Portal Dashboard Upset
We were told last year that sending a Gather request lets clients register for the portal, so that’s what we told our clients.
Now, with the new dashboard, clients can’t register themselves—we have to add them manually or with a CSV bulk import, and we had no warning about this change. It’s created a lot of unexpected extra work at the start of tax season when we don’t have time to spare and confusion for us and our clients. This could damage client relationships because now we look like liars. We are very upset and frustrated by this development.
Why wasn’t this mass communicated to all SafeSend users prior to tax season, and what is SafeSend doing to support firms who now need to address client dissatisfaction and additional administrative burden?
The most efficient solution, I believe, is for clients who receive a Gather request to be automatically added to the portal dashboard.
Comments
I completely agree. We had no prior warning that now we will need to manually go through our client list and invite those who have not yet signed up. We do not have the extra time for this cumbersome process, and we also told our clients that they can sign up for the portal at any time. Very disappointed with this change.
This was obviously not well thought out before implementing! They should take the entire client management list and transfer to the client portal list and indicate the "not registered" along with the "registered." Then give the ability to check off selected clients and send multiple invites at the same time to the clients that have not registered. The fact that we now have to create and import a CSV file is ridiculous and there is no easy way to tell which clients are registered since the client management list does not indicate if a client registered for the portal. Going forward when a client is added to the client management list, they should also be added to the client portal list.
I completely agree. This was an unexpected change with no warning at the end of January. We were new users to Gather AI this year and spent a significate amount of time in November and December creating a strategic communication plan to our client including an informational PDF document with instructions. These communications stated that the client could sign up for the portal. We delivered our business and individual Gather's by January 20th and when this changed we had no idea. Client's were calling us because they were receiving error messages when trying to access their Gather because we hadn't previously entered them into the client manager. This cause upset clients and a ton of behind the scene work for our team to quickly fix this. Major updates like this need to be communicated in advance and not rolled out at the end of January. Most firms are reviewing and updating processes, client communications and evaluating efficiencies in December so January is a smooth roll out for busy season.
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