Review notes and tick marks
Mark up a document, leave a note someone owns, and close the loop.
Review happens on the document, not in an email about the document. Tick marks and review notes both live where the evidence is.
Tick marks
Tick marks are your firm's own symbols, defined once and applied to any document — footed, agreed to source, traced, recalculated.
If you see No tick marks defined yet, nobody has set them up. Define the handful your firm actually uses rather than a comprehensive scheme nobody remembers.
The value is consistency. A tick mark meaning the same thing to everyone is a shared language. One that means whatever the preparer intended is decoration.
Annotating
The document viewer supports marking up directly, with rotation for pages that arrive sideways, and undo and redo.
Client-supplied documents arrive scanned at every possible angle. Rotating and marking up in place beats downloading, fixing, and re-uploading.
Review notes
Leave a review note… on a workpaper. Notes thread, so Reply… keeps a question and its answer together.
Two things make review notes work rather than becoming a second inbox:
Assign to… gives the note an owner. A note nobody owns is a note nobody clears. Assigning it puts it on a person rather than on the ether.
Looks right closes it. A note that's been answered and cleared disappears from the working list, so what remains is genuinely outstanding.
Writing a note that gets resolved
Write the note as an instruction, not an observation.
Tie the 1099-NEC total to the GL — I get a $340 difference gets a resolution. Check this gets a reply asking what to check, and the round trip costs both of you a day.
The same applies to returning a client upload — specificity is the whole thing.
Where notes fit against the alternatives
- On the document, about the work → review note
- Internal chat about the client generally → team chat
- Context worth keeping permanently → a note on the client
- Needs doing by someone → a task
Review notes are for the review conversation, and they belong with the evidence so the next person sees the reasoning without asking.
Notes and limits
- Review notes are internal and never visible to the client.
- Notes stay with the workpaper, including after sign-off.
- Tick marks are firm-wide.
- Assigning a note doesn't create a task.