How Angela Gains Insights to Manage Team Capacity and Increase Profitability with Financial Cents
TL;DR
- Main Accounting Services, a 12-person virtual bookkeeping, trust accounting, and CFO firm in Henryville, Indiana founded by Angela Main Roberts in 2016, moved off Asana to Financial Cents to get real-time visibility into team capacity and profitability.
- Time vs. fees, finally tracked: the team compares hours worked against what each client pays to calculate profit by client.
- One place for everything: resource links and client details live inside Financial Cents, so the team never has to switch context to find them.
- Capacity planning built in: reporting on workload and team activity tells Angela exactly when it’s time to hire.
Angela Main Roberts founded Main Accounting Services to give law firm owners the peace of mind of knowing that their accounting processes comply with state bar regulations.
To achieve this goal, Angela prioritizes using the right processes and technology to ensure accuracy, efficiency, and profitability.
This necessitated their search for a practice management software solution that provides real-time visibility into the team’s workload, time log, and revenue.
Struggling to Track Time Spent On Client Projects
The team initially used Asana. With fewer clients and staff, this generic project management software sufficed.
As their clients and employees increased, task management and time tracking required a solution built for their unique needs to ensure sufficient return on their investment in client projects. Otherwise, they would work their fingers to the bone with little to show for it.
Finding Financial Cents’ Capacity Management Solution in a Webinar
The need to stay up-to-date with industry trends took Angela to Roundtable Labs, a webinar for accountants, beekeepers, CPAs, EAs, etc. After watching Shahram Zarshenas’ presentation on Financial Cents, she knew it was time to move her firm to Financial Cents (a tool that combines time tracking, project, client, and capacity management).
How Financial Cents is Helping the Main Accounting Team
Tracking Time for Adequate Billing
With Financial Cents, the Main Accounting team has succeeded in capturing the time employees spend on client work versus the client’s fees. This gives them a basis to calculate their return on investment.
Managing Work and Client Information without Switching Context
Due to Financial Cents’ ease of use, the team did not waste time before implementing its client relationship management (CRM) feature. This allows them to:
→ Use the resources section to link to external, work-related resources, helping them access all they need to work efficiently without leaving Financial Cents.
→ Use the About section to store unique client information (entity type, formation date, tax ID, birthday, etc..) that helps them build stronger client relationships.
Ability to Run the Firm from One Place
The ability to run the firm from one place gives the firm’s manager visibility into client projects, helping them to hold team members accountable.
Angela’s Favorite Financial Cents Features
Reporting Features
With robust reporting features (time tracking, capacity management, and team activity report), Financial Cents gives Angela the insights she needs to track employees’ workload, reassign tasks, and manage resources more effectively.
Our major benefit from Financial Cents has been organization. We have full insight into what our team is working on. We can assign projects, create filters, and see what is assigned to each team member to help capacity management.”
Client Emails
This feature allows accounting professionals to pin work-related emails to projects. It also allows new and existing assignees to see the communication history of a project, reducing the need to bother clients (and teammates) to repeat the information they already provided.
