How Financial Cents Gives Anna Time to Focus on Growing Her Firm

Anna Murphy

Firm Name: Murphy & Associates Consulting

Firm Type: Bookkeeping for Real Estate and Digital Online Businesses

Staff members: 5

Year founded: 2018

FC Start date: 2021

Location: Chicago, Illinois

Working style: Fully remote

From Trello to Financial Cents:

In search of an industry-specific software 

Murphy & Associates Consulting supports service-based businesses and digital online businesses with professional bookkeeping services. 

The CEO and President, Anna Murphy, brings her 10+ years of industry experience to help clients stay on top of their books, better understand their financial situation, and achieve their dreams. 

When the firm started operating in 2018, they used Trello to manage their workload and collaborate with clients. But after some time, things weren’t working well or like Anna puts it, “the firm outgrew Trello”.

First, they had a tough time convincing their clients to create a Trello account in other to access the dashboard to see updates, share information and documents. 

Second, because Trello is a generic project management tool, rather than an industry-specific tool, it lacked specific capabilities and industry nuances that the growing bookkeeping business needed.

“Although you can also close out tasks in Trello, the way it was laid out was such that after a while, their tasks would just get bogged down with a lot of stuff. And then we would have to scroll all the way down to find what we were looking for. So it felt like, the more we grew, the more we were adding tasks to our work. Whereas, because Financial Cents is strictly for bookkeeping firms and specifically for our industry, it eliminates having a lot of those nuances.”

Her Trello dashboard had 2530 boards and it took her hours to find information. After getting into trouble with a number of clients and having to cover her back, she knew she had to find a way forward.

“Trello became too bulky and managing projects with it became too difficult. I grew frustrated with it so I started looking for another software solution. Somehow, many bookkeepers and CPAs kept recommending Financial Cents in the Facebook groups I belong to, so I decided to give it a try.” 

– Anna Murphy

How Financial Cents Gives Anna Time to Focus on Growing Her Firm

• Being able to scale more efficiently: Anna is no stranger to how it feels to waste time on time consuming work that doesn’t move the firm forward or increase revenue. Once upon a time, she had 2530 boards, had to click into each one of them and look through all the tasks to know where things were at, all work that didn’t move the needle but rather left her feeling deflated and overwhelmed. 

Now, with Financial Cents, she has the foundation to move her firm to the next level because she has enough time to work “on the firm” instead of “in the firm”.

“With Trello, it felt like the more we grew, the more we were adding tasks to our work. Unlike Financial Cents that takes work off our plates because it is specific to our (bookkeeping) industry.”

• Delegating work in a structured and organized way: Anna, like all business owners, knows how important delegation is and Financial Cents workflow dashboard makes it easy for her. In one view, she’s able to get a great overview of the status of work, upcoming due dates, and who’s working on what, so she can delegate tasks appropriately. This way, work moves along faster and is done excellently well so that clients are happy. And we all know that happy clients bring in new business.

“With Trello, you end up with thousands of boards with several tasks attached to them. To know the status of work and delegate it to my team, I’d have to click into each one and look through all the tasks. It was very time consuming. With Financial Cents, I can get all the data I need to delegate work in one view.”

• Having all their workflows in one location: When it comes to productivity, process matters. It ties everything together like a well-knitted quilt. And workflow checklists are an important aspect of a bookkeeping firm’s process.

Creating and using workflow checklists across the firm ensures everyone is conformed to doing an excellent job. 

With Financial Cents, Anna is not only able to create workflow checklists and distribute them across her firm, but she can also use any of our 40+ available templates. All templates are centrally stored on their Financial Cents dashboard and can be used to create projects for clients in one click. 

“With all our workflows in a centralized location, we decided to set up work such that certain folks are assigned to only do certain tasks. This allows us to become better at delegating work.”

How Financial Cents Makes Anna Feel

“Financial Cents definitely gives me more time to focus on growing the business. With the work management part of the business being efficiently catered for, I have more time to spend on marketing, hiring, and building relationships so that I can bring in more work. The ultimate goal is to make more money so I can pay the team well and all that good stuff.”