How BookPro Uses Accounting CRM Software to Satisfy Clients Across Multiple Industries

When all your clients are in one industry (e-commerce or nonprofit, for example), it’s relatively more straightforward to transfer workflow and client management strategies between them, and you’ll do just fine.

But when some are in e-commerce and others are in retail, real estate, hospitality, etc., you need a simpler but more advanced system to store their information, personalize their services, and build stronger client relationships.

The BookPro team faced this challenge, but found a way to make businesses in the dental, medical, retail, and real estate sectors feel like their only clients using Accounting CRM software.

The Challenge: Managing Clients Across Multiple Industries

1. Each Industry Has Unique Accounting and Bookkeeping Needs

Due to differences in business models, revenue streams, and operational structures, there are slight differences in accounting practices and workflows across various industries.

For example, real estate accounting requires expertise in maintenance costs, rental income, depreciation, and 1031 exchanges. In the hospitality industry, frequent reconciliation (due to the high volume of cash and POS transactions) is needed for more accurate financial records, and Non-profit accounting requires grant reporting according to IRS 501 (c) (3).

With a good CRM, your team will be able to store every relevant information about the client’s business, including links to workflow templates (or links to third-party template checklists) that enable them to meet every client’s financial reporting requirements.

2. Difficulties in Tracking Client Interactions, Deadlines, and Preferences

When you interact with your clients across multiple apps, information silos form, making it hard for team members to access up-to-date client interactions.

That causes your client’s ad hoc requests to fall through the cracks, leading to missed deadlines and unmet deliverables.

A good CRM enables your team members to record their interactions with clients. This allows everyone in your firm to know what each client needs from one place.

3. Issues with Client Communication and Document Sharing

Failure to streamline client communication opens any team up to multichannel communication—phone, Email, SMS, messaging apps, etc.

The problem is that there’s no time to get back to clients and share files with them in multiple places. It’s only a matter of time before a client’s messages are left unattended.

CRMs pull all client communication into one place. In Financial Cents, all your client emails are pulled into a dedicated folder in the client folder. This makes it easy to see where your client’s communication stands at a moment’s notice.

4. Lack of Automation (to Improve Efficiency and Consistency)

Accounting firms spend valuable time chasing clients for the data they need to complete their work every month.

Automating this task frees up time and human resources, saving accounting firms thousands of dollars yearly.

The client task feature in CRMs helps firms automate client data collection and hold their clients accountable to deadlines.

Why BookPro Needed an Accounting CRM Software

i. Managing Diverse Client Needs

Serving customers across multiple industries, the BookPro team needed a central place to store client information to allow them to personalize their service.

Relying on their brains for this would be overwhelming, and the information would be inaccessible to other team members.

With accounting CRM software, they could store and retrieve up-to-date client information easily.

ii. Reducing Mental Load

Storing so much information in the head is enough to make the best talent the most unproductive. It makes employees end each day wondering what they may be forgetting.

But with CRM software serving as a single source of truth, team members could always go into the app to see what was missing without spending their mental energy worrying about it.

iii. Task and Deadline Management

The inability to collect client information necessary for work is a major bottleneck in the accounting industry, and the BookPro team had its share of this.

Clients would forget to send the documents they needed, which delayed projects and wasted human resources that could have been spent on billable work.

The client task feature allowed the team to request all files and information needed for work. This enabled them to work more quickly to beat deadlines.

iv. Better Project Visibility

Tracking tasks in Excel was overwhelming for the BookPro team. More clients meant longer spreadsheets and more data to maintain.

Finding information required navigating unwieldy spreadsheets, making it time-consuming to see what was happening with each project.

The Features That Transformed BookPro’s Client Management

After struggling with using spreadsheets, Outlook, and Jetpack Workflow for different tasks, the BookPro team switched to Financial Cents to consolidate their tech stack.

This enables them to:

A. Centralize Their Work and Client Information

In their quest to hold less information in the head, the BookPro team abandoned Excel Spreadsheet and Jetpack Workflow for Financial Cents.

Financial Cents has put all the information the team members need to complete their tasks at their fingertips—the client profile.

In the client profile, they can store and access the client’s information in different sections, such as contact information, projects, emails, transactions, client notes, activity tab, etc.

The best part? Anyone on the team can access the client profile anytime and from anywhere.

B. Automate Task Reminders

As the firm grew, they started to forget what was most urgent. They did their best to make do with their existing workflow systems (like setting up email reminders in Outlook) until team members began to miss deadlines.

This missed deadline led the team to Financial Cents, which allows every member to set up due date reminders for tasks. This enabled each person to know what they needed to do and when.

C. Enhance Project Tracking

Financial Cents’ workflow dashboard shows the BookPro team where each project stands.

As the first page in the app, the workflow dashboard displays each client project with the progress report. This helps them understand how much work has gone into the project and how many more tasks are left.

With this information at their fingertips, the team can spot bottlenecks quickly and make timely decisions that help the team meet all deadlines.

D. Automate Recurring Projects

The recurring projects solution has been one of the most sought-after features in accounting workflow solutions for a ‘productive’ reason.

Like every other accounting firm, it helps Denise May and her team to create repetitive projects automatically.

This has saved them the time and effort of manually creating these projects at the beginning of every day, week, month, quarter, or year.

By simply selecting their preferred recurring frequency (when creating the project), the BookPro team wakes up every other day, week, or month to find the recurring projects for that day, week, or month waiting for their action.

E. Speed Up Client Data Collection

Thanks to the Financial Cents passwordless client portal, BookPro’s clients don’t need to create login information to respond to requests from their accountants.

Removing this bottleneck of creating and maintaining usernames and passwords has made it easy for all clients to access the portal to upload documents and provide information.

Financial Cents uses a magic link security system to verify client identity before granting access. After every 30 days, Financial Cents will send your clients a code to authenticate their access. It is less stressful and more secure.

F. Turn Client Emails into Projects (Using Email Integration)

One reason accounting teams forget to meet client deliverables is the inability to take immediate action when they receive a client’s ad hoc email request. Before you know it, other emails will come in, and the request will be forgotten. However, the BookPro team has succeeded in preventing this.

Since starting with Financial Cents, any client’s request that any team member receives is turned into a project, assigned to someone, and given a due date immediately.

That is because Financial Cents integrates with Gmail and Outlook to pull all client emails into the client’s profile in Financial Cents. The idea is to save accounting teams the time and energy spent looking for client emails in team members’ inboxes.

G. Improve Team Coordination

While Excel spreadsheets and even Jetpack Workflow initially worked for the BookPro team, adding more clients (from multiple industries) threatened the team’s organization.

Between storing work information (in the head), setting task reminders in Outlook, and tracking projects in Excel, the team needed practice management software to bring it all together in one place.

By switching to Financial Cents, they freed up mental space to focus on improving client service rather than coordinating administrative work.

Results: How BookPro Improved Client Satisfaction & Efficiency

a. Time Savings & Increased Efficiency

Storing their client information in a central place helps them retrieve it faster.

Combined with features like client tasks, which automated client data collection, the firm saved precious time and used its resources more efficiently.

b. Eliminated Missed Deadlines

Centralizing all the client information needed for work saves the team the time they’d have spent going back and forth to access the latest information.

This also reduces their chances of errors, which would warrant rework and more time wasted. Plus, the client task feature ensured they collect additional client information quickly, preventing delays and improving the chances of meeting deadlines.

c. Improved Client Experience

With clients coming in from different industries, the BookPro team has been able to customize their services and workflows to suit each client using unique client information.

Financial Cents, their CRM, has a Custom File tab where they can store all types of information about each client. This includes information about their formation date, marketing source, birthday, and favorite color.

Plus, you can add fields to store unique client information.

This has made it easy for the team to serve numerous clients without losing that personal touch.

d. Scalability for Future Growth

By implementing a CRM solution, Denise May empowered the BookPro team to record and keep track of client relationships efficiently.

It doesn’t matter who spoke with a client, it is recorded in the client’s profile (using the Client Note feature) for other team members to see.

This enabled them to provide consistent client service and interaction, establishing a solid foundation for the team to serve more clients at scale.

Use Financial Cents to Centralize Client Information Where You’re Doing Client Work

Denise May founded BookPro to provide various accounting services to its clients in multiple industries.

By 2022, the team had reached a point where their continued growth depended on their choice of a client relationship management (CRM) solution.

In Financial Cents, they didn’t only find a CRM solution, they found an all-in-one practice management solution to manage their firm (clients, projects, and team).

Do you also need a CRM tool to centralize your work and client information in one place? Financial Cents is the tool.

Its industry-specific features (like workflow management, time tracking, billing, and email integration) can make it a one-stop shop for all the resources you need to grow your firm without spreading your staff thin.

Click here for a Live Demo today, or Start Your 14-day Free Trial to test all the features.