“Accounting workflow software tools enable firms to clarify roles for team members, prevent loss of revenues and build a happier workforce.”"

Nayo Carter-Gray, Founder, 1st Step Accounting LLC

Did you recently launch (or about to launch) an accounting firm?

Congratulations!!!

You’re living the dream of many accounting professionals. So, celebrate yourself in any way you see fit, but keep in mind that running an accounting firm is about optimizing for constraints, especially during accounting busy seasons when most clients need their taxes done at about the same time.

That is why you cannot afford to run your firm without accounting workflow software if you want to prevent your team from struggling with challenges like:

  • Not knowing the status of client work.
  • Not knowing what to do next because there’s no clear sense of priority.
  • Information silos because there’s no tool to centralize work and client information.

Doing these tasks with spreadsheets or pen and paper could drown your team in the rabbit hole of administrative tasks when they should be doing work that directly improves your firm’s bottom line.

That is why the accounting firm owners that use automated workflow solutions reduced the time their teams spend on manual tasks from 1- 10 hours to 0-5 hours in 2022.

Meanwhile, the 2023 State of Accounting Workflow Automation Report reveals that more accounting firms are working remotely in 2023 for obvious reasons.

Virtual accounting gives them access to clients and talents outside their immediate environment. If you’d like to take advantage of this opportunity, here’s a resource to help you build a thriving virtual accounting firm.

What is an Accounting Workflow Software?

Accounting workflow software is a system that lets you create, track, and manage projects, clients, and staff automatically.

Financial Cents is a good example of an accounting workflow software you can use to create and manage your clients’ work.

To create a monthly bookkeeping service, Financial Cents gives you the ability to:

  • Onboard the bookkeeping client by adding them manually, importing them from QBO, or uploading a CSV file of your clients.
  • Create the bookkeeping project from Financial Cents accounting templates (which you can customize). Your team can also create projects from scratch by filling out a dialogue box with project details like client name, assignee, and start and due dates.
  • Track the project in the workflow dashboard.

Using spreadsheets and pen & paper to create and manage the work will be difficult for collaboration.

Compare:

List of the Best 5 Accounting Workflow Software for Accountants

What to Lookout for in Accounting Workflow Software for New Accounting Firms

 

  • Recurring Projects

Everything is easy to find and the recurring projects makes it easier to track weekly, monthly, etc. tasks without a lot of time spent"

Nina R, Firm Owner

This feature helps to automatically recreate copies of those projects that you will need to repeat every week, month, or year. The goal is to save your firm hours of billable work and the mental energy that goes into remembering or recreating the work in the future.

That is why 70.5% of the accounting firm owners we surveyed in 2023 value the recurring project feature more than any other feature in their accounting workflow software.

Here’s how it works:

You have a new monthly bookkeeping client. As you are creating their project for one month, this feature allows you to duplicate it for subsequent months (in a few clicks of buttons) in your workflow tool. That means you wouldn’t need to wait to create it again in the next month and risk forgetting.

The alternative solution would be to rely on a tool like Outlook to remind you to recreate the project whenever it’s due. But if your team fails to see the notification quickly enough, they will forget work and miss the deadline.

In Financial Cents, the work automatically recreates (for future dates) when your team marks the current work complete or when it becomes overdue.

You can also set custom dates for your recurring projects to make the project repeat on a more custom schedule (the first Tuesday of each month, for example). This gives you more flexibility with recurring client projects and keeps you from leaving things too late.

recurring task feature in financial cents accounting workflow software

  • Workflow Dashboard for a Bird’s Eye View of Work

Financial Cents is allowing everyone in my office to have access to the same information. It keeps us all on the same page. Knowing what needs to be completed each week will aid in not having something fall through the cracks or missing a deadline"

Sue D, Firm Owner

The way you present your work and client information can help or hinder your team’s ability to find relevant information for work.

When things are clunky, everyone struggles to figure things out to make timely decisions. But that’s where accounting workflow dashboards come in handy.

They give accounting teams (especially the owner or manager) a bird’s eye view of their projects, helping them see important information at a glance.

From the dashboard, team members can click on any project or client profile to find more granular details about their assigned tasks. This gives them much-needed clarity whenever they sit to work.

Whether you need to see upcoming deadlines, pending client requests, employee workload, or progress reports, it’s all on the workflow dashboard.

Meanwhile, using spreadsheets requires your team to regularly drill into several rows and columns to find the information. Apart from the time consumption, your employees will find working at your firm more stressful than other accounting firms, which will not help you attract great talents.

Financial Cents workflow dashboard, for example, has a suite of features to help you better control your firm, especially during busy seasons. They include

  • The start and due dates to keep your team accountable to client deadlines.
  • Task Assignment to give your team members responsibility for a client’s project.
  • Workflow Filters to search for information on the dashboard, whether by assignee, client, due date, or work status.
  • Team Chat to help collaboration between your staff.
  • Custom Views to save custom views to find the same firm information more easily.

This gives you (and your team) complete visibility that reflects in the accuracy and timeliness of their work, not to mention the level of satisfaction they’ll derive from working at your firm.

Learn how you can use ChatGPT in accounting to create workflows and perform other accounting tasks.

financial cents accounting workflow dashboard

  • Client Tasks and Reminders

Financial Cents is helping us organize our client’s workflows to ensure we always meet our deadlines, and formally structure client tasks with due dates and assignees"

Helen H, Small Firm Owner

The client task feature enables accounting firms to use the workflow software to chase clients until they send the requested information instead of making your staff waste hours of billable work chasing clients for it.

It gets even worse as you take on more clients. Following up with clients for additional information becomes easy to forget. You may go to complete a client’s work one day, and you’ll find that you don’t have enough information for the work, which will feel quite unprofessional for your brand.

That explains why firm owners in the 2023 State of Accounting Workflow Automation Report chose the client task feature as their third most sought-after feature in accounting workflow software.

financial cents client task feature

By creating a list of the things you need from your client ahead of time, the clients can click into their portal to upload the information they need when they are ready. You can direct the uploads to third-party document management systems like Sharefile, DropBox, Google Drive, etc.

This will save you the time to figure out what you need to ask for, whether you have already requested it, and how you should reach out to them.

In Financial Cents, creating client tasks is easy. All you need to do is to:

  • Click Client Tasks
  • Type in what you would like to request from the client
  • Click “+” sign
  • Click Manage Notifications (to add reminder)
using the client tasks notification feature

→ Select the date you want Financial Cents to send the request to your client.

Then the system will auto-remind them about the request until they send it.

 

  • Task Dependencies

This feature is for projects that require several team members to complete. When you assign a team member tasks in multiple projects, he’ll likely spend some time every day figuring out which tasks are due and that might affect his productivity and efficiency.

The task dependency feature in your accounting workflow software will save the day by helping your team members establish order and priority for their tasks in any project.

Financial Cents improves on this by decluttering your team members’ dashboards to avoid crowding their dashboards with tasks that are not yet due, which might overwhelm them.

To keep assignees from forgetting those tasks, Financial Cents will also notify the assignees when the project is ready for action.

setting up task dependency on your accounting workflow software

  • Team (and Client) Collaboration and Chat

Communication with staff and clients is a huge part of an accountant’s day-to-day work, especially in a virtual accounting setup. If done well, everyone is clear on what is expected of them, when, and how.

If communication is ineffective, employees might assume the next person is working on a task until it’s too late.

In Financial Cents, these collaboration features include

  • Comments to ask questions or share ideas directly on the client’s work.
  • Notes to share updates about a client’s work with relevant team members.
  • Mentions to @tag your team members to your comment so that Financial Cents can pull them directly into the conversation.
  • Team Chat to enable your team to see team updates about client work on the workflow dashboard.

Meanwhile, clients are fond of communicating by email, which often leads to the loss of critical information in email threads.

Thankfully, Financial Cents integrates with your email to help you track all the emails clients send to your firm from inside your workflow tool. With this integration, any mail you read, send or delete in Financial Cents gets sent, read, or deleted in your Gmail or vice-versa.

This centralizes your day-to-day work and keeps things from being forgotten in sticky notes, emails, and Slack threads.  This also helps you deliver better client experiences.

client dashboard feature on financial cents

  • Due Date Tracking

Accounting is big on compliance, and a major way to keep pace with deadlines is by staying conscious of them with clearly defined project due dates. Interestingly, due dates are easy to forget, so it’s not something you can let out of your sight.

You need a system to stay reminded of what is due this week, next, and this month so that you can allocate your resources accordingly.

That’s what accounting workflow software like Financial Cents provides. Each client project displays its due date in the workflow dashboard, so it’s hard to miss it.

You can also filter your firm’s projects by their due dates so that only those projects that are due on a particular date will appear on your screen. This saves you the distraction of projects that are not as urgent.

Due Date Reminders Improve Your Ability to Meet Deadlines

How would you like your accounting workflow software to send your staff reminders about upcoming due dates? That’s what Financial Cents Due Date Reminders do.

You can set them to your projects so that the system will remind you of all the projects that are due by (the date you chose).

Read: Due date tracking software and tips for accountants

Enjoy all these Features (and More) for Free

It’s not enough to know what to look out for in an accounting workflow software solution. You need to use one to experience the improvement in your team’s efficiency, productivity, and profitability first-hand.

Take advantage of Financial Cents’ free trial to enjoy its accounting workflow and practice management features for 14 days.

Start your Free Trial. Book a Demo