Welcome to Canopy! This video is designed to walk you through the step to get started in Canopy.
In this Video:
- Using the Global Navigation Bar and navigating the home page
- Setting up your personal and company settings
- Account management and customized branding
Using Global Navigation Bar
When you log into Canopy, you are taken to your home screen dashboard. Off to the left is the global navigation bar. Yours might look a little bit different than mine. It just depends on what licenses you're subscribed to.
At the top is the global plus button. When you click on it, you will see several quick links to popular things inside of Canopy.
Exploring Home Screen Dashboard
If at any time you would like to navigate back to the home dashboard, you can do so by clicking on the Canopy symbol at the top.
On the dashboard, you will see:
- Calendar: once synced, you will see your upcoming days in real time.
- Tasks: an overview of your current task flow, including upcoming due dates. You can click on View all Task to go directly to your task dashboard.
- Links: You can customize links to places you visit frequently, both inside and outside of Canopy.
- Your Icon: this is where you will access your settings and support
Canopy Tip!
If you can't see your entire home screen, you may need to zoom out of your browser so you can see the entirety of your browser in this window. You can use a keyboard shortcut to zoom in and out by using command + or - on a Mac or control + or - on Windows.
Setting Up Your Profile
Click on your profile icon, then settings.
You're going to land on your user profile. This is where you can update any of your own personal information.
Two-factor Authentication
And one important area to pay attention to is two-factor authentication. Canopy is going to require you to use two-factor authentication every thirty days during your sign-in. It defaults to the email you have in Canopy, but you can enter your phone number if you would like it to be texted to you via SMS text. You want to make sure you press this little checkbox to agree to receive text messages. You can also set up an Authenticator if you use an app on your phone. You will scan the QR code with your phone and follow the directions on the app. Make sure you save any changes that you make before you navigate away from this page.
Company Information
Here is where you're going to put in any information about your firm.
A couple of things to know:
- When you put in your address and if you use the autofill feature, you just want to double-check and make sure that the state populates correctly when using autofill; oftentimes, it will skip over the state.
- When putting in your company's email and phone number, you're going to want to use generic ones, either for your customer support or to your main desk, since this information will be client-facing.
Links
Up at the top in the next tab are your links. And here is where you add one of the quick links that live on your home dashboard.
To add a link:
- Click +Add Link
- Give it a name
- Copy and paste the URL
- Click Save Changes
Now, it will appear on the home page.
Managing Access and Permissions
Access and Permissions is where you create different permission sets for your users within Canopy.
Heads-up!
As a heads-up, you need to have at least one of your users within your firm who uses the defaulted Admin permission. This is the only permission set that will allow the user to assign permission sets to other users.
To learn more about Access and permissions, click here!
Account Management
Account management is where you are going to manage your subscriptions to Canopy. You can see how many licenses you have for each module, as well as the option to purchase licenses or more clients, from this window.
The next tab over is going to house your invoices. Once again, these invoices are going to be for your Canopy subscription. Here, you can view your monthly balance and total. In the next tab, you can set up your payment method here to pay for your Canopy subscription.
Billing Settings
Billing settings is where you set up your own billing settings. Each tab will allow you to further customize your billing experience.
- Invoicing: The first tab allows you to customize what appears on the invoices you send to your clients.
- Payments: Canopy payments helps take the billing experience one step further and allow for an integrated payment experience for firms to manage and clients to leverage inside of Canopy. Your firm can offer your clients two convenient payment options, including AHC or credit card. If you would like to learn more about Canopy payments, you can go ahead and click this link to learn more.
- Service Items: Here you can add and manage all of the service items your firm offers.
- User Rates: You can choose to set service rates for each practitioner in your firm.
- Manage QBO integration: here is where you can either restart your integration, view your integration report, disconnect your QBO integration, or start and pause your payments for QBO.
Customizing Branding in the client portal
Custom branding is where you're going to customize and personalize the branding that shows up on your client portal, which is what your clients will see. You can choose to add a company website and an appointment scheduler like Calendly. You can include custom links. This could be helpful for partner sites as well as whether or not you want a billing tab or display names on the client portal.
The logo is another great way you can customize this experience, You want to make sure you're uploading either a PNG or a JPEG format. And I highly recommend you click this link here to look at some tips on how to make sure your logo is looking its best when you upload it.
Using Custom Fields and Tags
Custom fields and tags are great ways to help you organize and keep track of your clients
Custom fields are great for adding specific texts, dates, and selection fields to organize clients and track relevant information. For example, you can include things like accounting numbers and cost centers, as well as things that might be a little bit more fun, like a favorite show. These fields will show up when you add or edit a client's information.
Tags are another great way to organize clients into categories. This is more for a fixed organization of clients that are not specific to each client. You can tag clients with specific services that you offer, or maybe who the practitioner is that is working with that client, You can even choose to do it by their location. You will be able to use these tags in the client list to filter your clients.
Managing Team Organization
Here is where you can see and manage all of your firm's users in Canopy. You can change their permission sets, see when they last logged in, and view and manage the clients they're assigned to as well as their teams.
In the Teams tab, you can create and manage teams. Creating teams allows new team members to automatically have access to all of the clients, files, and information they need without having to add each of those things individually The new team member will be a part of the team and have access immediately.
You can learn more about team organization by clicking here and it'll go into more detail on how to set up teams, roles, and other things you might need to know for your users.
Syncing Email and Calendar
This is where you're going to sync your email and your calendar.
A few things to note about the calendars:
- You can only have one calendar synced to your Canopy account. So you're going to have to choose, if you have multiple accounts, which calendar you would like to use.
- Shared calendars are only supported with Gmail account. Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, and other calendars are not supported for sharing calendars.
Once you have your email connected, You can manage the settings here, making it available to different team members to be able to send emails or have full permission to your email.
Another feature here is the bulk email history.
This is a great way to check on any bulk emails that you have sent. It will list the name, who sent it, when it was sent, how many clients received it, the percentage of how many clients opened that email, and if anyone replied. This is a great way to keep track of any bulk emails and kind of check up on those things.
Exploring Integrations
Integrations are where you can keep track of all of the different services that you can integrate within Canopy.
I'll go over a few things you should know.
- integrating with the IRS. You want to make sure that you have a transcript delivery service account before you integrate with Canopy.
- You should test pulling a transcript from the IRS e-service before integrating to make sure everything on the IRS side is set up correctly.
To learn more about the IRS integration, click here.
We already touched a little bit on QuickBooks online, but you can manage your QuickBooks online integration here. When you click on manage, it will take you back up to the billing settings where you can manage that integration. One thing to note about your QuickBooks online integration is that you can only have one account per canopy instance.
If you would like to learn more about QuickBooks online integration, here is a link to learn more.
Other integrations include: your Canopy desktop assistant for either Windows or Mac; the virtual drive (Windows only); and the O drive (Mac).
Managing Notifications
Just like it sounds, here is where you can manage all of the notifications that you receive.
For each of the different categories, you can choose whether or not you want to have a badge appear or if you want to receive an email.
If you have any questions that came up while watching the video or going through this article, please reach out to support. When you click back on your profile icon, you will see a button at the top to chat with support, which will open up a little window. You can also reach them by calling this phone number during their open hours: 1-855-616-7305.
Another great tool is our Canopy Help Center. By clicking on the little graduation cap, you will open up all of the different resources that we have for you. You can do a quick search at the top for any in-app guides or help articles. You can also go directly to our knowledge base.
The Knowledge Base is a great resource where you can search and find articles on all of the different features within Canopy, as well as guides for your clients and anything new coming into Canopy.