Does anyone use Trello to manage their workflow in an accountancy practice ?

David Cramp

I am new to Trello and my gut is telling me it is a great tool, particularly with all the power ups. I wondered if anyone had experience of using Trello manage workflow in an accountancy practice. If so, how do you structure your boards - are your boards based on work type eg accounts, tax returns, VAT etc or do you have a board per client, for example, or anything else ?

Thanks in advance

Iain Dooley

@David Cramp I did some work with an accountant a couple of years ago. My ideal set up for him was to have a "board of boards" which is something I use frequently for clients who have consulting or project based businesses:

https://blog.trello.com/related-cards-related-boards

however this approach requires some automation to make it really functional for a business as complicated as an accounting practise without lots of manual clicks.

So for example I created automations for him so that when we added a new card, it would create the linked board, then certain tasks would recur on given time periods. You can see a typical sales/production workflow that demonstrates this type of thing in the intro video for the Trellinator integration I created:

https://trello.com/integrations/#trellinator

Other options would be to have repeating cards for each client that recurred using Butler or the Card Repeater power up, where each new card created would have a checklist for each of the tasks to perform for that client. The lists would then represent the "stages" (for example "Documentation Requested", "Documentation Received", "In Progress", "Out for Signature", "Filed with Tax Office" and that kind of thing) and you would move cards through stages as you went. You could use Butler to set due dates on cards based on the types of work being done.

The advantage of having a board per client is that you can add your client to their board. If you're not doing that, what I would recommend at a strategic level is to keep things on one board as much as possible, and use labels to quickly and easily create "views" of cards using filtering:

https://help.trello.com/article/787-filtering-cards-on-a-board

A common complaint in Trello is that people create lots of boards and then want a way to "see it all in one place" -- generally when I see that, it's an indication that they should have had fewer boards to begin with.