The Communication preferences feature lets you and your clients choose where our digital communications are sent. It allows you to set a client's communication preferences to reflect their circumstances and your engagement with them.
You should only set communication preferences for communication types a client has authorised you to act on. Before you set or update their communication preferences, ensure you have clear and express written authorisation from your client and their declaration that the information they provided to you to set or update their communication preferences is true and correct. For more information, see Client communication.
You can choose to apply preferences to as many or as few clients as you wish. Communication preferences won't change activity statement lodgment channels or activity statement lodgment notifications.
Before setting communication preferences, consider if its functionality will benefit your entire practice.
You need to set default communication preferences before you can set any client preferences. This allows you to set, at the practice level, the default communication preferences (or favourites) that can be applied to your clients.
To set the default preference for the practice at the agent home page:
- select Communication then Preferences
- select Practice or Client to determine who we should send communications to for each communication type
- select Apply.
Setting a client’s communication preferences to Practice will designate Online services for agents as their preferred address for service for certain ATO communications.
Communication preferences can then be set:
- when you add a client
- individually at their Profile
- using the Bulk preferences function for up to 50 clients at a time.
See Communication preferences to change individual settings.
Bulk preferences
To set up to 50 clients' communication preferences at one time:
- select Communication then Bulk preferences
- create a list of up to 50 clients
- select Apply default communication preference or a combination of Practice or Client to determine who we send these clients' communications to for each communication type
- select Submit.
See Setting client communication preferences for more detailed information.