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Shannon Ballman Theis
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Payroll Restoration
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Initial Payroll Restoration Assessment, Recreating Prior Payroll, ERC Review
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8 staff members
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Mankato, Minnesota
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Remote Working Style

TL;DR

  • Payroll Restoration, an 8-person remote payroll compliance firm in Mankato, Minnesota led by founder Shannon Ballman Theis, moved from a tickler file and spreadsheets (and a brief detour through Jetpack Workflow and ClickUp) to Financial Cents to keep up with 400+ active projects.
  • Full team visibility: workflow dashboard views show every teammate’s assignments, so the team can spot who has room to help and stay coordinated.
  • Time-saving saved views: Workflow Filters and Saved Views let Shannon check overdue and upcoming projects across 400+ open files with a click.
  • Balanced capacity: the capacity management feature flags when staff are approaching a 32-hour cap, so Shannon knows exactly when it’s time to hire.
We will never leave Financial Cents again because the product is just so good and they really listen to the different features or lifestyle upgrades that users request.”
Shannon Ballman Theis, Founder, Payroll Restoration

Shannon Ballman Theis is the accountant’s accountant. Other accounting firms run to her when they need help resolving their clients’ payroll problems with the IRS.

Based in Minnesota, she founded Payroll Restoration out of her love for solving payroll puzzles that no one else can or wants to figure out.

People usually know that there’s something wrong with their payroll compliance because they get IRS letters or letters from different state agencies. We help address the payroll issues they’re having. We also do ERC reviews to help businesses who may have gotten the wrong amount of ERC.”
Shannon Ballman Theis, Founder, Payroll Restoration

Fourteen years later, the firm Shannon started alone has grown to a team of eight (8) accountants who are eager to help businesses get their payroll back in compliance.

Here’s how Shannon found (and is using) a suitable practice management system that keeps her team from wasting precious time figuring out what to work on.

The Challenge: Tickler File and Spreadsheet Were Not Scalable

Shannon didn’t need any serious project management system in the first three years of her firm. She was alone. Clients were few. She knew where every work and client information was.

Her Tickler File and spreadsheet project management system were going to be more than enough as long as she didn’t add many clients or team members.

But Shannon wanted to add more clients and get more hands to get the job done. It was in this process that she found it too difficult to track work and manage the firm without drowning in non-billable work.

I started working with another bookkeeper using spreadsheets and a tickler file. The spreadsheets had dates for when payrolls needed to be run or when liabilities needed to be paid. That was what I did for about three years. It worked okay when it was only me, but when I had other people joining me, it really didn’t work at all.”
Shannon Ballman Theis, Founder, Payroll Restoration

From Jetpack Workflow to Financial Cents, ClickUp, and Back to Financial Cents

When Shannon was sure she needed project management software, she used Jetpack Workflow before switching to Financial Cents.

While using Financial Cents, Shannon received a piece of advice to switch her software. This led her to ClickUp. But despite its robust features, ClickUp was not fit for purpose. The whole switch resulted in a waste of time, money, and opportunity.

I started with Jetpack Workflow. I used Financial Cents for a while after I left Jetpack Workflow, and then somebody else told me that ClickUp was better. So, we tried to use ClickUp, but my team and I hated it. We could never get it to function the way we wanted it to.”
Shannon Ballman Theis, Founder, Payroll Restoration

Shannon did not waste time before pulling the plug on what was not working. She left that tool with a resolve to prioritize accounting-specific project management software. Of the two solutions she had used before (Jetpack Workflow and Financial Cents), Financial Cents stood head and shoulders above.

We came back into Financial Cents and redesigned our processes to reflect our payroll services because everything that we had created before was primarily bookkeeping templates.”
Shannon Ballman Theis, Founder, Payroll Restoration

Shannon’s decision to choose Financial Cents paid off immediately. It took them about a day to set it up. This enabled the team to continue delivering services with little to no interruptions in client deliverables.

Getting all of our clients imported and creating our new templates didn’t take much time. We just copied and pasted the templates and imported our clients into Financial Cents. I don’t think we spent more than a day or two on the initial setup.”
Shannon Ballman Theis, Founder, Payroll Restoration

How Financial Cents Helps the Payroll Restoration Team

1. Visibility Into Team and Individual

Members of the Payroll Restoration team use the Financial Cents workflow dashboard to not only see their tasks but also what their teammates have to work on and how their tasks relate.

Everybody can easily see what they need to do because they can create a view that shows all the projects they’re assigned to. They can see what they’re doing, when they’re the next assignee on a project, and we can get an overall view of who’s working on what.”
Shannon Ballman Theis, Founder, Payroll Restoration

With this, Financial Cents enhances team cohesion, collaboration, and accountability, enabling team members to assist each other to get work done and meet client deliverables across the board.

If somebody is done with everything they’re assigned, they can see which teammate has a lot of work to do and say, ‘Hey, I know how to do some of the tasks you’re working on. What would you like me to do?’ It helps a lot with coordination and keeping everybody occupied with something productive.”
Shannon Ballman Theis, Founder, Payroll Restoration

2. Filterable Dashboard and Custom Views That Save Time

Workflow Filters in Financial Cents allow users to find a specific type of information on the Workflow Dashboard. Information can be so much on the workflow dashboard that scrolling through it all becomes a time-consuming task.

The Payroll Restoration team handles over 400 open projects at any time, so Shannon combines Financial Cents’ Workflow Filters with the Saved View feature to find and save specific dashboard views for subsequent uses. This enables her to see which projects are overdue and due (and when) with a click, helping them restructure the due dates and stay ahead of deadlines.

In Financial Cents, I can see all of the projects that everybody is working on. I can see how many are overdue and how many are due this week, this month, and next month. That is helpful because we sometimes have to restructure project due dates. After all, we’ll have a lot due. We have 427 projects open right now, and they are due in the next couple of months.”
Shannon Ballman Theis, Founder, Payroll Restoration

Shannon added that, “If I’m looking at it on a Wednesday and I see 97 projects are due this week, then that’ll give us some time to do some shifting of different things around so that it’s not a huge number of projects that are due this week and not a lot that is due next week. That’s why I like the different Due Date Filters in Financial Cents: Today, This Week, Next Week, This Month.”

3. Real-Time Insight into Team Workload to Balance Capacity and Deadlines

Shannon does not want her staff to be assigned more than 32 hours of work a week, partly because they also engage the IRS, and when you are dealing with the government, work can take much longer than expected.

That is where they use the capacity management feature in Financial Cents. It helps them understand how many hours everyone is working. Once the capacity management report shows that everyone is working up to 28 hours a week, Shannon knows it’s time to bring in more hands.

Without this visibility into team workload, Shannon and her management team might have to wait till something goes wrong (employee burnout, missed deadlines, or subpar work quality) to realize the team has reached its limit.

Financial Cents help us figure out capacity planning and when we need to hire another person. Because we set our capacity to 32 hours a week for all of our full-time staff, and if everybody is hitting 32 or more hours of scheduled projects every week, then we know that we’re late in hiring. Ideally, we would bring in another person when everybody is consistently at about 28 hours of productive time.”
Shannon Ballman Theis, Founder, Payroll Restoration

“That is because some of our projects and tasks take longer, but we also deal with calling the IRS. It is always a wild card whenever you’re dealing with the government,” Shannon added.

The Key Features That Made a Difference

  • Easy-to-Navigate Interface

Shannon’s team finds Financial Cents’ user interface very intuitive, and that’s not surprising. When you have a product team that relies, as heavily as Financial Cents does, on suggestions from actual accountants to build features and design the interface, it will definitely feel purpose-built for accounting workflows.

This has sped up workflows and enabled the Payroll Restoration team to spend their time on billable work.

Financial Cents is really intuitive. If it looks like something should be in a spot, that’s nine times out of 10 where it is in Financial Cents.”
Shannon Ballman Theis, Founder, Payroll Restoration

  • Responsive Product Team and Supportive User Community

Shannon has also grown to appreciate the responsiveness of the Financial Cents team, especially in the Financial Cents Facebook user group, which she shares with other users (accounting firms).

The group serves two major purposes for Financial Cents users:

  • It is a suggestion box where users recommend features to build. The Financial Cents team also asks users their thoughts on new features and functionalities.
  • It is a community of accounting firm owners who are sharing ideas on how to maximize Financial Cents to speed up their workflows, automate manual tasks, and grow their firms.
I like the team’s responsiveness. I can say, ‘Hey, I wish the app did this.’ Sometimes, if it’s an easy thing to do, they just add it. There’s also the Financial Cents Facebook group, where we can go in and say, ‘Hey, my app is doing this. Is this how it should work?’ You can also give ideas of things that you wish it did. If it’s something that a lot of people want, it will be added to the roadmap, and they are always launched when they say that it will be or sooner.”
Shannon Ballman Theis, Founder, Payroll Restoration
We will never leave Financial Cents again because the product is just so good and they really listen to the different features or lifestyle upgrades that users request.”
Shannon Ballman Theis, Founder, Payroll Restoration