How Envision Business Services Streamlined Month-End Close and Cut Client Friction with Financial Cents
When Kristin Thompson founded Envision Business Services, she began as a team of one. Today, she leads a team of six bookkeepers spread across British Columbia, serving small and medium-sized businesses throughout the province. Envision doesn’t specialize in any particular industry; instead, they focus on nurturing a specific type of client relationship.
As a fully remote firm, Envision relies heavily on technology systems to keep things running smoothly for staff and clients alike. As Kristin puts it, “Using tools like Financial Cents is really what makes that possible.”
The Problem: A DIY System That Couldn’t Scale
Before implementing Financial Cents three years ago, Kristin had tried a lot of platforms. But none of them really aligned with the way she visualized workflow. She even tried building a system herself using Microsoft 365. Her homegrown setup worked well, right up until it didn’t.
Month-end close presented a similar challenge. Rather than jump on Financial Cents’ recategorization tools right away, Kristin’s team initially engineered their own workaround: a recurring client task they nicknamed the “inquiry inbox.” Every time a question came up, they’d add it to the list, and the client would get a notification.
It worked in some cases. But for data-heavy clients, the inquiry inbox ate up more time than it saved—and the running list of open questions piled up, which wasn’t a great experience on the client side.
The Solution: Adopting Month-End Close in Financial Cents
When Financial Cents moved beyond the original recategorization tool to launch its comprehensive Month-End Close feature, Kristin was immediately interested. By that time, her team was fully invested in the Financial Cents platform, and with her inquiry inbox workaround starting to lose its luster, she figured Month-End Close was worth a look.
She sat through the demos, talked it over with her team, and quickly saw a clear path to streamlining Envision’s process for collecting missing client information each month.
Key Month-End Close Benefits in Financial Cents
Two months into using Month-End Close, the benefits are already showing up in the Envision team’s day-to-day:
1. Less Manual Work, Faster Client Requests
Instead of typing out every missing detail by hand, Kristin’s team now simply codes a transaction to a designated account, and Month-End Close automatically routes it to the client at the designated send time.
2. One Simple Screen for Multi-Entity Clients
For clients who own multiple companies, Month-End Close has eliminated the headache of logging in and out of separate portals to track down information for each entity.
3. Less Friction for Clients
On the client side, the feedback has centered on how clean and manageable the experience feels. Requests can be sorted easily, and once a client answers a question, it disappears from their list—a stark contrast to the ever-growing list that cluttered up the old inquiry inbox.
The scheduled reminders have been another big win. Rather than getting pinged about individual transactions on a scattered basis, clients now receive notifications for their outstanding items batched together on a set schedule.
While Kristin admits that some clients will always be slow to respond no matter the system, she’s confident about the big-picture impact of this functionality: “It absolutely causes less friction on their end,” she says.
Beyond Month-End Close: Why Envision Loves Financial Cents
Month-End Close is just one more reason why Financial Cents is such a great fit for Kristin and her team. Even before they adopted this new functionality, Envision was all-in on FC features like:
- Customizable, recurring templates. Envision builds out task templates for every client and tailors them to the client’s specific needs—and they recur automatically. “They’re magical,” Kristin says.
- Centralized team and client tasks. Integrating team tasks and client tasks in the same place has been super beneficial for Envision’s remote team. The intuitive file system clients use to upload documents has also been a huge help.
- A team that actually enjoys using the platform. The feedback Kristin has received from staff has been overwhelmingly positive. They love seeing every task and due date laid out in front of them at all times (and they especially love seeing the celebratory confetti pop whenever they complete a task).
Results Round-up: Envision Business Services’ Achievements with Financial Cents
Since adopting Month-End Close in Financial Cents, Envision Business Services has:
- Cut manual data entry by coding missing information to specific accounts so it can automatically be sent to the client.
- Simplified the experience for multi-entity clients with a single screen that replaces multiple logins.
- Reduced client friction through a more streamlined request format and batched, scheduled reminders.
- Created a single source of truth for outstanding client questions during file review.
- Replaced a hard-to-scale DIY system with one platform that can grow alongside the firm.
What Financial Cents Does for Small Bookkeeping and Accounting Firms (According to Kristin)
For any firm weighing whether to add Month-End Close, Kristin’s recommendation is straightforward.
As for Financial Cents in general, Kristin says her team would have a tough time functioning without it at this point.
