From XU Magazine, 
Issue 25

Perfecting cloud-based communication and collaboration with SuiteFiles

Be prepared to collaborate and communicate with your clients completely online...
This article originated from the Xero blog. The XU Hub is an independent news and media platform - for Xero users, by Xero users. Any content, imagery and associated links below are directly from Xero and not produced by the XU Hub.
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Our customers are grateful to have systems in place that let them both collaborate with clients in-person and online. During the Covid-19 lockdown period, this proved invaluable to their practice and their clients. Many of our customers prefer to create in-person relationships with each of their clients, but love having the ability for their clients to upload and amend documents within SuiteFiles!

Features made for collaboration

Connect lets you create shareable folders with your clients and colleagues. Clients sign in with their Xero, Google, or custom credentials for a client-based view of SuiteFiles. You can move any documents you want them to see into here or remove any documents you want to hide from their view. You can also create documents where they may need to fill in information and create a task for this to be completed.

Our tasks feature is a sub-feature of Connect and this gives you the ability to set tasks for your clients with an easy follow-up process. Receive notifications when a task is completed and chat within the tasks feature to give more information.

Digital Signing with SuiteFiles means once a document is signed, it’s saved directly back to your client folder. When you request a signature, clients receive an email asking for them to sign the document. They can either login to Connect or click the link to sign in the browser, reducing the need for more credentials. They simply click the fields you have created and then click done.  

Completely cloud-based

When faced with the Covid-19 lockdown, many businesses chose to begin their transition to SuiteFiles so they could operate throughout the rest of the lockdown and be prepared for a second, should it arrive. Their transition involved a few conversations with our team and a weekend migration to pull their data across.

Because of our online training, they were able to quickly set their team up for success when using SuiteFiles and teach their clients the ins and outs of our Connect feature. Our integration with Microsoft 365 meant their team were used to the interface, they could edit Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents as they always have.

Emails with clients are automatically saved back to their client folder to ensure all correspondence is saved which adds to the ability to go completely online - should a practice need to.

Many of our customers choose to spend some of their week (or their whole week) working remotely, this is sometimes quite far from where their clients are based. Having the ability to work solely online and in the cloud has given our customers the ability to work remotely without struggling to get documents to their clients and receive any correspondence they may need.

Withers Tsang is a customer of ours and has staff working remotely from the Cook Islands, remote work can have its challenges, but this also meant that Withers Tsang were prepared from the get-go.

“Having all of our data in the cloud. We were very lucky we did that back at the start of 2019. At the time of course, we couldn’t have known that we’d be working remotely for long stretches of 2020. It has made all the difference in keeping our practice running as close to normal as possible in this environment.”

Document Management in the remote environment

SuiteFiles lets you store, manage, and edit all file types in the cloud. Office file types can be created and edited with real-time collaboration. When one or two team members are working remote, it can be useful to have the option of editing a document at the same time as a coworker. SuiteFiles lets you share documents and set tasks within your team. When a business has remote workers, this reduces the number of emails or messages that need to be sent about certain correspondence.

When considering whether remote work is right for your practice and team, it’s important to check out all the technology and features available that can create simple processes for those who are out of office. If you already have a remote worker, or team, reviewing those processes that are creating hardship and checking out the new technology that can create simplified working could ease those typical issues. We’re advocates for improving your app stack wherever you may need, so you can spend less time on manual tasks and more on what matters.

Getting started:

If you’re wanting to give SuiteFiles a go, getting started is easy. Begin by viewing a short demo to learn about each of our features, then book in for a 1-on-1 with our team so you have all your questions answered!

  1. View a demo
  2. Book a demo
  3. Trial
  4. Migration
  5. Training
  6. You’re good to go!

Why leave it there?

To sign up for a demo or free trial

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