.
Build your team
Invite your teammates next. Each person you invite gets an email with a secure link to set their own password, so you never handle their credentials. As you invite them, give each one a role (Owner, General Manager, Manager, Supervisor, or Staff), because that role is what controls everything they can see and do. If you're not sure which to pick, the Role structure page breaks down exactly what each one unlocks.
Then create your departments: the groups your work flows through, like Individual, Business, or Documents. Departments are more than labels: they're the backbone of how Journey routes and assigns work, so a return or request can be dropped in front of the right team automatically. It's worth creating at least one department before you start real work, because without any, there's nothing for the automation to route into.
Two more pieces of department setup are easy to miss, and Journey's own setup checklist will not complete without them.
Give each department a head. The head is who work escalates to and who covers when nobody else is assigned, so a department without one has no fallback.
Add at least one delivery location. A delivery location is where finished returns are delivered or filed. Both live on the Departments page, under its Delivery tab for locations.
If the setup checklist on your dashboard is stuck partway through, these two are almost always the reason.
Configure the automation you'll rely on
A few minutes of setup here saves your team a great deal of manual sorting and chasing later. Three things are worth doing up front:
- Routing rules connect the kind of work to the department that should handle it: request categories and return types each map to a department, so incoming work sorts itself.
- Checklist templates are the list of documents you need for each return type. Set them once and every new return of that type shows the client exactly what to upload. There's a "Load standard checklist" button to start from a sensible default and trim from there.
- Legal documents (your engagement terms, privacy policy, and any §7216 consent) can be authored here, with e-signature turned on wherever a plain click-to-agree isn't enough.
If you want to understand what each automation does before you switch it on, How the automation works walks through all of them.
Add a client and start a return
Now the setup pays off. Add a client (as an individual or a business) and optionally invite them to their portal at the same time. Then create a return for that client. The moment you do, three things happen on their own: the return is routed to the right department, assigned to a suitable preparer, and given its document checklist, which the client immediately sees in their portal as a list of exactly what to upload. From a standing start, your first return is already sorted, staffed, and requesting documents. See Clients and Returns for the detail.
Where to get help as you go
The getting-started checklist inside the app tracks your setup progress, so you can see at a glance what's left. Everything in this documentation is searchable from the Help Center, and if you can't find an answer, the support assistant can help or open a ticket to our team.