All help  ·  Plain text for an AI assistant

Permission to email your clients

Step 5 of setting up Kudos. It takes about five minutes, and four of those are reading.

This is the only step in Kudos where you have to write something rather than click something. That is deliberate, and this page explains why, then helps you write it.

This page is not legal advice. It explains what Kudos is asking and why. If your situation is unusual, ask your own adviser.

The 30-second version

Australian law says you need permission before you email someone commercially. For an accounting or bookkeeping practice emailing its own existing clients, straight after sending them an invoice, you almost certainly have that permission already, and you have had it the whole time you have been emailing them.

Step 5 is you saying so once, in writing, so that both you and Kudos have a record of it.

Why there is a text box and not a tick box

A tick proves nothing. Anyone can tick anything, and if the question ever came up, a tick is not evidence that you thought about it.

A sentence in your own words is. It shows you understood what you were confirming. That record is what protects you, and it is also what Kudos relies on to send anything on your behalf at all.

That is the whole reason for the box. It is not a test and there is no right answer to memorise.

The four statements

You are confirming that all four of these are true of your practice. They appear on your screen exactly as below, under version KUD-PROC-001 Rev A.

ATT-001

The recipients are existing clients of the tenant's practice with an ongoing business relationship, and each email follows an invoice the tenant issued to that client.

In plain English: you are only emailing your own clients, and only after you have invoiced them. Kudos cannot email anyone else. It only ever acts on an invoice you raised in Xero, to the contact on that invoice.

ATT-002

The tenant holds consent to email those clients about that relationship, given directly or reasonably inferred from the client relationship.

In plain English: you are allowed to email your clients about your work for them. For an ongoing client who gave you their email address so you could do their books, this is the ordinary case. "Reasonably inferred" is the law's own language for exactly this situation.

ATT-003

Each email address held against a Xero contact was given to the tenant by that client for correspondence.

In plain English: the addresses in your Xero contacts came from your clients, not from a list you bought or a directory you scraped. If you have ever imported a purchased list into Xero, this is the statement to think hardest about.

ATT-004

The tenant will notify Kudos if a client asks the tenant directly to stop.

In plain English: every Kudos email carries its own unsubscribe link, and that works by itself. But if a client tells you directly, by phone, in person, or in a reply to a different email, you need to tell us so we can stop as well. Email support with their address.

What to write in the box

The question is:

In your own words, how do you have permission to email these clients?

A sentence or two is enough. Describe how your clients' email addresses reach you, and what they expect to hear from you about. Write it the way you would explain it to a colleague. You do not need legal language, and legal language does not make it better.

You have up to 4,000 characters. Nobody needs that many.

Three worked examples

These are illustrative. Do not paste one in. Write your own, because the point of the box is that it is yours.

A small suburban bookkeeping practice

Everyone on our Xero contact list is a current client. They give us their email address when they engage us, usually on the engagement letter, and we use it for everything: invoices, BAS reminders, queries about their accounts. They expect to hear from us about their bookkeeping, and a short note after an invoice is in keeping with that.

A larger practice with an onboarding form

Clients provide their email address on our onboarding form when they engage us, which states that we will use it to correspond with them about their engagement. Our engagement letter says the same. We only email clients with a current engagement. Anyone who has left is archived in Xero and is not invoiced, so would not receive anything from Kudos.

A practice that has been going a long time and is being honest about it

Our client list has been built up over eighteen years, entirely by referral, and every address was given to us by the client themselves so we could do their work. We have never bought or imported a list. Some clients have been with us since before we used Xero, and their addresses were carried across from our old system, but they came from the same place: the client gave them to us.

When the honest answer is no

It is worth pausing if any of these are true:

• You have imported a purchased or scraped list into Xero. ATT-003 is not true of those contacts. The fix is to remove them from Xero, or not to go live until you have.
• Some Xero contacts are prospects you have never done work for. ATT-001 is not true of them. In practice Kudos will not email them anyway, because it only acts on an invoice, but the attestation should still be true.
• A client has already asked you to stop emailing them. Tell us before you go live, not after.

If you are unsure, the safe order is: sort out the contact list first, then complete step 5. The attestation is dated and signed, and you may later need to stand behind that date.

What Kudos does regardless

None of these depend on step 5. They apply to every practice, always.

• Once per client per year. A client who has been asked for a review will not be asked again for 365 days, no matter how many invoices they receive. This is counted on the email address, so a person who appears as three contacts in Xero still only hears from us once.
• An unsubscribe link on every email. It works immediately, is recorded against that client and honoured from then on, and you do not have to action it yourself.

• We never ask your clients to rate you first. Every client gets the same link to your Google listing, whatever they think of you. Filtering out unhappy clients before showing them the review link is against Google's policies and against Australian consumer law, and Kudos does not do it in any form.
• We never post a review, and we never promise one. Kudos sends your client a link to Google's own review form. What happens after that is entirely between them and Google.

What each message means

If you are using an AI assistant

An assistant is genuinely useful on this step, with one limit.

What it can do for you

• Explain any of the four statements in more detail
• Ask you a few questions about your practice and turn your answers into a draft you then edit
• Tell you whether a situation you are worried about is actually a problem
• Explain any message you have seen

What it should not do

• Write the description for you and have you paste it unread. The point of the box is that the words are yours and that you considered them. A pasted answer you did not read defeats the one thing this step exists to record. Have it draft; then edit it until it sounds like you.
• Tell you that you are compliant. It does not know your client list.

A useful thing to ask it:

I run a bookkeeping practice in Australia. Ask me three or four questions about how I get my clients' email addresses and what I email them about, then draft two sentences I can edit, describing how I have permission to email them.