At this stage, you've reviewed your Fields, Contact Roles, and File Roles. Our next step is to review and update the Task Templates within Open To Close. Task Templates are a powerful tool for our users on the Grow and Pro Plan. They can be used to send out emails, texts, and even apply more templates if needed.

Your first step with Task Templates is going to be reviewing what is currently available in your account and possibly importing additional Task Templates as needed.

Navigate to the left-hand menu, select the Hammer Icon, and choose Templating. From there, find and select Task Templates.

After navigating to the Task Templates, take note of the way the Task Templates are broken into each process you might manage on a transaction.

At this point in your journey, you should review the different processes you manage and add any Task Templates to cover those processes. Even if the Task Templates only have two or three tasks, it’s better to have them broken up into bite-sized pieces so your transaction will only be populated with the tasks and communication that's necessary.

Now let's take a focused look at the Task Card Options. Each of these options allows you more control over who sees the tasks in the portal, adding more internal instructions or links, adding the date calculation, and more.

After reviewing your Task Card Options, we suggest reviewing the Task Triggers that are already associated with the Task Templates available in your account.

Task Triggers are used to automate some of your communication and add additional templates as needed. Take notice of the Lighting Bolt Icon on each task card. This is where you can build and review your Task Triggers.

If you are a Follow Up Boss user and you plan on having your Open To Close users send tasks to Follow Up Boss, review your Follow Up Boss integration to make sure it is connected and made available for your Open To Close users to utilize.

To test out the changes you made to your Task Templates, let's go to a property and apply a template. This is a great time to send out some sample emails to yourself and your coworkers, test out how the emails look, how your merge fields and smart blocks populate, and identify some of the areas that could make your process quicker.

Ask yourself the following:

Task Templates should always be broken down into specific bite-sized parts of your transaction. This will automate your task process and allow you to use conditional logic to populate each unique transaction.

There are always ways to improve your Task Templates! Consider adding in tags, assigning roles and if you have the option, adding in some task conditions as well.