After 12 Months of Various Free Trials, Pathway Found Financial Cents as the Right Software to Organize and Track Client Work
TL;DR
- Pathway, a 2-person on-site firm in Ontario serving 1000+ clients, founded by Peter Piluk in 2012, spent 12 months exhausting free trials of every practice management tool before settling on Financial Cents in 2022.
- Looking more professional to clients: the client task feature replaced chains of 3-5 email reminders, and within four months, two new clients said it made Pathway look more professional than their previous accountants.
- Email visibility without the guesswork: email integration keeps client emails in the client’s profile and lets Peter search every inbox at once, instead of digging through Outlook.
- Recurring work that doesn’t need babysitting: setting up recurring tasks used to mean manually rebuilding checklists in Outlook every cycle; in Financial Cents it’s automatic for any timeframe.
Pathway
Pathway is a two-person firm. Peter Piluk handles the firm’s accounting, bookkeeping, and payroll services, while Lisa Ryckman does the tax work. Together, they have more than 20-years of experience helping clients (and their children) “tame their personal and business finances.”
Peter sees himself as an incredibly organized person, so for a long time, he got away with managing the firm with pen, paper, and Microsoft Outlook. But there comes a time in every accounting firm when an accounting practice management software goes from being a nice-to-have to a must-have.
For Peter, it was when managing client work with Outlook, pen, and paper became too overwhelming for him and his wife.
Peter had a checklist for everything and in different places. There were daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly lists that he needed to organize to keep things from falling through the cracks. This investment in manual administrative work was too unproductive and inefficient.
Commonly Used Features
- Workflow Management
- Client Tasks
- Email Integration
- Time tracking
- QuickBooks Integration
Trying Out Several Software Solutions
When Peter realized his firm’s need for accounting practice management software, he was very clear about what he wanted. He had a list of eight criteria by which he judged all his options, but beyond that, he wanted software that would have as short a learning curve for his partner (and wife) as possible.
He wanted to be as objective as possible, so he decided to exhaust the free trials of all the software solutions he found. Some were 14 days, and others were as long as a month. He went as far as paying for a month of service for those without a free trial (like TPS) to get a first-hand experience of every one of them.
Making the Buying Decision
Towards the end of one year, Financial Cents was top on Peter’s list of the most suitable accounting practice software solutions.
How Financial Cents Helps the Pathway Team
Makes Them Look More Professional
Trying out Financial Cents’ Client Task feature was a game-changer for Peter and the Pathway team. Peter knew about his partner’s struggle with collecting additional data from clients. It required sending a number of emails before getting the files or information she needed to complete client work.
In under four months of using Financial Cents, the Pathway team had gotten commendations from two of their new clients who found the Pathway team more professional (than their previous accountants), thanks to their use of Financial Cents’ client task feature.
Lisa, who handles the firm’s tax work, was the first to realize the helpfulness of the feature.
Peter added that the feature has also saved his team an enormous amount of time because they’re
Want to see how it works for your firm?
The demo is free, and there’s no pressure to sign up.Seamless Client Communication with Email Integration
Email is essential to accounting client communication. But for lack of awareness of a better option, the Pathway team relied on Outlook to communicate with clients. This created visibility issues for the team until Peter started using Financial Cents’ Email Integration feature and never looked back.
The integration enables him to:
1. Get Visibility into client communication
Peter can find the emails a client sent him or his partner in the client’s profile. This keeps him from worrying about being CC’ed or digging through his emails to find what he needs to get client work done.
2. Separate client emails from other work emails
Outlook is designed to tell Peter which email should be important to him, but in Financial Cents, he gets the ability to separate client emails and convert their requests to tasks on the go.
3. Search All Inboxes at Once
Financial Cents’ Email Integration also enables Peter to search across all inboxes and folders at once, instead of going through each inbox and folder one after another.
Track work better and hit deadlines
The ability to turn client emails into projects was pivotal to Peter’s choice. Before Financial Cents, Peter would write ad-hoc client requests in his pen and paper planner. With Financial Cents, Peter realized that he could immediately turn them into tasks and start tracking them in Financial Cents. This saves him hours of billable work and has kept him from forgetting things.
Embrace Automation and Reduce Manual Work
Setting up recurring tasks in Outlook required him to create a weekly or monthly checklist that he would need to monitor to mark tasks completed and manually move them to the next schedule. That got more overwhelming as the number of clients increased.
On some days, Peter would have had too many tasks than a single day could take. And the fact that he didn’t have visibility into his firm’s workflow, deleting important information was too common and caused things to slip through the cracks.
With Financial Cents, however, setting up recurring work for any timeframe is easy. This helps him save time on manual work, keep tabs on tasks, and stay organized.
Specific and to-the-Point Customer Training and Support
Financial Cents’ library of short training videos made learning—and implementing—the software so much easier for Peter. When he set out to buy practice management software, he was determined to stick with the resources the brands provided. He refused to watch YouTube videos, so he could measure how easy each software would be for his wife to learn.
After trying out dozens of accounting practice management software, Peter finds Financial Cents’ approach to training incredibly straightforward. Unlike other software options that overwhelm prospects and new users with information.
