How Advantage Insights Brought Fortune-500 Close Discipline to Small Business Books with Month-End Close in Financial Cents
Before Mary Ferry launched Advantage Insights, she spent nearly 35 years in corporate finance, working for household-name companies like Conagra Foods, Foot Locker, and Gateway computers.
When Conagra moved its headquarters to Chicago in 2016, Mary decided she didn’t want to uproot her life in Nebraska. So, she took the severance package and the opportunity for a fresh start. A few months later, in May 2017, she opened Advantage Insights with one client and a clear thesis: small business owners deserved the same kind of financial discipline that Fortune-500 teams take for granted.
Nine years later, Advantage Insights serves roughly 50 clients, closing the books for about 85 entities every month. Boasting a fully remote team of nine, the firm doesn’t specialize in any particular niche—clients range from construction companies to medical offices to arts organizations—but every one of them gets the same rigorous, process-driven experience.
The Problem: Running a Complex Process on Spreadsheets
For her first few years in business, Mary ran her firm’s enterprise-grade processes on a scattered collection of spreadsheets and documents—which meant she spent a lot of her time managing those files instead of focusing on her business.
About five years ago, she moved the whole operation into Financial Cents and converted all of that tedious documentation into recurring projects and tasks. That alone was transformative.
Still, the month-end close process largely relied on manual labor. At the end of each month, Mary’s team had to:
- Export uncategorized transactions out of QuickBooks and into Excel—and then email them to clients to sort out (where they often got lost in inboxes).
- Manually review every client’s P&L to identify vendors who might cross the 1099 threshold, track them in a spreadsheet, and chase W-9s.
- Trust that team members were checking transactions for missing payees, with no way to confirm it had actually been done.
The 1099 situation was perhaps the most painful piece. Despite the team’s best efforts throughout the year, it was virtually impossible to stay on top of 1099 tracking in real time.
The Solution: Automating Manual Month-End Close Steps
When Financial Cents launched Month-End Close, Mary immediately recognized that it was the automation layer her existing close process was missing.
She points to uncategorized transactions, transactions without payees, and 1099 preparation as the three areas where her team is seeing the most benefit since adopting the Month-End Close feature.
Uncategorized Transactions: Goodbye, Spreadsheet Ping-Pong
The old process was a familiar story: export uncategorized transactions to Excel, email the file to the client, and wait. (Or, more accurately, follow up—and follow up again.) By December, every client still had open items, and tax prep was that much harder for it.
With Month-End Close in Financial Cents, uncategorized transactions are not only flagged to Mary’s team in real time, but staff can also request missing information from clients right within the report. Clients receive a request directly in the client portal with all the context they need to provide an answer—and the response flows back into Financial Cents automatically.
It’s worked so well, in fact, that it has completely replaced a separate receipt-capture tool.
1099 Prep: Ongoing Tracking Instead of an Annual Marathon
1099 tracking has been the team’s favorite Month-End Close feature so far. Instead of maintaining a side spreadsheet and chasing W-9s by email, the Advantage Insights team now sees which vendors have been flagged, what the status of each W-9 request is, who needs a reminder, and what’s still outstanding—all on a single dashboard, with automated reminders going out on a set schedule.
On a per-project basis, the time savings are modest: Mary estimates the monthly 1099 review went from about 10 minutes per entity to closer to 5. But across roughly 90 entities, that’s hours back every month (and the year-end panic is no longer looming in the background).
Transactions without Payees: Easier Verification
Month-End Close also clearly flags transactions without payees, which is a problem Mary’s team had been working around for years.
The firm runs a two-tier review structure—a transactional preparer plus a reviewer who double-checks everything—and the report now gives reviewers a single place to confirm the work is clean directly within Financial Cents. That tighter loop is part of what’s created so much time savings.
What Clients Notice
One of Mary’s newest clients, a fairly large business, wrapped up their first month-end close with Advantage Insights and immediately gave unprompted feedback on the work.
A Firm Built for the People Doing the Work
Mary says the real value of the time savings Advantage Insights has gained through Financial Cents—and now, through Month-End Close—is the additional capacity it frees up for her team. And she’s not just talking about the ability to take on more clients; she’s also a huge proponent of creating a healthy work-life balance for her staff.
Mary intentionally built Advantage Insights to be the opposite of the corporate environment she spent most of her career in. Her team is mostly stay-at-home moms working part-time on schedules that fit around their families. The firm offers unlimited PTO and a 401(k) program—even to part-time employees. So, a 25-hour-a-week team member who takes a week of vacation still gets 25 hours of pay.
Financial Cents and the Month-End Close feature help make that work possible at scale. Projects recur automatically, deadlines are visible to everyone, and team members clock in and out on their own time. The work gets done, the clients stay happy, and nobody has to be at a desk from eight to five to make it happen.
Results Round-up: Advantage Insights’ Achievements with Financial Cents
Since adopting Month-End Close in Financial Cents, Advantage Insights has:
- Cut monthly 1099 review time roughly in half for each project—from about 10 minutes to 5—across approximately 90 projects each month.
- Eliminated the year-end 1099 scramble by tracking W-9 requests, vendor responses, and reminder statuses on a single dashboard throughout the year.
- Replaced a separate receipt-capture tool for at least one client by routing credit card activity through uncategorized transactions instead.
- Given internal reviewers a clean, verifiable view of transactions without payees, replacing a step the team had always done but had no way to confirm.
- Earned positive unsolicited feedback from a new large client on the thoroughness of the first close.
- Opened capacity to take on additional clients thanks to the time reclaimed from manual review.
- Sustained a flexible, family-first culture by running a fully remote, project-based firm on Financial Cents—with team members working around school schedules, sports practices, and life in general.
What Financial Cents Does for Small Bookkeeping and Accounting Firms (According to Mary)
Mary Ferry is the founder and CEO of Advantage Insights, a remote accounting firm based in Omaha, Nebraska, that brings Fortune-500-grade financial discipline to small business owners.
