Settings

Settings is the control room for your firm. It's where you tell Journey who you are, how your team is organized, and how the automation should behave, so most of what makes the rest of the product work the way you want traces back here. Which sections a given person can reach depends on their role; see Account & security.

Firm profile and branding

This is your firm's identity in Journey. Your firm name and, importantly, your legal name live here. The legal name is what prints on legal documents and disclosures, so it's worth getting exactly right. Your logo and accent color live here too, and because Journey is white-labeled, they're what your clients see across their portal and in every email. And your support contact (the email and phone clients use to reach you) powers the Contact staff options in the portal, so a client always has a correct way to get in touch.

What your firm calls things

Journey ships with sensible defaults, but the words are yours. Under Settings, then Firm, you can set:

• Service Types, the categories of work you do for clients. Add, rename, reorder or retire as many as you need. Each one counts as one of four Services (Tax preparation, Bookkeeping, Advisory, Payroll), which is what clients show; an owner or general manager sets that beside each type.
• Role names, what your firm calls each of the five permission levels. See roles.
• Client tier names, what your firm calls each of the four client tiers. See clients.

Departments are named in the same spirit, on their own page.

Renaming a role or a tier changes the wording everywhere it appears and nothing else. Permissions, queue ordering and reporting all keep working exactly as before, because they run on the underlying levels rather than on the words. The number of roles (five) and tiers (four) is fixed; the names are not.

All of this is per firm. If you work across more than one firm, each keeps its own vocabulary.

Departments

Departments are the groups your work flows through: Individual, Business, Documents, and whatever else fits your firm. They're more than labels: they're the backbone of routing and assignment, and you assign staff to them so Journey knows who can pick up a department's work.

Workflow and routing

This is where you teach Journey how to sort incoming work. Request routing maps each request category to a department, return routing maps each return type to a department, and you can edit the request categories that clients and staff choose from so the list matches how your firm talks about work. Export & offboarding is here too: download a selected client's documents, organized by tax year, when they leave or you need a backup.

Checklist templates

Two kinds of templates live here, and they serve different sides of a return. Checklist Templates are the client-facing document lists per return type (with a "Load standard checklist" button for a fast start), covered in document checklists. Stage Checklists are your firm's own steps per pipeline stage (five of the eight stages take them; the page shows why the other three don't), covered in stage checklists.

Legal documents

Your engagement terms, privacy policy, and §7216 consent are authored here, with tokens that fill in your firm's legal name automatically. You can turn e-signature on for a document wherever a click-to-agree isn't enough. See Signatures & e-sign.

Communications

Not in Settings: Communications is its own item in the Admin section of the sidebar, open to managers and above. Email templates and the email log are managed there. Your own notification preferences are in the Notifications section above. See Communications.

Questionnaire and rollover

A couple of the firm-wide automations are configured here. Questionnaire auto-assignment decides whether a tax questionnaire is sent to a client automatically (see Questionnaires), and tax-year rollover sets when the new tax year opens for your clients (see rollover).

Integrations

Settings is where you connect your firm's email address and set up card payments through Stripe.

Billing

This is where you turn on client billing (a Billing tab appears on each client record, with invoices, a running ledger, and the invoice on a return) and choose the prefix your invoice numbers use.

Archived records

Also not in Settings: Archived Records is its own item in the Admin section of the sidebar, open to owners and general managers. Everything you archive (clients, returns, documents, templates, and more) is preserved there and can be restored. Archiving in Journey never deletes; it tucks things out of the way with a way back.