Best Practices for Setting Up Your Firm

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.

1. (Optional) Set up and create users in Active Directory. If you want to link CCH Axcess users with Active Directory Active Directory can serve as the primary source for maintaining information about the users on your network. Active Directory Authentication allows you to manage user data through Active Directory., set up Active Directory before setting up CCH Axcess. Active Directory is a part of the Windows^® networking system. Smaller firms will often elect not to perform this step.

Note: It is recommended to migrate staff data before mapping users to Active Directory. If Active Directory is mapped to users before data migration occurs, a single staff template is used for all staff.

2. 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 Represents a lower level organizational unit available in an office. Examples might 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.
3. 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 modules and functions in the suite. Staff can be assigned to security groups individually or by attributes, such as their positions. Determine the security groups you will use to provide and restrict access to modules and functions.

Important: Staff who will migrate data 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.

4. (Optional) Plan client access groups. By default, staff have access to clients assigned to the same office and business unit as the staff. Client access group Your firm can create client or staff access groups to both limit and grant access to the clients or staff in the access group. The access can be defined on a work product module basis.s are used to provide and restrict access by staff to clients.
5. 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.
6. (Optional) Build staff templates. Staff templates greatly simplify entry of staff.
7. 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 sets Groupings that allow the firm to configure tax return detail for signature block, print, electronic filing, tax products, and interfaces with the Tax system. 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 are a means for your firm to define your organizational structure. The structure can consist of multiple levels: firm, region, office, and business unit. Regions are optional. If regions are used, at least one office must exist in each region. At least one business unit must exist in each offices 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.
8. Apply licensing. Assign licensing to staff who will use CCH Axcess of products.
9. 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.