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Powerful Accounting, Inc
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Accounting, Tax, Wealth Management, Controller (CFO Services)
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Founded in 2011
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3 staff members
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Connecticut, USA
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100% Remote Working Style

TL;DR

  • Powerful Accounting, Inc, a 3-person fully remote firm in Connecticut led by founder Dawn Brolin (CFE, CPA), moved to Financial Cents after Karbon proved impossible to customize for storing and securely retrieving client information.
  • Searchable client data: details like phone numbers and EINs now live in one profile, so the team can pull up a client’s info in seconds instead of digging through multiple apps.
  • Secure client requests: client information requests moved off of email and into Financial Cents’ client task feature.
  • Team Chat keeps context: project conversations happen inside the project itself instead of over email or CC chains, so nothing gets lost.
Tags, filters, saved views, and custom fields enhance productivity and profitability in Financial Cents. Custom fields, for example, are helpful for firms looking to store information (like the last time you contacted a client, which helps you know when a follow-up is due).

If your practice management tool does not do these, you’ve brought in a third-stringer instead of a starter.”
Dawn Brolin, CFE, CPA, Founder of Powerful Accounting

Powerful Accounting is a team of energetic and client-centered professionals that help business owners conquer the numbers aspect of their businesses.

Led by Dawn Brolin, the team seeks to make their clients more comfortable with their finances.

With multiple accounting services and a fully remote team, Dawn is particularly interested in using a practice management solution that empowers them to store and access client and project information in real time.

The team struggled to do this in Karbon—until an employee introduced the team to Financial Cents.

Karbon Made It Easy to Track Work But Difficult to Store Client Information

Before Financial Cents, the team tracked work in Karbon, and it worked well. However, they could not say the same for client information management.

Although Karbon has a client management feature, the team needed help understanding how it worked, so they had to rely on third-party solutions.

At the end of the day, tracking work was fine. Requesting information and storing the client information was the biggest challenge. It just didn’t work. It was cumbersome.”
Dawn Brolin, CFE, CPA, Founder of Powerful Accounting

No firm owner wants to spend extra time and money on separate workflow, time tracking, or client information tools when a single tool is just as efficient—if not more.

So, when Nicole Morey, the team’s bookkeeper, found Financial Cents to be a better deal than the system they used, Dawn didn’t hesitate to switch to Financial Cents.

Part of the reason I moved to Financial Cents was client information. Storing client information in Karbon took a lot of work. It was not customizable, and that was a nightmare. We could not store information (such as EIN and incorporation date) in our previous practice management solution.”
Dawn Brolin, CFE, CPA, Founder of Powerful Accounting

Inability to Securely Request Client Information

The Powerful Accounting team also needed help to set up client tasks to receive additional information.

They had to rely on email (which is not so secure) to receive client information until they eventually found Financial Cents.

We never really used Karbon for client tasks. Nicole Morey (the team’s bookkeeper) had found Financial Cents easy to send client requests to because she had been using that for bookkeeping.”
Dawn Brolin, CFE, CPA, Founder of Powerful Accounting

Inability to Retrieve Client Information

Dawn Brolin is fond of searching her practice management software for information to get client work done and maintain client relationships. Not being able to do this was frustrating to her.

I finally switched to Financial Cents out of the frustration of client data searchability. One of the key things was searching for a phone number, and I used this feature in Financial Cents recently. Someone had called me on my work phone, but I did not have the phone number on my work phone. So I checked Financial Cents and found it was a client, so I called her right back. We could never look things up that way before.”
Dawn Brolin, CFE, CPA, Founder of Powerful Accounting

How Financial Cents Helps the Powerful Accounting Team

  • Transparency of Client Data

Retrieving client information has become much easier for the Powerful Accounting team.

With all kinds of information stored and accessible from the client’s profile in Financial Cents, they no longer need to go into multiple apps to fetch the information they need.

Part of the reason I moved to Financial Cents was the ability to customize client information within Financial Cents. The ability to easily look up information on the dashboard has been very beneficial. We use it (the Global Search feature) whenever we’re looking for something.”
Dawn Brolin, CFE, CPA, Founder of Powerful Accounting

Want to see how it works for your firm?

The demo is free, and there’s no pressure to sign up.

  • Communicating Within a Project with Team Chat

Dawn’s team has found a better way to collaborate on projects with Financial Cents.

Before Financial Cents, they needed to copy team members to hold work-related conversations. In Financial Cents, the Team Chat feature enables team members to communicate and collaborate on the project.

From a communication perspective, Financial Cents has worked well for communicating about a project. We can easily communicate in the Team Chat inside the project. So, everything stays within the project, which is important to us. We’ve always wanted to work that way.”
Dawn Brolin, CFE, CPA, Founder of Powerful Accounting

  • Founders and Product Team That Actually Listen to Customers

Dawn is glad that the Financial Cents team listens to their customers and has designed features that make managing her firm easier.

It’s nice that I can say, ‘Hey Shahram and Abdullah, can you format phone numbers within Financial Cents to this format?’ And they’ll make it happen.

Shahram and Abdullah respond to feature requests on the fly. Other product teams will say, ‘It’s on our roadmap.’ You can see items on their roadmap for four years. It’s the worst response an app developer can have.”
Dawn Brolin, CFE, CPA, Founder of Powerful Accounting

Dawn’s Words to Other Accounting and Bookkeeping Firm Owners

Financial Cents gets accounting firms organized. It’s important to be organized and systematized for efficiency and productivity. Financial Cents does that for accounting professionals.”
Dawn Brolin, CFE, CPA, Founder of Powerful Accounting

How Dawn Feels About Financial Cents

We were looking for a software solution that made client data transparent and easier to search. We wanted to customize fields with information that we could search for. We weren’t able to do that in our old system. But we can do it all in Financial Cents, which is awesome.”
Dawn Brolin, CFE, CPA, Founder of Powerful Accounting
No clear visibility into your firm’s workload? Keep every client, task, and deadline on track with Financial Cents.
Book a free demo or Start a your free trial
quote up svgrepo com 1 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.”
Hugo C. Sanchez, CPA, Butler & Sanchez