Link Intro Training for All Team Members

Most firms run on a list that lives in one person’s head or one person’s screen. The team gets told what to work on, so nobody except that person can see what is coming, and the plan is out of date by lunchtime. This 20-minute training is for every team member in a firm using Xero Partner Hub and Link. It covers the five things an accountant does in Link each week, and why each one takes work off the person managing them.

Video Overview

Why Link exists, and where to get help (0:20)
Link sits on top of Xero Partner Hub and turns the firm’s jobs into an ordered list of work per person, with the hours, the due date and the state attached to each item. Every team member can see what the firm expects of them without asking.

Your team, your hours and your capacity (1:40)
Capacity in Link is built from contracted hours per week, leave taken, and a target capacity split between client work and internal work. These are the inputs that make every later number mean something, which is why a firm’s capacity charts are only as good as its team list.

Available capacity, over capacity, and drilling into either (3:00)
Link shows available capacity for an individual, a team and the whole practice, by month. Where someone is over capacity, you can drill from the red figure straight into the jobs causing it, so the conversation is about specific work rather than about how busy someone feels.

Your own workflow (6:00)
My Workflow is one team member’s allocated work, grouped by month, with allocated hours, actual time and remaining time on every row. The month total tells you whether what you have been given is achievable before the month starts, not after it ends.

Task states that mean something (8:20)
A firm can build its own states per task type, so Annual Accounts can move through Info Collection, Workpapers, Client Queries, In Review, Prep Drafts and Client Signing rather than a generic In Progress. When each person updates their own state, nobody has to ask where a job is.

Putting your month in the order you intend to work it (9:20)
Work can be dragged into priority order, or sent to the top or bottom of the list. The order a team member chooses is visible to their manager, which is the fastest way to catch a disagreement about priority before it becomes a late job.

Three ways to timesheet, and the live productivity KPI (11:00)
Time can be entered from the workflow screen, from the full timesheet page, or in Xero Partner Hub directly. Timesheeting in Link shows a live productivity KPI as you go and keeps remaining time budgets accurate while the work is still happening, rather than after it is invoiced.

Having the conversation on the job (14:40)
Work Chat attaches the discussion to the job itself, with participants, attachments and mentions. The next person on that job can read the review conversation instead of asking for it again.

Completing work (17:00)
Completing a task closes it out, updates the hours against the budget, and removes it from the month. What is left on your list is what is genuinely left.

Link does not give you more hours. It makes the hours you have, and what has been asked of them, visible to everyone at the same time.