Accounting Solutions of Sarasota (ASOS)

Firm Name

Premier Pre-Tax Accounting Services

Firm Type

7

Staff members

2011

Year Founded

2022

FC Start Date

Sarasota, Florida

Location

Hybrid

Working Style

From a Confusing Time Tracker to Financial Cents

The team at Accounting Solutions of Sarasota (ASOS) have successfully built a history and reputation of integrity across the Sarasota area. The owner, Vicki Goffinet, worked in the accounting business for over 25 years before she started the firm in 2011.

Like many other accounting firms, time tracking is essential to ASOS’ day to day work. Besides its obvious use, time tracking helps ASOS to quantify how much time they spend on each client’s work so they can accurately set the recurring billing rate.

Meaning, time tracking directly affects their revenue.

Time tracking is very important to us because it helps us to know how much time we're spending on a client so we can set their recurring bills accurately."

With such significant impact, they desperately needed a time tracking software solution. But the software they signed up for ended up confusing them rather than helping them.

According to Tim Summers, Accounts Payables Officer at ASOS:

We used a software solution before Financial Cents but the time tracking capabilities just didn’t work for us. Sometimes, we would think we were tracking time but when we'd go back, it would have turned off. Other times, the time tracker would just turn off after two seconds. It just didn't do a good job of tracking time."

Time tracking has always been a big deal to the ASOS team so they continued searching for a better solution. Then they found Financial Cents.

One of the reasons Financial Cents is great for us is because different members of our team can simultaneously track time on the same client. This makes it easy for us to compare time spent on tasks. And with people working remotely, it clearly shows us that they are getting work done."

How Financial Cents Helps ASOS

  • Identify over-budget work and unprofitable clients: With Financial Cents’ time tracker, the ASOS team is able to estimate how much time they spend on client work. This in turn shows them which clients they spend too much time on based on how much those clients pay. It essentially shows them unprofitable clients so they either increase their fees or adjust their contracts, thereby making a positive impact on their revenue.

While we have a few clients we bill hourly, we also want to know how much time we’re spending on their work in comparison to how much they pay."

  • Set up effective billing: Knowing how much time, on average, it takes to complete certain client work helps the ASOS team to come up with pricing that works. That is, pricing that sets them up for success, not failure. Pricing that motivates employees not frustrates them. This is how they ensure that the team doesn’t work like an elephant and earn like a rabbit. And Financial Cents’ time tracker helps them easily and efficiently do that.
  • Make hiring decisions and efficiently manage resources: When it comes to hiring extra hands to help get work done, the team at ASOS take a data-first approach. They use Financial Cents’ capacity management and time tracking reports to see how work is distributed across the firm. These reports show them how many hours members of the team spend on each client work, what tasks are getting completed and which ones are dragging.

By having everybody track their time to see exactly what they are working on and if they have free time, we are able to determine if we need another full-time or part-time person."

  • Improve processes to produce consistent client deliverables: Inconsistent client deliverables is one of the banes of failing firms. Clients notice and appreciate consistently good work, this is what makes them come back and refer their contacts. With Financial Cents’ workflow templates which can be used as they are or edited to fit their firm’s needs, ASOS is able to build better processes that lead to better outcomes.

We're constantly improving our tasks and processes. And we noticed that when the tasks are well laid out, it helps us to do more consistent work regardless of who's working on the project. So we always ensure that we attach workflow templates to our projects and clients within Financial Cents to serve as a guide to every team member."

  • Prevent things from falling through the cracks even while working remotely: When the firm started in 2011, remote work was not in the picture, at all. So they manually tracked and managed work. This led to an array of issues like updates getting buried in files and folders, missing emails and attachments, etc.

We were kind of old school and used papers and folders to manage work. Then if I got sick and I didn't go in that week or something happened, work would fall behind."

But when the pandemic happened to us all in 2020, they had to find a way to continue to serve their clients from home. Financial cents has been of tremendous help to them in this regard. Here’s what Tim Summers had to say:

Financial Cents really makes it easier for us to work remotely such that things aren't slipping through the cracks like they were when we first started working remotely."

How Financial Cents Makes Tim & Meghan Feel

Financial Cents has calmed me. Work doesn’t stress me out anymore because I know exactly what I need to do each day or week to get everything done. "

Tim

Financial Cents makes me feel calm and in control. Having a visual overview of where work is at makes me feel like things are on track."

Meghan
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