Best Practices

To help you use Document to its full advantage, we suggest applying the following best practices.

Firm Setup

• Create non-client entities to hold administrative materials for your firm. When you need to search for a particular file, you can choose to filter by entity type.
• Establish a policy that defines the file types that can be sent as email attachments. Document provides strong encryption of email attachments. However, we recommend that the following types of files not be sent via email:
  • Tax returns and financial statements
  • Tax notices and responses
  • Tax payment vouchers
  • Tax e-file forms

  You can use Document's sensitivity levels to enforce your firm's policies about email attachments. We recommend using a secure Web portal product such as Portal for exchanging these types of files.

• Set file-naming conventions. The guidelines should be easy to follow and encourage using whole words and spaces, without underscores or dashes, to make it easier to search for files.
• Use document types to group files at higher-level categories than class. For example, you can create document types such as Draft, Research, and Final to indicate the status of a file.
• Restrict the right to access the recycle bin to a few people who have file purge rights. Limiting access to the recycle bin can reduce the odds of files being accidentally purged.
• Enable automatic encryption of email attachments. We recommend setting the number of days that the recipient can open the encrypted file to five to 10 days.

User Configuration

• Customize your Dashboard Home page to display Document panes. Adding Document panes to your Dashboard Home page allows you to access files stored in Document without having to open Document first. See Accessing Files from Your Dashboard Home Page for more information.
• Enable the user option to automatically check in files after you edit and close a file. Selecting this option ensures that your edits are captured in Document. It also can save you time because it reduces the number of steps required to check in a file. See Setting Document User Options for more information.
• Enable the user option to delete files from your workstation after the files are uploaded to Document. Selecting this option lessens the possibility of there being multiple conflicting versions of the same file available in different places. See Setting Document User Options for more information.

Client Setup

• Use the same folder template for all tax clients who have the same return type. For example, all Corporation clients should use the same folder template, all Partnership clients should use the same folder template, and so forth. Using the same folder template helps ensure that files sent from Tax to Document are filed correctly.

Working with Files

• Review a file's properties after copying or moving the file to a different location in Document. Following this practice will ensure that the correct metadata is assigned to the file in its new location.
• When you check in a file, enter comments describing the edits you made to the file. The comments you enter when you check in a file display as part of the file history. If you ever need to restore an earlier version of the file, your comments can make it easier to identify the version you need.
• Never send discussion emails to external contacts. These emails will not include your email signature or firm disclosures, nor will they be recorded in your sent items mailbox.
• Use the lock files function to prevent changes to completed files. Your firm may want to create internal risk management policies outlining when a file should be locked.
• When applying year metadata to a file, use tax year for the file, not the year-end of the engagement. It is important that staff use year metadata in a consistent manner.

Keeping Informed