How Financial Cents Keeps Accounting Therapy from Falling Apart
TL;DR
- Accounting Therapy, Inc., a 9-person fully remote bookkeeping and QuickBooks support firm founded in 1996 by Alexis Sadler, switched from Jetpack Workflow to Financial Cents after a broken QuickBooks time-import and a confusing interface became dealbreakers.
- One tool for everything: every process, project, and even marketing task runs through Financial Cents as a single source of truth.
- Time budgets that hold the team accountable: setting an expected number of hours per project makes it easy to spot where work ran over and fix it next time.
- Due dates nobody forgets: the project dashboard keeps deadlines visible so team members don’t need reminding.
Accounting Therapy was founded in 1996 to “support business owners to do what they went into business to do (rather than getting bogged down with their accounting system).”
With team members scattered across Arizona, New Jersey, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Wyoming, the team could not afford to be overwhelmed by their own processes and workflows.
That would have prevented them from providing the efficient accounting operations they promised their clients.
The team started out using Jetpack Workflow, and although Jetpack is limited to accounting workflows (because it doesn’t have practice management features), the deal breakers for the firm were more fundamental.
Their challenges included:
Jetpack’s Complex User Interface
Generally, Jetpack was difficult for Alexis’ team to implement in their day-to-day operations.
Since ease of use is a primary consideration in software adoption for any firm, they had two options:
- Allocate more time, energy, and other resources to understand how it worked.
- Look for a tool that is easy to implement and use.
They chose the latter because accounting firms barely have enough time for their client project—let alone a tool that was supposed to help them save time.
Issues with Jetpack’s QuickBooks Integration
Specifically, the team couldn’t leverage Jetpack’s integration with QuickBooks to import the time they tracked into QuickBooks.
For whatever reason, it just never worked for them.
How Financial Cents Helps Accounting Therapy, Inc.
Financial Cents became the most suitable practice management software the team has come across because of its ability to:
1. Standardize their Processes
Since starting Financial Cents, the Accounting Therapy team has implemented techniques that optimize their workflows. This has made their work quality more consistent across the board.
2. Give Them Firm-wide Visibility
Financial Cents has become a single source of truth for the Accounting Therapy team. They track everything in Financial Cents, from projects to marketing campaigns and meetings.
This has freed them (particularly Alexis, the CEO) to focus on tasks that grow the firm.
Our major benefit from Financial Cents has been organization. We have full insight into what our team is working on. We can assign projects, create filters, and see what is assigned to each team member to help capacity management.”
Alexis’ Favorite Features in Financial Cents
1. Project Resources: This feature enables Alexis’ team to link to apps (such as a third-party CRM), SOP documents (such as a Google Doc), walkthrough videos (in Loom, for example), and any other resource that has a URL.
This feature enables Alexis to give her team access to all the information they need to complete their work.
2. Time Budget: Financial Cents’ Time Budget has enabled Alexis to see when a project exceeds its allocated time. That way, the team can examine what went wrong and determine what can be done to avoid it going forward.
Before Financial Cents, the Accounting Therapy leadership team struggled with ensuring team members completed their tasks on time.
They did not have a way to keep due dates top of mind, so staff members constantly forgot when their tasks were due. To address this, Alexis needed to find a way to remind assignees of their due dates.
Enter Financial Cents!
With Financial Cents, every team member can see (on the dashboard) when their work is due, allowing them to work towards meeting the deadline.
