How Capovario Uses Financial Cents to Stay Ahead of Deadlines and Support Time Off
TL;DR
- Capovario, a 6-person remote accounting, bookkeeping, and concierge consulting firm in Denver led by founder Dave Kersting, moved off sticky notes and Outlook tasks after his own team pushed him to adopt Financial Cents.
- Centralized the whole firm: sticky notes, printed folders, and Outlook tasks were replaced by a single hub where work starts and ends for every team member.
- Stayed ahead of deadlines: the due date feature surfaces every project’s timeline on the workflow dashboard, cutting down last-minute scrambles.
- Protected time off: clear task ownership and priorities let Dave and his team take vacations without worrying about work falling through the cracks.
Every firm owner is in business to help their clients and teams. For Dave Kersting, this means:
- Providing excellent client services to improve compliance, lower operational costs, and deliver timely insights for efficient performance.
- Building a firm that helps team members maximize the “life” aspect of work-life balance.
Founded in 2020, Capovario is an accounting and bookkeeping firm on one hand, and a concierge consulting firm on the other. They connect business owners with the service providers they need to solve their business challenges.
The Denver-based firm is fully remote, which means having a digital workspace that centralizes work and client information for team members to get work done is non-negotiable.
However, knowing when to move from manual systems to a software solution can be difficult. For Dave, he got to the point where he risked losing his team.
Why Running the Firm with Sticky Notes Failed
Before switching to Financial Cents, the Capovario team managed its projects, communication, and clients using sticky notes and Outlook (email and tasks). When things got busier, they switched to a physical multi-level folder, which contained sticky notes and printed emails.
With this setup, most of the workflow processes were in Dave’s head, and he knew too well that this was not sustainable.
When it became clear the time was right to move to practice management software, he chose a different solution because Financial Cents was new, and he wasn’t sure what it would look like in the long run.
Having worked with other firms using Financial Cents, his team members had seen its features set and how easy it was compared to the system Dave had implemented, so they demanded that Dave move Capovario to Financial Cents. And he listened.
How Financial Cents Keeps the Capovario Team Organized
Dave might have moved the firm to Financial Cents based on his team’s evaluation, but it wasn’t long before he started seeing the benefits:
1. Better Client Service through Task Assignment and Project Management
Financial Cents enables the Capovario team to assign tasks, clarify responsibilities, and keep itself accountable to client promises.
This is important to their profitability because their projects and workflows are tied to client contracts. Once a client signs the proposal, Financial Cents creates projects directly from it.
This helps them work within the agreed scope, balancing quality client service with efficient use of the firm’s resources.
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.”
2. Ability to Stay Ahead of Client Deadlines
Using the Financial Cents due date feature, Dave and his team have learned to stay ahead of client deadlines.
The due date feature displays every project’s deadline on the workflow dashboard, which helps assignees understand the urgency of their assigned tasks.
The feature also reminds team members to complete their assigned tasks, eliminating the last-minute rush to meet client deadlines that increases the chances of errors.
3. Visibility into Workflow that Clarifies What Every Team Member Needs to Do
Visibility into team workflow is a game-changer for accounting firm owners. For Dave, this has meant the ability to weigh his firm’s resources against future workload, which has been crucial to the team’s consistency in meeting client deliverables.
4. Centralized Storage System that Makes Information Retrieval Easy
Dave remembers the days when his team stored information and managed work in multiple places (sticky notes, emails, and Outlook Tasks), and team members depended on him to personally tell them what to do, when, and how.
Since switching to Financial Cents, all files, tasks, and information have been centralized and easy to find, which saves them the time and energy of jumping between tools to retrieve information.
5. Supporting Time Off without Worrying About Tasks Falling Apart
Since everything is organized in one place, Dave and other Capovario team members can now afford to take vacations or take time off to attend to personal emergencies without worrying about tasks slipping through the cracks.
Financial Cents clarifies responsibilities for tasks, defines priority levels, and keeps information at each assignee’s fingertips. This also enables team members to fill in for absent colleagues, ensuring uninterrupted client service.
Dave’s Favorite Financial Cents Features
Dave finds it hard to narrow down his team’s favorite Financial Cents features because, in his words, “there are so many features in Financial Cents that are just so spectacular,” but he managed to mention a few, including:
Work-related Resources within Projects
Dave’s appreciation of the Work Resources feature boils down to the ability to store project-related information within the work, which saves them the stress of forgetting information that will affect the quality of service delivered.
Integrated Workflow and Billing Solution
Dave finds the billing feature in Financial Cents “super exciting to see” because it integrates their payment processing needs with their workflow, team, and client management needs, making Financial Cents their all-in-one app.
What Makes Financial Cents Different (for Dave)
While Dave appreciates Financial Cents’ features and functionality, the most outstanding aspect of the software for him is the company’s desire to build a tool that truly serves its users. This has informed the creation of several communities to interact with users and understand what’s working and where to improve.
“They also have the Next Level Firm Roundtable, where they bring accounting firm owners together to help each other grow. They always strive to understand what it’s like to be a firm owner before and after implementing Financial Cents,” Dave added.
