Ghai CPA Professional Corporation

Firm Name

Accounting, Tax, Outsourced CFO, QuickBooks Support, ETC.

Firm Type

2

Staff Members

2010

Year Founded

Vaughan, Ontario

Location

2020

Financial Cents Start Date

In Person

Working Style

Since Sarabjeet Ghai founded the Ghai CPA Professional Corporation in 2010, he has sought opportunities to leverage technology for excellent client service.

I always wanted to create a firm that was modern, tech-savvy, and client-service driven."

Sarabjeet Ghai, CPA, CGA, Managing Director

Despite this clarity of purpose, the Ghai CPA team had to settle for spreadsheets and other manual systems because they were just starting and had few clients and projects to manage in those days. However, the readiness to embrace automation positioned them to find better systems to replace existing ones over the years.

This has earned the firm the reputation of a financial leader in the Greater Toronto Area.

From Needing Manual Interventions to Figuring Things Out in Financial Cents

Sarabjeet started his firm using a combination of tools to manage projects, and it initially worked because he had so few clients and projects to deal with.

He did that by:

  • Tracking projects in Excel.
  • Storing client information in his head.
  • Creating recurring projects with an Excel and Outlook Combination.
  • Making notes in Microsoft Word and attaching them to projects in Excel.
  • Scheduling tasks and setting reminders for upcoming tasks in Outlook.

I had some of my projects and client information in Excel and stored the rest in my head. I also had an Excel and Outlook combination for recurring tasks. I didn't have many clients or projects, so it was easier to manage it."

Sarabjeet Ghai, CPA, CGA, Managing Director

This worked until it didn’t. With information stored in different places, this system soon created an information silo, making it difficult to find work and client information.

With deadlines tracked in one place and notes saved somewhere else, it was difficult to find information."

Comparing his Spreadsheets and workflow software days, Sarabjeet admits that his work quality has improved significantly.

It took extra work and manual intervention to use spreadsheets and Outlook. At the end of the day, it's your brain giving information to all these tools. In Financial Cents, you only have to figure it out once. You don't have to think about it again."

Sarabjeet Ghai, CPA, CGA, Managing Director

From Creating Multiple Channels (in Microsoft Teams) to Having a Focused Folder for Client Communication

Before using accounting workflow software, Sarabjeet used Microsoft Teams to manage client emails. He would create teams and channels in Microsoft Teams to track emails from each client’s email addresses. This increased his administrative workload and took up the mental space he could have used for more strategic work.

With Microsoft Teams, I would create a team and then a channel to keep track of all the emails from an email address"

Thanks to Financial Cents’ email integration, Sarabjeet now has a focused folder inside Financial Cents. With this, all work-related emails are automatically pulled into his Financial Cents account, enabling his team to work and track client emails in the same place instead of shuttling between multiple apps.

Everything stays in the project in Financial Cents. It's nice that all the external communication with clients stays in the focused folder, and everything we need for projects is in one place"

Sarabjeet Ghai, CPA, CGA, Managing Director

From Delegating Tasks with Emails to Creating Easy-to-follow Checklists for Staff Members

Financial Cents’ workflow templates enable Sarabjeet to assign tasks more effectively. He no longer needs to send multiple emails to explain what he wants his staff members to do.

Before Financial Cents, I wasted a lot of time sending my staff emails to explain anything I needed them to do."

Projects and tasks in Financial Cents are in the form of a checklist. This allows him to outline the steps that make up any work he is delegating, making it easier for the assignee to complete them.

In Financial Cents, every task has a checklist. Once I delegate tasks to team members, they can see what they need to do."

Sarabjeet Ghai, CPA, CGA, Managing Director

How Financial Cents Helps Ghai CPA Professional Corporation

1. Manage Work and Track Deadlines in One Place

Financial Cents has enabled the Ghai CPA team to see the status of tasks and track deadlines at a glance. Before Financial Cents, Sarabjeet relied on continuous email communication with team members to know where client work stands.

I would email them to do something, and they would email me when it's done. And I would have to go in and find that email to see when it was done. It was a huge hassle. It took a lot of time to find those emails."

Sarabjeet Ghai, CPA, CGA, Managing Director

Financial Cents makes projects and tasks easy to see now. The dashboard (the first screen you see when you open the app) shows the firm’s projects, assignees, and due dates at a glance. This helps Sarabjeet to stay on top of deadlines at all times.

2. Standardize Work with Templates for Consistent Work Quality

Apart from ease of delegation, workflow templates help accounting firms maintain consistency in their work quality. Sarabjeet has found Financial Cents Workflow Templates beneficial, especially because he can use them in two uniquely helpful ways.

  • The ability to create a standard template for all clients that use a particular service.
  • The ability to customize the standard template for a client (by adding more steps, resources, and information to their projects) as he finds better ways to serve the client.

This has empowered the team to use the lessons learned while serving a client to improve client experiences.

I like that you can have a standard template and specific templates for each client, and you can keep adding to the project (rather than at the template level), and then it's carried forward as you figure things out for the client. That makes the quality of our work smoother over time."

Sarabjeet Ghai, CPA, CGA, Managing Director

3. Better Internal Collaboration for Improved Client Service

The Ghai CPa team uses the Comments feature in Financial Cents to communicate internally. Sarabjeet appreciates that his team can share comments in both the comments tab and at the task level.

He believes that the contextual understanding the task-level comments provide enables his team to collaborate more effectively.

Sarabjeets says it makes it easier for a team member to point out a missing transaction in a task like bank reconciliation than commenting in the Comments tab, which is more generic.

I like that you can share comments in the comments tab (which is not specific to any task) and within tasks. Comments on tasks make it easier to have that audit trail of everything related to the work in one place instead of looking for them in different places (documents, email threads, and Team chat)."

Sarabjeet Ghai, CPA, CGA, Managing Director

Sarabjeet’s team implemented Financial Cents because they “needed to stay on top of things; get reminders, and look at the calendar to see what’s due this week, next week, this month and manage my time and better manage everything.”

How Financial Cents Helps Sarabjeet Keep Things From Falling Through the Cracks

Financial Cents’ email Integration allows me to pin emails to projects. If a client sends me something this month for a project that is not due until next month, I can pin that email to next month's project, and whoever is going to do the work will see the information about the project."

Sarabjeet Ghai, CPA, CGA, Managing Director
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