Zapier and Financial Cents: Save Time on Accounting Client Onboarding

Many bottlenecks accounting firms face, especially in marketing and sales operations, result from the use of tech tools that are individually effective but don’t integrate well, or at all, with the other tools in the tech stack.

In many cases, this creates information silos where each app stores different sets of information. It makes getting up-to-date client information for work difficult.

Dawn Brolin, CPA, CEO of Powerful Accounting advises accounting firm owners to:

In a previous article, we discussed how tools like Zapier empower you to streamline your firm by automating the tasks in any accounting process to run with little to no human input. You can learn more about that here.

In this article, we dive deeper into ways you can leverage the Financial Cents and Zapier integration for your accounting client onboarding.

The client onboarding process should be designed to effectively set up new clients in existing workflow systems. This process should be as personal as possible to deliver quality results that cultivate lasting customer relationships.

But it doesn’t have to be manual. You can – and should – leverage technology to make it personal and efficient. Don’t overwhelm your team with the constant struggles:

• Creating client profiles in multiple apps
• Manually entering client data in the accounting software
• Creating client folders in the document management system (DMS)
• Crafting engagement letters that clearly spell out the terms of the engagement

Why You Should Use The Financial Cents and Zapier Integration for Onboarding Clients:

• Save Time Spent on Manual Tasks

As a firm owner, you initially want to have a pulse on everything going on in your firm, which works when things are slow and client onboarding is infrequent.

As client onboarding speeds up, creating client profiles and entering client information in multiple apps will take away precious time from core accounting & bookkeeping work.

Automating the onboarding process with the Financial Cents and Zapier integration will save you from getting lost in the everyday details,  free up your time, and add consistency to client onboarding.

• Reinvest the Time You Regained into Acquiring and Servicing New Clients

When your employees regain as much as 50% of their work hours from manual, repetitive work, your team is not only better equipped to source and serve new clients, you also get more time to creatively add more clients to your firm.

• Reduce Staff Workload

Streamlining your onboarding processes reduces the number of tasks your employees need to do by limiting them to core accounting tasks.

This enables them to strike a better balance between work and personal life, which makes them more efficient at work.

• Hit Your Deadlines

Setting your new clients up properly (with automation) helps your team collect and store the information they need to start and finish new client work on time.

Doing it manually will not only take a good chunk of your productive hours, but it could also cause your team to forget to store important client information in the proper app.

By the time you’re ready to complete the work, it might be too late, which can keep you from meeting client deliverables.

• Meet and Exceed Client Expectations

As a service-based business, the first few contacts with a client can determine how long they will stay with your firm.

So, client onboarding is your chance to impress your clients from the get-go.

For example, the inability to collect & store relevant client information (due to stress or human error) may require the team to ask the client repetitive or duplicative questions which may tarnish the client’s perception of the firm.

With an automated client onboarding process, client information won’t slip through the cracks; the system automatically transfers client data from one app to another.

This ensures that your team has up-to-date client information to do the work and improves your ability to meet and exceed the client’s expectations.

• Increased Accuracy and Efficiency

Automating the client onboarding process improves your firm’s accuracy by utilizing software solutions to consistently transfer client data across platforms.

You won’t need to worry about relying on memory to add information, accidentally typing inaccurate information into your CRM tool, or forgetting to send that follow-up email in your client communication tool.

• Build Highly Scalable Processes

Your staff can likely handle every aspect of accounting client onboarding when dealing with just a handful of existing clients. As the client base grows, systems are required to handle tasks automatically, allowing time to focus on tracking your new clients as they go through the onboarding system while your team attends to more strategic issues.

Example: How the Financial Cents and Zapier Integration Helps You Save Time on Accounting Client Onboarding with GoProposal

Zapier works with Zaps that use trigger and action events to create desired results. A condition must be met (trigger) for an event (action) to happen. It begins by opening a Zapier account here.

Here are some of the accounting client onboarding tasks you can do with Zapier from inside Financial Cents:

Step 1: Automatically Create a New Client Profile in Financial Cents After Signing a Proposal, Engagement Letter, or Filling a Form

The Financial Cents and Zapier automation allows you to create a client in Financial Cents after a prospect signs a contract in GoProposal.

This saves your team the stress of logging into Financial Cents to manually create the profile of each client you get a new client.

 Here’s how to set up the Zap in Zapier:

• Select GoProposal as the Trigger app and Proposal Won as the Trigger event.

• Select Financial Cents as the Action app and Create Client as the Action event.

• Click Continue

(The next window shows you a list of possible client information you can choose.)

• Select the information that applies to the client in your Financial Cents client profile

• Click Continue
• Test and publish the Zap

Step 2: Automatically Create Document Management System Folders (DropBox) for New Clients from Financial Cents

After setting up the client’s profile in Financial Cents, Zapier enables you to automatically create a folder for clients in your preferred document management system (DMS) like DropBox, Sharefile, or OneDrive.

This will ease the burden of setting up your client documents destination for all your clients.

Here’s How to Set It Up for DropBox:

• Select Financial Cents as the Trigger App and New Client as the Trigger event.

• Select Dropbox as the Action App and Create Folder as the Acton Event.

• Select the Space and Folder you want the new client folder created in.

• Choose the folder name (we recommend you use the client’s name) by selecting the client’s name from Financial Cents to establish the new client folder’s name.
• Click Continue
• Test and publish the Zap

Step 3: Automatically Create New Client Profiles in Financial Cents from Other Accounting Software

You can also automatically create a new client profile in Financial Cents after creating it in any of your accounting tech tools. Let’s use Xero as an example.

Here’s how to set it up

• Select Xero as the Trigger App and New Contact as the Trigger Event (the event that triggers the resulting action).

• Choose Financial Cents as the Action App and Create Client as the Action Event.

• From the following sets of information, select the ones that are relevant to the client’s profile in Financial Cents.

• Click Continue
• Test and publish the Zap

BONUS! Financial Cents Integration with QuickBooks Online Enables You to Add Clients Directly to QuickBooks Online from Financial Cents

The Financial Cents and QuickBooks integration is one quick way to add new clients from QuickBooks Online in Financial Cents. This will save time and energy that is better suited to entering client information.

Any subsequent edits made to client information in Financial Cents or QuickBooks Online are automatically reflected in both apps. This helps your firm keep your client information consistent across platforms.

To import your clients into Financial Cents with the Financial Cents and QBO Integration:

• Click the +Create button in the top right of your screen.

• Select Client
• Select Use Integrations

You’ll be taken into QBO (it will ask you to enter your login details if you’ve not logged in).

• Click Connect to connect your Financial Cents with your QBO.
• Select whether you want to import all your clients or you want to select the specific clients you want to import.

It will take about 30 seconds for your clients to be imported and you can go into each one to see their basic information. You can add more information (client emails, notes, and documents) to the client profile.

Automate Your Firm with Financial Cents Zapier Integration

How will you make client onboarding efficient when constantly overwhelmed and feeling the strain of repetitive, manual work involved in accounting client onboarding?

The Financial Cents and Zapier integration is designed to assist with this challenge. For instance, it aids in maintaining data consistency across tech stacks. Preventing the existence of multiple datasets in tools used by the team and work to manage clients.

This ensures clients wouldn’t need to respond to the same set of questions at different stages of the onboarding process. Once a client signs their contract on Ignition, Proposify, or Dubsado, a profile is automatically created for them in Financial Cents. This, in turn, triggers the creation of their folder in Sharefile or OneDrive and so forth.

Any process in the firm can be automated in this manner, regardless of the number of steps.

Start Using Financial Cents today to create a seamless accounting client onboarding experience seamless with the Zapier Integration.

Not a Financial Cents User? Start a Free Trial