Working a task

Click any task and it opens in a panel beside your list rather than taking you to a new page. You keep your place, and closing it puts you back where you were.

Press Escape to close.

Where to find it

Tasks open the same way from the pipeline board and from a client's Tasks tab.

The tabs

The panel carries eight tabs: Details, Subtasks, Documents, Messages, Activity, Research, Workpapers, and a library of reusable content.

Details is where you'll spend most of your time. The rest are there so the task is a complete record of the work rather than a pointer to it — the files, the correspondence, and the reasoning all sit on the same object.

The Details tab

Client — which client the work belongs to.

Assignee — who's doing it. Unassigned tasks show as Unassigned, and are worth filtering for weekly.

Office — which office owns it, where your firm has more than one.

Due date

Period — the period the work covers. This is what separates 2024 1040 from 2025 1040 when both are open.

Research — tax research linked to this task, so the reasoning behind a position stays attached to the work it concerns.

Tags — click the dashed + Tag chip to add one. Tags come from your firm's shared list, and you can't create a new one from here.

The two toggles people miss

Billable — whether time on this task bills. Set it correctly at the start, because reconstructing billability in April from memory is nobody's favourite exercise.

On hold — parks a task without completing it or losing it. Held tasks are filterable, which means "what have we parked and forgotten?" is a question with an answer.

On hold is the right home for work that's genuinely stalled for a reason outside the normal flow. Don't use a status for it — statuses describe where work is in your process, and "stuck for reasons unrelated to the process" isn't a stage.

Client sees

Each task carries a client-facing label. Internally a task might be 1040 — prep (Marcus), while the client sees whatever you put here.

This works alongside the client label on the status. The status label says what stage it's at, and this says what the work is.

Remind client

When a task is sitting in a status whose role is Waiting · client, and the task is visible in the portal, a reminder action becomes available.

It only appears under both conditions, deliberately — reminding a client about something they can't see, or about work that isn't actually waiting on them, is how a firm trains its clients to ignore reminders.

Notes and limits

• Moving a task to a status with the Complete role closes it out, and in the active list it fades and drops away.
• Changing a field on the panel saves immediately. There's no save button.
• Single edits fire the same automations a bulk edit does.
• Tabs you lack permission for don't appear.