Best Practices for Firm Setup

Before you begin setting up your software, we recommend performing some initial planning. A few minutes with a pencil and paper can save you hours of setup time and maximize your firm's potential with CCH Axcess™.

The following items, performed in the order suggested, provide the easiest setup of the software and creation of clients and staff in preparation for preparing tax returns and performing other functions.

1. Establish your organizational structure. Staff have default access to clients assigned to the same office Either a specific geographic location or a logical partitioning of a firm. For most single-office firms, firm, region, and office are synonymous. An office can only be assigned to one region. and business unit A level of the organizational unit associated with one or more offices. Examples may be Human Resources, Billing, Tax, Audit, and Financial Planning. All offices must have at least one business unit. A business unit may be assigned to one or more offices. as the staff. Establishing your organizational structure before adding clients and staff simplifies and shortens setup. See Setting Up Security for more information.
2. Determine staff access to modules and functions. Staff must be assigned to a security group A set of access rights and restrictions. Staff assigned to the security group automatically receive the group's access rights. before they can access CCH Axcess modules and functions. Staff can be assigned to security groups individually or by attributes, such as their position. Determine the security groups you will use to provide and restrict access to modules and functions. See Setting Up Security for more information.

Important: Staff who will migrate data from your CCH ProSystem fx products to CCH Axcess must be assigned to the Full Rights security group to ensure all required permissions for this function are granted. Staff assigned to the Full Rights security group cannot be assigned to another security group that denies the permissions necessary for successful data migration.

3. (Optional) Plan client access groups. By default, staff have access to clients assigned to the same office and business unit as the staff. The client access group A group of staff members who have permission to access information for a group of clients. is used to provide and restrict access by staff to clients. See Setting Up Security for more information.
4. Plan completion of the setup steps and enter the information you have gathered. This is a good time to take a look at the setup process and look for additional items that can be decided before beginning the input of your firm information. As a minimum, look at staff and client templates. Determine and set up any useful options for setting up clients and staff. See the following topics for more information:
• Setting Up Your Firm
• Entering the Firm's Organizational Structure
• Managing Staff Positions
• Setting Up Security Group General Information
• Assigning Staff to a Security Group
5. (Optional) Build staff templates. Staff templates greatly simplify entry of staff. See Adding a Staff Template for more information.
6. Migrate (or enter) staff and clients.
• If migrating from multiple databases, migrate first from the database with the most up-to-date information. Subsequent migrations only update fields that were missing in the original migration.
• If migrating Tax data, then staff, office groups, and signers must be migrated. Your existing office groups form the basis for the new return configuration set A set of preferences that allows the firm to configure tax return detail for signature block, print, electronic filing, tax products, and other products that interface with the Tax system.s and return groups.
• Positions are not created during data migration. If you use staff positions, then staff must be assigned to positions after data migration.
• If migration is performed before setting up lists, any required list items are created during migration. Those list items can be changed later.
• Migrating clients and tax returns is optional. If organizational unit Organizational units define your organizational structure. The structure can consist of multiple levels: firm, region, office, and business unit. If regions are used, at least one office must exist in each region. At least one business unit must exist in each office.s are not created before migrating clients and returns, then all clients and returns are migrated to the single default office and business unit created at installation.
7. Apply licensing. Assign licensing to staff who will use the new CCH Axcess products. See Assigning Licenses to Staff to enter your license assignments.
8. Finalize security and access groups. Assign positions to staff, if needed, and assign staff to security groups. Review staff access to modules, functions, and clients. Create any desired client access groups. Make any individual exclusions or inclusions to access groups as desired. For more information, see Viewing Staff Security Rights for an Organizational Unit and the Related Topics located there.