How Butler & Sanchez LLC Organized and Expanded to 22 States with Financial Cents
TL;DR
- Butler & Sanchez LLC, a 10-person accounting, tax, and part-time CFO firm that Hugo C. Sanchez started almost by accident in 2017 with his wife Amanda Butler, replaced Post-it notes and spreadsheets with Financial Cents to organize work across a fully remote, 22-state client base.
- Centralized organization: a single dashboard gives Hugo full visibility into every task and lets him filter by team member to manage capacity.
- Automated client reminders: Financial Cents nags clients on a set schedule for missing documents, so Hugo doesn’t have to chase them manually.
- Supports a flexible, global team: with staff spread across the US and the Philippines, real-time updates and shared task lists keep everyone visible without rigid work hours.
The story of Butler and Sanchez LLC proves that you don’t need a grand vision or well-thought-out branding to start a business. The universe can fan a small idea into flames if you know how to ride the wave and deploy the right resources (technology).
Three years after this casual step, Hugo Sanchez, CPA, had seen enough clients to convince him to bet on himself and his accounting expertise. At some point, his wife, Amanda Butler, joined him.
Together with eight other accounting professionals, they provide full-service accounting solutions to businesses in 22 states in the USA.
With their entire family (and eight other households) depending on the firm for livelihood, Hugo Sanchez and Amanda Butler were determined to attract more clients and grow their profits by improving service quality and giving their staff the tools to do their best work.
This is when the limitations of their existing project management system hit them.
The Two Biggest Challenges Butler and Sanchez LLC Faced
1. Inability to Track Work and Store Client Information in One Place
Like every firm, Hugo Sanchez and Amanda Butler started out tracking work and managing clients using Post-it notes and spreadsheets.
But they have clients in multiple industries (construction, healthcare, dental, law, manufacturing, hospitality, and real estate), who require slightly different financial reporting needs.
They need a robust practice management solution that is robust enough to organize all the unique information and is easy to use at the same time.
2. Struggling to Collect Client Information
Hugo often found his team stuck with client data collection. He would email clients repeatedly for missing tax documents, praying that he would get a response quickly enough to get the job done.
Like every other task that can be automated in accounting, this seems negligible until you realize that they are why firms couldn’t do deep, focused work in 2024.
Why They Switched to Financial Cents
It’s more difficult to have tasted the productivity and efficiency that comes with using project management software, to then return to unwieldy and counterintuitive solutions.
Hugo and Amanda, his wife and partner, had used project management software in their previous roles. Even though they didn’t like it that much, they had seen enough to know the firm wouldn’t rely on Excel and Post-it Notes for long if they hoped to achieve all that was possible.
True to that, things began to fall apart when they hired their second staff.
Guided by their existing knowledge of project management software, Hugo went in search of a software solution; a search that led them to Financial Cents.
Top Financial Cents Benefits for the Butler and Sanchez Team
1. Running a More Organized Firm
No one teaches accountants how to organize their accounting team in school, so when you get a program that keeps your team on top of all deadlines and prevents things from slipping through the cracks, your job as a firm owner is half done. That is why organization is Hugo’s biggest benefit from Financial Cents.
Financial Cents gives the Butler & Sanchez team a centralized dashboard with full visibility into the status of the tasks everyone is working on.
They can filter tasks by team members and manage capacity centrally without drowning in sticky notes and email inboxes.
2. An All-in-One Platform
Using multiple software solutions for different tasks is a quick way to make your team unproductive. They’ll have to constantly switch between multiple apps with the time and mental energy they could have spent directly on billable work.
With the inclusion of the billing and proposal feature in Financial Cents, Hugo has enabled his team to do more from one place, keeping project, time, and billing information more accurate.
3. Flexible Working Style that Helps Remote Work Thrive
Hugo does not believe in micromanaging his team, so he does not care about the time of day his staff works as long as they get the job done.
With two team members in the Philippines and others spread across the U.S., Hugo couldn’t afford to use a cookie-cutter approach to the team’s work hours.
The challenge with this strategy is the tendency for team members to become complacent. Thankfully, Financial Cents’ real-time updates, shared task lists, and central workflow management system provide Hugo with firm-wide visibility into every team member’s performance.
4. Automated Client Task Reminders
Financial Cents saves Hugo the stress of remembering (and calling or emailing) to remind clients of outstanding requests.
Financial Cents’ Impact on Butler & Sanchez LLC
1. Customizable for Every Role
Financial Cents allows everyone in the firm, regardless of their roles, to customize Financial Cents with the information they want to see.
When you’re handling around 20 projects at a time, seeing where each project stands can be challenging. The Financial Cents checklist also helps Hugo to understand where each project stands for timely decision-making.
“With the checklists (task list), you’re not reading through notes. You can see what has happened, what hasn’t happened, and most importantly, what needs to happen next. That saves us time,” said Hugo C. Sanchez, CPA.
2. Standardized Workflows for Consistent Work Quality
The firm has done very well documenting workflow templates on the accounting side of things, which has improved the consistency of their client service.
This has motivated Hugo to also document their tax workflows to make their next tax season less demanding.
3. A Software Partner They Can Grow With
Financial Cents’ benefits to the Butler & Sanchez LLC go beyond features. The team behind the product has also shown, time and time again, their commitment to helping accounting firms maximize the product through their responsiveness to users’ concerns.
Instead of treating feedback like a suggestion box that is emptied once or twice a year, Financial Cents approaches it like an ongoing conversation that allows them to iterate alongside their users.
