User Guide

Adding a client. Click Add Client in the header, or use search to find an existing one. Choose a Return Type first — Individual shows first/last name fields, anything else (1120, 1120-S, 1065, Estate/Trust, 990-Non Profit, Gift Tax) shows a Business/Entity Name field instead. Fill in what you know and click Save Profile.

Checking a client in. With the client selected, click Check In. This assigns a ticket number — hand-write it on the physical file jacket so the two stay matched up. If this client already has an active check-in for the same tax year, you'll be asked to confirm before creating a second one — this is intentional, since amendments or a wrong-return-type re-check-in are legitimate separate events, not something to silently merge.

Checking a client out. When their return is done, click Complete. If a client has more than one active return checked in at once, Complete will ask which one just finished.

Marking an extension. Use the Ext Filed button on a client's profile to mark an extension for the currently selected tax year without going through a full check-out.

Difficulty is calculated automatically from the Tax Forms you select on a client's profile. Each form has a weight configured in Settings > Workflow, and the total score maps to a tier — by default Easy, Moderate, Challenging, Hard, and Very Hard, though your office can rename these to anything.

Use Complexity Override on the client's profile to set the difficulty manually instead, for the cases that don't fit the formula.

The colored chip(s) on a client's profile show where each tax year's return stands. A client with returns in progress for two different years gets two independent chips, each with its own dropdown.

The first status in your configured list is applied automatically at Check-in, and the status matching "Completed" is applied automatically when a return is marked Complete — the statuses in between are yours to set manually as work progresses. Configure the actual list of statuses, their colors, and what a client sees for that status in the Portal, all under Settings > Workflow.

The table at the bottom of the dashboard is your full record for the selected year — searchable by client name and filterable by location, return type, difficulty, and staff member. Export what you're looking at as a CSV or a printable PDF using the buttons above the table.

Click Reports in the header for five views:

• WIP Dashboard — everything currently checked in, grouped by return type.
• Retention Report — clients who had a return done last season but haven't come back yet this one.
• Extension List — everyone with an extension filed for a given tax year.
• Analytics Report — busiest days and hours, and average turnaround time by preparer, difficulty, and form.
• Stale Contacts — clients you haven't seen in a configurable number of years.

Everything office-wide lives under the gear icon:

• Locations — your office locations and their pin colors.
• Workflow — tax forms and their difficulty weights, the difficulty tiers themselves, and the return status pipeline.
• Team — invite staff, assign Front Desk or Preparer, and manage admin access.
• Clients — bulk manage or delete client records.
• Data — archive a completed year, download a full JSON backup, or bulk-import clients from a CSV.
• Corrections — undo a return marked Complete by mistake, admin only.

Your own My Profile tab controls your default location and personal panel colors.

Portal has two kinds of accounts sharing the same sign-in page. Staff (preparers and admins) use the same credentials as Check-in, and need a Portal seat assigned under Team settings in addition to their office having an active Portal plan. Clients get their own Portal-only login, set up through an invite link, to view and manage their own documents and returns.

Portal has two separate e-signature systems, built for two different purposes — knowing which one you're looking at matters, since they work differently.

Pay & Sign Delivery (identity-verified, KBA) — used for the 8879 and any state e-file authorization forms. Because these authorize e-filing, signing requires Knowledge-Based Authentication (KBA): the client answers a short identity-verification quiz from public records before they're allowed to sign. Uploading a document here shows two upload areas — one for the federal 8879, and an "Add Another Form" option for any state forms, sent together in the same signing session. Clicking Continue to BoldSign opens a new window where a preparer manually places the signature and date box directly on the client's actual document before sending — this is deliberate: it means a state changing their form's layout, or a client's PDF looking slightly different than expected, never breaks anything, since a person is placing the fields on the real document each time rather than relying on a fixed template. Each identity-verified signature uses one KBA credit, shown and top-off-able from Settings.

In-house e-signature (no KBA) — used for engagement letters and 7216 consent forms, sent from a template. No per-signature fee, since these documents don't require identity verification.

Sending a document outside a full delivery. If a delivery already completed but something changes — a corrected 8879 is needed, or a client needs to sign a POA — there's no need to start a whole new Pay & Sign Delivery. A separate "Send a Document for Signature (With KBA)" tool lets a preparer upload just that one file and send it through the same identity-verified flow, with the KBA credit balance shown right there so you can top off first if needed. The signer defaults to the client's own info on file, but can be swapped for someone else (an authorized representative for a POA, for example).

If an e-sign document looks wrong to the client — garbled text, strange symbols instead of what should be typed values. This happens when a PDF was filled in using a font that isn't properly embedded in the file — common with PDFs edited in Adobe or fillable forms from certain sources. Portal automatically checks every uploaded PDF for this specific risk the moment it's selected, and shows a warning right there if it's detected, before anything gets sent. If a document is missed anyway (the warning is easy to skim past) — the fix is simple: open the file, use Print → Save as PDF, and upload that version instead. This isn't something Portal or BoldSign can fix automatically; the corrected version has to come from wherever the original font is actually installed, which is normally the computer that created it.

Create one-time invoices with line-item service items, or set up recurring invoice series that follow the same service item/description/discount pattern as a regular invoice, with support for both per-line and whole-series discounts.

Clients upload and view their documents directly in Portal. When a client marks their document upload complete, it shows up as a dashboard notification for staff, with a direct link to view what was submitted.

Automations let a status change trigger something automatically — most commonly a client notification — instead of a preparer manually sending one every time. When a client's return moves into a status you've configured a rule for, the matching action fires on its own.

Date-triggered notifications (like birthday emails) are configured separately from status-based automations, since they're driven by a date rather than a status change, but reuse the same underlying notification templates either way.

Stage durations measure how long a return actually spends between two pipeline statuses — for example, "Checked In" to "Ready to be Worked." This is entirely separate from the manual-timer billing feature under Time & Billing: nobody has to click start or stop for this to work. It's calculated automatically from your return's own status-change history, so it reflects what actually happened, not what someone remembered to track.

Because every office's workflow is a little different, the start and stop statuses for each stage duration are fully configurable — not limited to a fixed set of default stages. An office with an Intake Specialist step in between check-in and active work, for example, can define a stage specifically for that step, alongside whichever other stages matter to how that office actually operates.

Engagement letters and 7216 consent forms are sent from templates rather than a one-off upload each time. A template can include tokens that fill in automatically at send time — client name, office name, tax year, and preparer name always fill in on their own — plus any other fields the template defines, which a preparer fills in manually when sending. InQ provides a set of default templates out of the box; an office can also build its own alongside them.

Rather than adding clients one at a time, an admin can import an entire spreadsheet of clients at once from Check-in's Settings > Data. The import recognizes your office's own configured tax forms (from Settings > Workflow) by column header — matching is case-insensitive and ignores extra spacing, so a column named "k-1" or " K-1 " still matches a form your office has named "K-1." Any column that doesn't match a client-info field or a configured form name is simply ignored rather than causing the import to fail.

An optional, opt-in program (off by default) that lets your office see how your pricing compares to other InQ Suite offices for the same standardized service — for example, your $250 Individual Income Tax Return price next to an InQ Suite average for that same service. Opting in only shares the price your office has set for each standardized service in the catalog — never actual client data, invoices, or billing activity.

To keep the comparison meaningful (and to keep any single office's number from being reverse-engineered out of a tiny sample), an average only displays once enough offices have opted in and priced that same service — a small handful of offices isn't shown as "the average" on its own. Participating offices see their own comparison directly in Admin, next to their own price for that service.

Log an IRS or state notice against a client, categorized by state and notice type, and assign it to the preparer handling it. Track it through to resolution by status, so nothing sits unanswered.

Notices works as its own standalone product, or alongside Check-in on the same account. It's included free with an annual Check-in plan; on a monthly Check-in plan it's a paid add-on.

InQ Notify handles marketing and client email campaigns for your office, and can be reached directly from Check-in or Portal with a single sign-on handoff — no separate login required. It's an add-on, bundled with either Check-in or Portal rather than sold on its own.