Tasks & jobs

Not all of a firm's work involves a client. A great deal of it is internal (the bookkeeping closes, the payroll runs, the "review this before it goes out"), and that's what tasks are for. Where a return tracks a client's tax file, a task tracks a piece of work for your team. It's one of the four kinds of work in Journey, and the one that's purely staff-to-staff.

Jobs

A job is an internal unit of work with a title, a priority, a due date, and an assigned owner, and it can hold subtasks (a checklist within the job) for work that comes in steps. Because a job has no client on the other end, its comment thread is staff-only, which makes it a safe place for candid internal discussion. Jobs move through their own progress states as your team works them, the same way any item in Journey does.

Assignment applies to jobs just as it does to tickets: a job is handed to a staff member, who's notified on the bell that it's theirs.

Recurring jobs

Much internal work happens on a rhythm (monthly bookkeeping, quarterly filings), and recreating it by hand every period is both tedious and easy to forget. A recurring job template solves that: you define the work once, and Journey creates a fresh job from the template on schedule. The recurring work simply appears when it's due, so nothing falls off the calendar because someone didn't remember to add it.

Tasks are staff-to-staff. Their mirror image is the client task (sometimes called a to-do), where your firm hands a small, specific action to a client rather than to a teammate: "upload your ID," "confirm your address." It's easy to conflate the two because both are small assignable items, so it's worth keeping the distinction in mind: a task is for your team, a client task is for a client. See the four kinds of work.

Not to be confused with stage checklists

There's one more internal to-do concept worth separating out. Stage checklists are task lists that live on a return, marking the steps of preparing that particular return at each stage of its pipeline. See stage checklists & auto-advance. Jobs, by contrast, are standalone units of work that aren't tied to a single return's pipeline.

Where to find your work

Staff see the jobs and tickets assigned to them in their queue and on their dashboard, and managers can see and balance workload across a department. That same picture of who's carrying what is what the assignment automation draws on to spread new work evenly.