How Sarah Uses Financial Cents’ Due Dates Feature to Ensure Team Accountability

Before Financial Cents

Challenges

1. Asana Was Not Suitable for Accounting Task Management

Task management software solutions exist to help firms do more work in less time. When a firm has to spend long hours on admin and task management, it loses the number of hours it could have spent on billable work.

Sarah often found herself going into projects to adjust due dates when, for example, unresponsive clients delayed projects beyond their original due dates. Asana is too generic to possibly include features that are equally beneficial to many industries at the same time.

2. Asana Was Too Limited for Effective Client Management

Client management is one activity most accountants and bookkeepers don’t factor into their pricing strategy, and rightly so. It’s a backend process that empowers accountants to satisfy clients.

Sorting it out quickly allows firms to move on to the work that generates revenue. So using a generic project management software like Asana held Sarah’s team back in many ways because they couldn’t organize client information in one place.

They were having to go through different apps and portals to store or get the work-related information they needed to meet client deliverables. As you can imagine, they risked losing important client information and missing client deadlines.

Sarah said,

3. No Way to See Employee Workload (to Manage Team Capacity) in Asana

Sarah also struggled with knowing how much work each team member had on their plate. This kept her from knowing when to re-assign work and risked overworking some team members.

Sarah said,

With this many challenges in Asana, it became clear to Sarah’s team that only a project management software solution designed for the accounting and bookkeeping industry would have the features they needed to make more efficient use of their time.

After Financial Cents

The Benefits

In Financial Cents, they have found the ability to:

1. Keep Multi-Stage Projects on Track with Due Dates

Sarah finds the way Financial Cents’ due dates are set up very beneficial. Instead of constantly going into projects to adjust every date when a project exceeds its original due date, Sarah only needs to reset the due date of the preceding task, and all dependent due dates will change accordingly.

Each dependent due date adjusts until the preceding task is marked complete. That helps Sarah to deal with project delays without wasting more time and energy on admin work.

2. Automate workflow with Task Dependencies

The task dependency feature has given Sarah and her team more clarity and focus, especially with complex tax work. Financial Cents greys out every task that assignees do not need to work on at the time, allowing them to channel their creative energy to the tasks that require immediate action.

And to keep team members from forgetting their tasks in any project, Financial Cents task dependency feature also notifies assignees when their work in any project is ready for them to complete.

• Ensure Tasks are Assigned to the Right Team Member (Using the Capacity Management Feature)

Financial Cents has made it easy for Sarah to see how much work her team members have on their plates. This has helped her to assign tasks to those with enough bandwidth, helping the team to maintain balance.

For the team members, this feature has enabled them to see how much work they need to do in a day, week, or month, and they can now shift tasks around based on the urgency of each project.

Sarah remarked that the Ascension CPA team is always looking for new ways to use Financial Cents’ feature updates to keep the firm more efficient, productive, and profitable.

For example,

Like Ascension CPA, you can start using due dates to meet client deadlines and help your team members honor client deadlines today.