How BookPro Satisfies Their Clients In Multiple Industries with Financial Cents
TL;DR
- BookPro, Inc., a 7-person on-site bookkeeping and accounting firm in Longwood, Florida founded by Denise May, moved from Excel spreadsheets and Outlook reminders to Financial Cents in 2022 as the firm outgrew manual tracking across multiple industries.
- Real project-level visibility: Financial Cents tracks progress per project instead of Excel’s single yearly percentage per client, showing exactly what’s left and who’s overworked.
- Fewer missed deadlines: task due-date reminders and assignee filters replaced relying on Outlook, which had already led to a missed client payroll.
- Recurring work that doesn’t get forgotten: the recurrence feature automatically repeats projects like bi-weekly payroll, instead of manually re-telling Outlook every time.
BookPro Inc., founded by Denise May, is an accounting and bookkeeping firm that promises to stand by its clients through their various phases of growth, especially when confronted with those difficult financial growth decisions.
This informed the team’s decision to offer so many services within the accounting value chain in Seminole County, Florida, United States.
Not Your Regular Accounting Firm
Full-Service Accounting
Against the conventional method, BookPro’s services range from outsourced bookkeeping, QuickBooks support, payroll, business incorporation, and other accounting services. Their clients cut across retail, dental, medical, real estate, architecture, and engineering businesses, among others. This setup required not just the people and processes but also the right practice management system to streamline information and automate manual processes for timely service delivery and exceptional client experience.
Super Customized Packages
BookPro creates customized packages that address their clients’ unique needs. This has enabled them to serve each one like they are their only client; a quality that BookPro’s client, Hughetta Dudley, appreciates in clear terms:
Regular Client Reporting
On top of these, BookPro promises to provide regular financial reporting to its clients to help them know where their money is going and what they can do to become more profitable. This requires a project management system that aids client communication.
Finding the Tool to Bring it All Together
Having hired the right people and built the right processes, Denise May’s primary concern had come down to finding a suitable practice management solution to help her team do their best work.
The more the practice management software could help them achieve, the better for the BookPro team. Because then, they would not need to jump between several apps to find what they need to get client work done.
Why Financial Cents?
The Need to Hold Less Information in The Head
Holding so much information is draining. It’s why high-achievers will always use assistants and organizers—human or electronic—to free up brain power for value-creating activities.
But when accounting firms are just starting, they are more likely to trust their brains with work and client information. Even when they use to-do lists, sticky notes, and Excel spreadsheets, they still need a significant amount of time to locate and make sense of the information, which slows growth in more ways than they realize.
When Denise and the BookPro team began to stretch to their limits, she knew information would be slipping through the cracks, deadlines missed, and clients would grow dissatisfied.
So, they started their search for a system that could organize and put work and client information at their fingertips. This search eventually led them to Financial Cents, where Excel Spreadsheets and Jetpack Workflows failed.
Want to see how it works for your firm?
The demo is free, and there’s no pressure to sign up.The Need to Remind Team Members About Tasks
The average accounting team has more than enough tasks to go around and almost every task is time-sensitive and screaming for attention. This makes it so easy to forget what is most urgent.
Usually, the solution would be to set up reminders in online calendars, like Outlook, which worked for BookPro until it didn’t.
With Financial Cents, every team member can set up tasks and due date reminders to stay reminded of anything that needs their attention.
Also, team members can filter work by assignees, and the system will bring up all the tasks that a particular team member needs to do, further reducing the chances of things slipping through the cracks.
Visibility into Client Projects
Financial Cents enabled Denise and her team to track every project they were doing for clients by their daily, weekly, or monthly schedule. Previously, Spreadsheets only showed them the percentage progress the team made on a client’s project for the entire year. This kept BookPro from knowing how much work the team had put into a client’s work, how much work was left, and which tasks they had to do next to meet the client’s deadline.
This denied Denise May the chance to see which work was falling behind schedule, who was working on what, and which team members were overworking (and might burn out) so that she could reallocate resources—where necessary—to meet deadlines and balance her team’s workload.
With Financial Cents, each project BookPro creates for a client includes the tasks (and subtasks) that go into completing them. As team members complete their tasks, the progress bar on the workflow dashboard will reflect the team’s progress on the individual project.
The Need to Create Recurring Projects
Most accounting projects are work that firms do for their clients on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis. With the recurrence feature in Financial Cents, accounting teams can set client projects to occur across all the days, weeks, and months they need to do the work so they don’t forget it.
This makes the recurrence feature project management tools one of the most important for most accounting teams. And serving clients across multiple industries, BookPro needed it even more, so they relied on Outlook to remind them of their recurring projects.
Some of BookPro’s staff would usually tell Outlook that they “needed to process so and so payroll every two Wednesdays” to avoid missing some bi-weekly payrolls. But that didn’t stop them from missing payroll deadlines.
With Financial Cents, they can now set their recurrence preferences while creating the work and the system will automatically repeat the project across relevant dates.
Despite its effectiveness, Denise May admits they are just scratching the surface of what is possible with Financial Cents.
For example, they’re still discovering the many use cases of Financial Cents’
Email Integration, which enables Denise to
- Turn client emails into projects so she can assign them to staff, give due dates, and track them from the dashboard.
- Ability to assign emails to multiple client profiles at the same time.
- Keep an audit trail of her team’s communication with clients.
Client Task, which Denise says is better than having clients create another login credential, further delaying work. In the past, when clients had to create login details, she had heard them say things like “Oh, I forgot. I don’t remember my login. How do I get to that page?” And they’ll say, “forget it. I’ll just email it to you.”
