[Tech] OpenPhone for 2FA & Client Communication

We use OpenPhone instead of Google voice for 2FA codes and for client communication. I'll go over that in this video and show you our setup.

Here's how to work around needing to pay for multiple users as your team grows:

1. Make sure you have a central email inbox setup (like help@yourdomain.com or support@yourdomain.com) 
   1. Give your entire team access to this (we save the login info in 1Password)
2. Use this to create your account on OpenPhone
3. Have everyone download the Desktop and/or phone app and login with that central inbox

Tips:

⚡️ We have a Zap that enters the client contact info into OpenPhone when they sign with us

⏱️ Schedule text messages to clients for business hours

✅ Mark things done when actioned to get them out of the inbox

💸 Use THIS LINK to receive a $20 Credit when you sign up for OpenPhone!

Learn how to start your bookkeeping business (for experienced bookkeepers & accountants): https://www.ambitiousbookkeeper.com/bba

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Grab the FREE Start your Bookkeeping Biz Checklist: https://www.ambitiousbookkeeper.com/checklist

Grab my FREE New Client Onboarding Templates: https://www.ambitiousbookkeeper.com/onboard

Become a Client: ofcoursebookkeeping.com/contact

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Podcast Publishing Tools we use:

• Podcast Editing: Sabr Media LLC
• Descript (affiliate link)
• Buzzsprout (affiliate link)

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Transcript

2:26

Hello and welcome to this video. I am going to go over OpenPhone, which is what we use to, , do multiple things. Mainly, this is the way that we get two factor authentication codes to the team so that when a client sets us up with bank access, even our own bank access, we have to tie a phone number to it. This is the phone number we use. This is also our business line. So Below this video, you will see the steps that you need to take before you get to setting up Open Phone so that it all works seamlessly. And as you start to build out your team, you have these things in place. So number one is you need to have a centralized email inbox. Before we even get into. open phone or setting up a phone service or a phone number, you need to have a central email inbox that as you add people to your team, everyone has access to this inbox and you train your clients to communicate through this one inbox, not a Serena at of course, bookkeeping, not, Emily at of course, bookkeeping or whatever your firm name is. You want a central inbox called help or support or hello or something that you're going to give everybody access to. And as you onboard new employees and clients, you're training everybody to use this inbox to communicate with clients. So that is the first step. Then once you have that email designated. But even if you don't have a team yet, I highly recommend doing this because eventually you're going to need help and you are going to want to offload some of the things like pulling bank statements and things like that. So set up the help inbox. Yes, you're going to be paying for another username if you have also one with your name, but it's worth it. I promise. So you set up the help or support or hello inbox something generic that everyone's going to have access to and then you sign up for open phone and when you go and set up your user in open phone as you can see I have right here on the side panel you can see it says your team there's only one person there it has my name but is actually tied to our help inbox and I it doesn't show it show that part but The email behind the login is help at ofcoursebookkeeping. com. So everybody can download this app on their computer or their phone and log in with help at ofcoursebookkeeping. com. They will be logged in as Serena Shoup as well, but this is going to allow them to receive verification codes, and things like that. So when I, opened this up, it went away because it must have been marked done. So someone on the team had requested an authentication code or tried to log into Stripe or a client's bank account, and this is where the text message comes for that two authentication. And once they read the text message, they went ahead and just marked it done. There's a little checkbox right here. I'm leaving these voicemails up because this is also our business line so you can see that there's missed call. I don't really answer our business line because most of the time it's people like bill. com and Avalara and things like that, but you can see it transcribes the voicemail for you. It shows you missed calls. If this were a client, which we do have our clients loaded in here as contacts, I'm keeping that private, but it's over here on the contact page. I could text my client and that's something that we've done. So when we onboard a client, we ask them what their preferred. method of communication is. And if they say text message, we have a note in Asana that has that in there and we can text them from open phone. And the whole team has access to this. So, we can see all the communication with the client if we want to. We can see calls and all the things. So, you could text your client, Hey client, I'm not going to send this. This is just an example. Hey client, we're wrapping up your month end. For September, and we need a few questions answered. so you could do that, and you could drop in the Google Sheet link. Google Sheet, right here. You could let them know if you use something like zeroass. You could say, We have a zero ask pending your answers, anything like that if you're trying to do follow up. So, that is something that you could do. You can attach files, you can do emojis, you can send it later, which is great if you or your team are working late at night and you want to make sure this stuff is handled during business hours. So, That is one way to use Open Phone to communicate with clients in a way that everyone has access to it. The other way is for receiving two factor authentication codes and all that good stuff. So, number one, make sure that you have a centralized email inbox. This is how you're going to work around having to set everybody up as individual users and pay more for Open Phone. You don't necessarily need that if you're small and you just want everybody to share the same phone number. so I would suggest doing that way, but you absolutely could invite your team as a separate user, which you're going to pay for another user license for. so that is how we do that. Once something has been actioned, we just have the process that our team marks it as done. You can always go back into the done archive to see everything that's happened. It's impossible to delete anything from here. so yeah. And there's an iPhone and a, Android app so you can have this on your phone as well. I have it downloaded onto my phone. When clients or other people call this phone number, it rings to my regular phone number, but through the open phone app. So I know that it's my business line versus a regular phone call, a lot like Google Voice. If you already have a Google Voice phone number set up, you can actually have it switched over to open phone when you sign up. There's a whole process that they walk you through on porting a phone number over, and that's what I did, so I know it's possible and seamless. And, there's lots of other things that you can tinker with here, but I wanted to give you our process for Using open phone on a budget and also the process for keeping the communication flowing with all the team and visible for everybody. So I hope this video was helpful. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions and we'll talk to you soon.