Friday, January 24, 2025

Simple Email Automations To Try

Today's Topic: Simple Email Automations To Try

I've been sucked into the Gmail blackhole too many times to count. The result? Not getting the real important work done.

Responding to urgent messages, cleaning up junk, and overthinking replies are where I usually go wrong.

Communicating to clients via email might be one of your biggest time sinks, too.

You get caught up in responding to urgent things, cleaning up junk and overthinking replies that you end up on a crunch to get returns filed. That's where simple email automations and tools can help.

Level 1: Gmail basics

There's a few basic features in Gmail you should take advantage of, if you haven't already:

  1. Scheduled sends - it's right by Send when drafting an email. Great when you want to prep emails ahead of time.
  2. Auto replies & vacation responders - this is a well-known feature but not everyone takes full advantage of it. There's lots of creative use cases: asking for docs, reminding clients on your working hours, notifying clients on deadlines, linking your client portal, etc. You don't just have to use it when on vacation.
  3. Email signatures - you can put pretty much anything in an email signature.
  4. Templates - go to Settings>All Settings>Advanced then create templates. When you hit the 3 little dot icon when drafting an email, you can create new templates to re-use.
  5. Smart compose - actually helps you write emails faster with AI embedded into Gmail
  6. Gmass - this is a Chrome extension that lets you send many emails at once. You can segment your bulk email lists by client types, for example, and even personalize bulk sends with variables like {firstName} - this is great for emails sent to all your clients.

Level 2: Boomerang

Boomerang is a powerful add-on to Gmail. Here's some of their best features:

  • You can embed scheduling links directly into your Gmail
  • Set up auto follow ups and reminders to yourself - for example, to follow up with a client who hasn't sent you their social security number yet.
  • You can set up notifications for yourself
  • Inbox Pause - basically Do Not Disturb but for Gmail
  • Recurring email chains and sequences

Level 3: Using Gemini in Gmail (or Copilot in Outlook)

If you get a Google One AI premium plan or Team plan, you'll be able to access Gemini directly in Gmail. Outlook has the same thing with Copilot.

Here's some things you can do:

  • Summarize an email thread
  • Suggest responses to an email thread given the entire thread as context
  • Draft a full email
  • Find info from previous emails such as, When is my next flight? Or, Show me all unread emails from Dave.
  • Find info from Google Drive and Calendar events
  • Auto create events in Google Calendar

Level 4: Superhuman

Superhuman is Gmail after taking a few performance-enhancing substances... Most of my high-speed tech friends use it.

Here's a few things it can do that Gmail can't:

  • Draft emails for you, but in your own voice (it trains based on your past emails)
  • The inbox is way cleaner, it splits emails into VIP and less important categories
  • It reminds you to follow up with people based on action items mentioned in the email
  • Great when your whole team is on it
  • Tells you when people opened your emails


It costs $25/user/month. If you're very email-heavy in your practice, this tool can definitely make a difference.

Level 5: Canopy, TaxDome, Financial Cents

You've probably heard of these platforms before. I won't go into detail here because it's outside the scope of simple email automations.

But I wanted to include them because they have by far the most powerful email automations for tax pros. It just takes more time to set up.

These tools understand where you are in the tax process - and auto sends client reminders for things like getting more returns, notifying them on status, and delivering the final return. All automatically.

Final thoughts

If there's one takeaway from this post, it's to set boundaries.

Remember, your clients aren't paying you to email them. They want their return done accurately. If emailing gets in the way of that, you need to make changes.

It's OK not to reply right away. It's OK to tell people emailing you for random things that you're busy right now and can't help.

And if all else fails, you can always turn to VAs and EAs to help you sort through your emails. See this prior post.

P.S. this email series is by CleanUpBuddy.ai, which helps you turn a tangle of bank statements into a clean P&L in under a minute using AI.

It's great for those Schedule C clients without clean books. You know who I'm talking about. Feel free to check out our site to see how we can help you reclaim hours of manual work this tax rush without outsourcing or hiring.

We also invite you to join our Discourse community for other bookkeepers & tax pros using CleanUpBuddy here. We'll add more content there as well as announce events, special promos, and more.

Thanks for tuning in, happy to help with any questions. Just drop a reply.

Touch base next week,

~Toni, CEO of CleanUpBuddy.ai

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