How Kathy Maintains Quality Work and Track Due Dates to Meet Tax Deadlines with Financial Cents
TL;DR
- Kathy Nash founded Nash Financial Solutions LLC in Ohio in 2016 and, heading into her 32nd tax season with around 300 clients, moved off paper folders and an unresponsive practice management tool onto Financial Cents.
- No more lost paperwork: client information and deadlines live in one system instead of physical document stacks she could no longer keep straight.
- Hands-off document collection: automated client task reminders chase down bank statements and receipts every few days without Kathy lifting a finger.
- Support that actually responds: in-app chat support and an active user community mean her feature requests and questions get answered fast.
Kathy is the founder of Nash Financial Solutions LLC. Supported by a part-time bookkeeper and one part-time tax specialist, Kathy couldn’t be more proud to enter her 32nd tax season in 2024 with 300 happy and recurring clients.
Having completed her accounting major at age 50 (she had stopped to get married and raise a family), Kathy is eager to deliver quality client services using a “low-pressure approach.”
To achieve this, she needed a practice management solution to organize client information, track upcoming deadlines, and monitor client requests at scale.
This, and other reasons we’ll discuss shortly, led the Nash Financial Solutions team to Financial Cents.
Struggling to Track Work, Client Information, and Client Requests with Paper Documents
Kathy is so organized that she knew the information in each stack of the document folders in her physical document management system in the early days of Nash Financial Solutions.
However, as the firm added more clients, she began to mix client information up and forget which project was most urgent. The time she spent searching for work and client information started to eat into her billable hours.
Implementing New Technology Can Be Hard, But Lack of Customer Support Makes It Frustrating
You need about three (3) hours to implement a software solution that is easy to use. More complex products require more time, especially for users with low IT skills. Kathy, like most accountants, relies on responsive customer support to manage software implementation.
In their previous practice management solution, the Nash Financials team needed help with some challenges they encountered while setting their firm up. This help never came. Kathy couldn’t get the customer support team to attend to her challenges.
By the time Kathy found Financial Cents, she had tried three other solutions, which looked too complex to set up and use for her daily practice management needs.
How Financial Cents Helps Nash Financial Solutions
1. Workflow Resources that Position the Firm to Scale.
Kathy, the only full-time staff at Nash Financial Solutions, hopes to employ full-time employees soon. She reckons that documenting her procedures will guide her potential staff to complete client projects to her standard.
Using the Workflow Template feature in Financial Cents, Kathy is building workflow templates to standardize work in her firm—regardless of the staff member involved.
2. Time and Energy-Saving Automation
Client data collection might not be avoidable, but wasting your time and energy on such admin work is.
With the Client Task feature in Financial Cents, Kathy has learned to avoid manually emailing and calling clients for the information her firm needs to work. The feature gives accounting firms easy-to-use automation that frees them up to work with complete focus.
She no longer has to stop halfway through a project to wonder if she received all the documents requested.
Moreover, Financial Cents reminds her each time a client sends the requested documents she asked for, saving her the hassle of digging through client records to know where client requests stand.
3. Responsive Customer Support
Financial Cents is the simplest practice management software Kathy has used or considered, and its customer support was also the most responsive.
4. Opportunity to Request (and Get) the Features You Need in Your Firm
Financial Cents relies on insights and suggestions from actual accounting firm owners to guide its product roadmap.
The Financial Cents User Community allows users to request features and functionalities and be sure that they will be built once other users also want them. This has made the product more beneficial to Kathy and other accounting professionals.
Kathy said,
“I’ve been impressed with how well the company reacts to the users and how fast everything gets done to make it easier for us to use,” she added.
The Financial Cents Features Kathy is Currently Exploring
One year after starting with Financial Cents, Kathy acknowledges that she is still scratching the surface of everything she can do with Financial Cents’ all-in-one features.
She is currently exploring ways to maximize
a. The Billing Feature
The Nash Financials team is excited about the new Financial Cents billing feature because it enables her to manage client billing and projects in one place.
Apart from the need to solve the invoicing challenges she is facing with her current billing solution, Kathy understands that the billing feature will reduce the number of applications the team needs for its daily work. It will also reduce the number of software programs she needs to pay for.
b. The Financial Cents Templates Library
Kathy draws ideas for her firm’s workflows from the newly launched Financial Cents Template Library.
Created by actual accounting firm owners, the templates library shows how other accounting firms are addressing their biggest workflow challenges.
Templates in the Library cover all aspects of an accounting firm’s operation, including tax, audit, payroll, bookkeeping, and client onboarding. This gives Kathy a one-stop shop to improve her processes and grow.
