How Ghai CPA Manages Time and Client Communication to Meet Client Deliverables with Financial Cents
TL;DR
- Ghai CPA Professional Corporation, a 2-person in-person firm in Vaughan, Ontario founded by Sarabjeet Ghai (CPA, CGA) in 2010, moved from a patchwork of Excel, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams to Financial Cents in 2020 after the DIY system created information silos.
- One place for deadlines and status: the dashboard shows every project, assignee, and due date at a glance, replacing constant back-and-forth emails to check on task status.
- Templates that improve over time: a standard template per service can be customized per client, and improvements carry forward on the project instead of getting lost.
- Comments with context: task-level comments create an audit trail tied to the actual work, instead of scattering feedback across email threads, documents, and chat.
Since Sarabjeet Ghai founded the Ghai CPA Professional Corporation in 2010, he has sought opportunities to leverage technology for excellent client service.
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.
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.
Comparing his Spreadsheets and workflow software days, Sarabjeet admits that his work quality has improved significantly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Sarabjeet 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.
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.”
