Jobs & templates
The practice workspace already knew what was wrong in a client's books — health scores, attention signals, a close board, a priority queue.
It did not know what your firm had agreed to do.
"VAT return, Kivora, quarterly, due the 15th, Grace prepares, the partner reviews."
That sentence had nowhere to live, so in most firms it lives in a spreadsheet beside the software. Jobs are where it lives now.
A template is the promise; a job is one instance of it
Write the template once — Quarterly VAT return — with its stages and who does them. Then generate it for a period, for every client it applies to.
| Template | The recurring commitment, with stages |
| Job | One occurrence: this client, this period, this due date |
| Stage | A step inside the job — prepare, review, file |
Three rules worth knowing
A job carries its own stages. They are copied off the template when the job is generated, not read back from it. So a firm that reorders its VAT workflow in March does not silently rewrite what it recorded doing in January — the record of what you actually did stays true.
Generating twice is safe. A template, a client and a period can only produce one job. A scheduler that double-fires, a partner who clicks Generate twice, a retry after a timeout — none of them can double your firm's workload.
Blocked is a real status, not a note. "Waiting on the client" is the most common state of real practice work, and a workflow that only offers not started / in progress / done forces you to lie about it. Blocked jobs are counted separately, because a week full of them is a client problem, not a capacity problem.
Setting up
- Write your templates. Most firms need six or seven: VAT, payroll, month-end, annual accounts, provisional tax. Stop there.
- Give each stage an owner role, not a person — prepared by a bookkeeper, reviewed by a manager. People change; the shape of the work does not.
- Generate for the period. Every client the template applies to gets a job, dated.
Assigning and workload
Jobs are assigned to people, and Workload shows what each person is carrying. That is where you find the manager holding fourteen reviews while somebody else has three.
Reassign from there. The job keeps its stages and its history; only the owner changes.
Reading the board
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| A pile of blocked jobs | You are waiting on clients — chase documents |
| One person carrying most of the board | Reassign before the deadline, not after |
| Jobs still not started near the due date | The week is already lost; move it now |
What this is not
It is not a project tool, and it should not become one. There are no dependencies, no Gantt chart, no percent-complete. A firm needs to know what is promised, who has it, and whether it will land — everything past that is software that gets abandoned.
Related
- Practice command centre — the working day
- Taking on a client — chasing what blocks a job
- Time, WIP and recovery — what the work cost
- The practice manual