How Financial Cents Helps Erin Delegate Work to Focus on Her Firm’s Long-Term Goals

Advocate Accounting LLC is an accounting and bookkeeping firm that provides payroll, tax, bookkeeping training, and grant consulting services to individuals, small businesses, and nonprofits in Seattle, Washington.

Led by Erin Louis, the firm prefers to train clients to do their bookkeeping. This has allowed its staff to focus on higher-level services like month-end adjustments, grant tracking, and customized management reporting.

In the firm’s early years, Erin was the lone staff member and was comfortable managing workflows from Gmail Calendar. But because she knew she would need to add accounting talents, she got in the market for a workflow tool.

Their Goals

• Get a workflow management tool that enables Erin to delegate tasks to her team members and automate repetitive tasks.
• Find a practice management tool that tracks employees’ time and workload to hold team members accountable for client deliverables.

Challenges

Erin’s search for the right workflow management software led her to several workflow tools, but they fell short of her expectations in several ways, including;

• Inability to Delegate Work or Hold Team Accountable on Gmail Calendar

Teams of one have lots of room to improvise, and Erin tried to do that by blocking off her schedule on the Gmail calendar to complete client projects.

This system was ineffective in delegation and accountability, and knowing it was only a matter of time before this system started causing missed deadlines, she set out to get a reliable workflow tool.

She said,

• Inability to Manage Work and Clients from One Place

Erin, however, noticed that the workflow software they got had clunky client management features and didn’t give her room to do work and store client information in the same place.

Besides storing basic client information, she couldn’t add custom information like client notes, work type, and Relationships. Storing this information in a separate CRM software tool would make accessing them more time-consuming on a day-to-day basis.

• Difficulty Tracking Time and Billing Clients

Erin is very particular about time-tracking reports. They empower her with the data to make informed decisions to meet monthly revenue projections.

She said,

Viewing it on (the former workflow software we used) required Erin to download and analyze a timesheet report in Excel, which was just too stressful to do every day.

• Ineffective Integration with QuickBooks

The former workflow software they used integrated with QuickBooks, but Erin could not maximize it to bill her clients because they didn’t correspond with the numbers on QuickBooks. This gave her reasons to worry about the numbers she had to make billing decisions.

As Erin’s team grew, these challenges became more pronounced, so she began searching for a more robust workflow management tool. This led her to Financial Cents, which proved instantaneously beneficial for many reasons.

Benefits

Keeping things organized at your team’s fingertips so that nothing slips through the cracks is critical to every accounting firm. In Financial Cents, Erin has found a tool that helps his team put their strong foot forward.

This is possible because Erin’s team can now:

• Keep Work and Client Information in One Place

Financial Cent’s client profile gives Erin a lot of room to store as much client information as they want. Apart from clients’ contact details, project information, and client notes (for relevant client updates), Erin can also use the Financial Cents Custom Field section to store client-specific information like entity type, client group, and other persons they can contact at the client’s firm.

The result is that whenever her team members sit down to work, they have virtually every client information they need to work in the same place.

This saves them the time and frustration (which compromises work quality) of logging into multiple apps to access relevant information.

• Easy-to-Use Time and Billing Reports

Unlike her previous workflow software, Erin does not need to download the timesheet report in Excel to see where her team is spending time and what client project is taking too much time.

A click on the Reports tab in Financial Cents takes her to the time tracking report dashboard, where she can see the amount her firm bills each client and the hours of services they’ve received. This makes it easy for her to gauge the team’s ability to meet their revenue goal for the month.

She added,

• Reliable Integration with QuickBooks

With a 98% chance of accuracy between the billing data in Financial Cents and QuickBooks, Erin is more sure of the billing information Financial Cents gives her and is better able to prevent loss of revenue by billing her clients more adequately.

Results

• Getting the Firm to Run without Her

Erin’s quest to find a workflow software solution that enabled her to delegate tasks and keep her team accountable seemed far-fetched with each new tool she tried.

But in Financial Cents, she finally found a solution that was both robust and specific enough for her needs.

• Getting Time Back for More Strategic Work

Looking at the client task feature in Financial Cents, Erin is happy to learn that the time her team spends chasing clients for documents will significantly reduce and boost their chances of providing quality client work and meeting their income projections.