Link Intro Training for Managers

A manager can only hold someone accountable for a due date, a budget or how long a job has been sitting if that person was given a realistic amount of work in the first place. Most firms allocate once a year and then re-balance by whoever shouts loudest. This 20-minute training is for job managers, people managers and partners, and covers how to allocate in Link and how to run the weekly conversation off it.

Video Overview

Running a workflow meeting off one screen (0:40)
Practice Workflow shows every person’s allocated work with their remaining capacity for the month beside their name, and can be filtered to one team. A negative capacity figure in red is the agenda item, because it names the person whose week does not add up before the week starts.

Reading allocated, actual and remaining time (3:20)
Every task carries allocated hours, actual time and remaining time, and remaining time shown in brackets and red means the task has already over-run its allocation. That is the earliest point at which a write-off is still a decision rather than a result.

Allocating work (4:20)
Allocate Work holds everything in the firm that has not yet been given to someone, with the job manager, the due date, the assigned person, the allocated hours and that person’s capacity on one row. A single task can be split across two people, and each person’s capacity updates as you do it.

Bulk allocating a year in one pass (6:40)
Filter to a job manager or search for a task type, select every matching row, and set the hours, the assignee and the due date across all of them at once. A full year of recurring compliance work can be allocated in a few minutes rather than a few days.

Letting history do the estimating (9:40)
Suggest Allocations proposes hours for each task from what that work actually took before, with a toggle between estimated time and actual time and a per-row choice of estimated, adjusted or actual. A firm with a few years of history in Xero Partner Hub has better estimates than anyone’s memory.

The one thing not to do in Xero Partner Hub (12:20)
Explicit job staff allocation in XPH, where you tick staff against a job and type their allocated time, is the thing to stop doing. It pins work to people in a way that cannot be re-balanced, so the first unexpected event makes the whole plan wrong and nobody can fix it.

Capacity is not a report you read at the end of the month. It is the thing that tells you whether this week’s plan was ever possible.

Training on Link for Administrators

Tagline: The settings that decide whether the numbers mean anything.

Every capacity figure, every workflow status and every suggested allocation in Link traces back to a handful of settings that one or two people in a firm maintain. Get them wrong and the charts mislead everyone downstream. This 10-minute training is for the person who owns Link’s configuration in a firm using Xero Partner Hub.

Video Overview

Practice settings: job titles, teams and offices (0:20)
Teams, job titles and offices are the structures every workflow view and capacity chart filters by. A workflow meeting can only be run for a team if the teams exist.

Non-schedulable tasks (0:40)
Some work genuinely has no assignee, estimate or due date. General queries, ad hoc advice and admin can be flagged as non-schedulable so they stay out of the scheduling views, which keeps capacity reflecting time-bound work rather than everything a firm does.

Team members, contracted hours and assignability (2:20)
Each team member carries hours per week and a target capacity percentage, and can be marked assignable or not. Marking the people who do not take allocated work as non-assignable stops them distorting the practice capacity figure.

Inviting team members and setting permissions (3:40)
Users are invited as a Team Member, Manager or Super User, with separate toggles for workflow permissions, capacity permissions, allocation and client and job access. This is where a firm decides who can see the whole practice and who sees only their own work.

Custom task states (4:20)
State templates can be built against a specific task name and label, so Annual Accounts gets a different set of states from a BAS return. Each state has a type and a colour, and the templates are what make a status in Link mean the same thing to everybody.

Syncing with Xero Partner Hub (6:20)
The Integration screen shows the connected XPH tenant and runs the sync that pulls new jobs and tasks into Link. New work does not appear until a sync has run.

The Export Queue (7:20)
Changes made in Link are published back to Xero Partner Hub through a queue. The queue is where you look when an allocation or a time entry has not appeared on the XPH side yet.

A firm’s capacity charts are only ever as accurate as its team list and its settings. Keeping these current is a ten-minute job that decides whether anyone trusts the numbers.