Virtual Offices

What is a Virtual Office?

A virtual office allows organisations to establish and maintain a presence in a desirable location without the need to pay for physical office space. This can include establishing a presence in different countries.

The Virtual Office feature offers a number of benefits to both you as the space operator and your customers.

Space Operator:

  • The Virtual Office feature allows you to offer more services to your customers, and it opens up another revenue stream.
  • The Virtual Office feature allows you to create and maintain customer contracts as well as streamline the day-to-day management of any physical mail and parcels received.

Customer:

  • A virtual office allows customers to establish and maintain a presence in a desirable location without the need to pay for physical office space.
  • Provides businesses with a more prestigious address than they might otherwise have if they used their actual location.
  • Allows businesses to receive mail at the virtual office address, with handling options based on their preference, such as opening and scanning, forwarding, and more.

The Virtual Office feature is an additional paid service that an account owner or full unrestricted admin can enable. This can be done from the Admin Panel Settings > Your Nexudus subscription.

Address and Identity Checks

With this new feature, you can manually verify customer addresses and manually or automatically verify customer identities. We offer an integration with Stripe Identity which allows you to automate the identification check process.

Integrating Stripe Identity

Integrating Stripe Identity is straightforward:

  1. In the Admin Panel settings, select Integrations.
  2. Select the Stripe Identity integration.
  3. Toggle on Enable Stripe Identity.
  4. Enter your Stripe Publishable Key and Secret Key.
  5. Enable the relevant settings.
  6. Click Save changes.

Please consult the Stripe Identity website for their pricing.

Setting up the Virtual Office Feature

There are a few things you’ll need to do to set up the Virtual Office feature in the Admin Panel.

After subscription has been enabled, a Virtual Office plan needs to be created. This can be done manually or through the Virtual Office plan wizard template. This is the same process as creating other plans, so the steps below highlight the new fields, tabs and sections when using the Manual Entry option.

  1. Click the Plans tile in the Inventory module and then click + Add plan.
  2. Select Manual Entry.
  3. In the Plan Details tab, enter the plan name and enable the This plan is a virtual office plan option.
  4. In the Onboarding section of the Virtual Office tab:
    1. Enable the relevant verification checks.
      • For the address check:
        1. Enter which documents are accepted as proof and whether the check should be repeated.
        2. If applicable, enable the Keep contracts paused option. This will keep any VO contracts paused if the customer passes verification but their business or address is in a different country.
      • For the identity check:
        1. Select whether the identity check will be completed manually by an admin or automatically through the Stripe Identity integration and whether the check should be repeated.
        2. Enter which documents are accepted as proof and whether the check should be repeated.
      • If you’d like to ask customers additional questions during onboarding, enable the ‘Send custom onboarding form’ option and select a form from the drop-down list. See the Knowledge Base for more information on creating forms in the Community module.
  5. In the Delivery Handling section of the Virtual Office tab:
    1. Select the delivery handling options you’d like to offer to customers purchasing this plan. By default, several options are already selected, but you can add or remove options.
    2. If applicable, add charges for collecting, storing, forwarding and scanning the mail. Simply select the charge from the drop-down list. Note: You’ll need to create these charge ‘products’ in Inventory > Products before they can be added to the Virtual Office plan.
      • The Collect charge will be applied only if the customer exceeds the maximum number of free storage days
      • The Store charge will be applied to any delivery that is stored.
  6. In the Define section of the Virtual Office tab:
    • Enter the maximum number of company aliases, additional recipients and forwarding addresses you’ll accept in this plan.
  7. In the remaining tabs, enter the relevant information before clicking Save changes.

Creating a Virtual Office Contract from the Admin Panel

From the Admin Panel, enrolling a member into a Virtual Office plan is similar to any other plan.

When a customer already has an active contract and they are signing up to a Virtual Office plan, the system will create another profile for the customer. Another profile is created as specific information is required for the Virtual Office plan, and the contact information for the Virtual Office may differ from their default profile details. For each virtual office plan a customer signs up to, the system will create another profile.

Customers with a Virtual Office profile are easily identifiable as they will have a Virtual Office tag at the top of their customer record in the Admin Panel. You can easily switch between the profiles by clicking Switch profile. Customers can also switch between their profiles on the Members Portal.

Virtual Office-only customers will not count towards the active user count.

You can create the contract from the Finance module or directly from the Sales tab of the customer record. See the Knowledge Base for more information on creating the contract. Once you’ve created the contract, you’ll need to reopen the record and supply some further information.

The information in the following tabs can also be supplied by the customer on the Members Portal. However, below is how you, as an admin, can input the information.

In the Contacts tab:

  1. Enter any additional beneficiaries and their contact details. By default, the contract owner will be added. The beneficiary’s name, email, DOB and address are required to pass identity checks. When you’ve added all of the beneficiaries, click Continue to identity checks. This will add the beneficiary’s identity checks to the contract and notify the customer.
  2. Enter any company aliases.
  3. Enter any nominated recipients and their name and forwarding addresses. You can mark one as the default primary address.

Any beneficiaries added to a Virtual Office plan are required to pass identity checks if they have been enabled as part of the plan. Usually, a beneficiary would be a company director.

The nominated recipients are the people who can receive mail/parcels as part of the Virtual Office contract. They do not need to pass any identity checks. Beneficiaries can also be added as nominated recipients. It is important to note that nominated recipients cannot be made into beneficiaries after the onboarding process is complete. They can only be added if the Virtual Office plan has been set up to repeat the identity check after, e.g. 12 months.

The number of beneficiaries, company aliases and nominated recipients that can be added will depend on the limits set in the plan. The information above can also be submitted by the customer on the Members Portal.

In the Identity checks tab:
You can track the progress of the checks. You can also upload relevant documents for the recipients.

In the Delivery handling tab:
You can set the customer’s delivery handling preferences.

The contract will remain paused until all of the beneficiaries pass the verification checks. The contract will automatically unpause once the checks have been passed.

One-off identity and address checks

Identity checks happen as part of the onboarding process for a Virtual Office plan. However, you can also perform one-off checks from the Admin Panel.

This feature is available to all, regardless of whether the Virtual Office subscription is enabled in your space.

  1. Click the Identity Checks tile in the CRM module and then click + Register identity check.
  2. Select the customer and which checks you wish to perform: Address, Identity or Both.
  3. For the identity check, select the method: Manual or Stripe Identity.
    Manual will be the only option for address checks at the moment.
  4. For the manual checks, enter which documents you’d like the customer to supply.
  5. Click Save changes.

The verification checks will appear in the list. From here, admins can track the progress of the check at a glance or open the record for more information. Admins can also track the progress in the Identify checks section of the CRM tab in a customer’s record.

Customers will be notified of the check via email and also on the Members Portal Dashboard. From the Members Portal, they can supply the relevant documents and track the progress of the verifications. We will cover the Virtual Office feature from the customer’s perspective shortly.

If the customer has supplied the documents outside the Members Portal, you can upload these via the Admin Panel.

Open the record of the request, select the relevant tab and click Select file. Please note that this is only possible for manual checks.

Admins with the Identity checks update notifications enabled will be notified when all the relevant information has been supplied. You can then mark the check as verified or rejected. If you are rejecting the documents, you can enter an explanation, which the customer will see on the Members Portal.

If the documents are rejected, the customer can supply the new documents either from the Members Portal, or an admin can upload the new documents via the Admin Panel.

Members Portal

Now, let’s take a look at this new feature from an end user’s perspective.

From the Members Portal, a user can sign up to a Virtual Office plan. The video below demonstrates the process a user will follow.

The user can track the progress of their Virtual Office plan onboarding and their identity checks from their dashboard. If an action is required, this will be highlighted. They can also see this information in the My Activity > Identity checks section.

 

Once the user has completed the onboarding, they can manage their virtual office delivery handling preferences, company aliases and nominated recipients in the Plans and Benefits section of the Members Portal.

Nexudus Members Portal > Plans and Benefits section > Displays current Virtual Office Plan

As previously mentioned, when a member has another active plan and signs up to the Virtual Office plan, another profile will be created. They can switch between their profiles by selecting their name in the top right corner and at the bottom of the list, selecting the relevant profile.

Nexudus Members Portal > Profile menu

Registering a delivery on the Admin Panel

When a delivery arrives for a Virtual Office member, admins can register the delivery in the Operations module in the Admin Panel.

See the Knowledge Base for information on manually adding a delivery.

If there is a handling charge linked to the handling service, for example, a fee linked to storing, the charge will be automatically applied to the customer’s account when the ‘delivery’ is recorded. Admins can amend the charge as they register the delivery.