bonus case study: how we work with our direct small business clients
by penny breslin
it’s not just the numbers
managing tasks and workflow through email, handwritten notes, telephone messages or walking down the hall is a recipe for disaster. a web-based tasking app, preferably linked to your document management system, allows the back office support to inspect what they expect:
- recurring tasks done on time and accurate load leveling of resources
- audit trail of work
- set up, review, make notes, share information and complete tasks while maintaining the relationship with the client
more: find the best tech for your team and clients | choose your little black dress of technology | pick your favorite clients | keep the accountants focused on accounting | what do you want advisory services to be?
exclusively for pro members. log in here or 2022世界杯足球排名 today.
tasking applications come on the market regularly and there are a few that are specific to the accounting industry. they can run the gamut in price ranges and capabilities. from advance flow to 17 hats, a firm large to small can find one that will work and fulfill 80 percent of their needs. below are some we work with and that get high reviews with our staff:
- karbon
- jetpack
- liscio
- asana
in the world of client advisory and full back office support such as bos, a workflow manager that allows you to interact with your client can be very helpful. not only does it provide the transparency for all the players, it also keeps the client sticky to your firm. some parts of the work an accounting office does are siloed for financial security reasons, but a successful bos practice requires a high degree of client interaction both to get the day-to-day work done and to develop a deeper client relationship. using a workflow management system that incorporates communication will make that interaction easier.
slack and teams are increasingly universal and most of the businesses you work with will be at least aware of them, if not already using them. integrated with voice and videoconferencing, they provide a great way to stay on top of the client work. teams is part of ms office, so many of your clients already have access to it. slack has a cost, but it has a very nice and very easy integration with zoom.
using text messages to interact with clients is quite common. whether we like it or not, a mobile phone is now more powerful than a computer. most things – not all – can be handled from an android or iphone. if your clients are there, then you should be also.
one app we have used with some of the accounting firms we work with is liscio. this app integrates tasking, document management and client communications. with other firms, we use slack combined with an integrated workflow tool, zoom and yodel.io. you will need to discover and find the systems that fit your team and your clients so you can maintain the right depth of focus on the relationship with the client.
case study: how we work with our direct small business clients
because we use slack for communication across teams and time zones, we felt it best for us to also use it for our small cadre of business clients.
each client has their own slack channel. from within that channel, we can easily send a task to our integrated tasking app, make a call using slack phone, create a zoom meeting on the fly and share documents via our google drive integration.
increasingly, when you access anything in the cloud, as an extra security step, you’ll be asked for a code to verify your identity. depending on the system, this will be called two-factor authentication codes, multi-factor authentication (mfa) or ota. here’s a brief overview of our process.
to log on to any app, we typically need to input a code within a few minutes. however, those codes are typically sent to mobile phones. we don’t allow our team members to bring their personal phones into the workroom, and if the code goes to the client’s phone, that usually results in a timeout, not only because of the time zone differences between india and the client’s location, but because the client’s priority is their business, not the bookkeeping.
to get around this, we integrated yodel.io. this app provides us with a phone number that can receive voice and sms messages. we ask our clients to add our yodel number to any applications that we need to access. we integrated our yodel number into its own channel in our slack. we also receive text messages and image uploads within that slack channel. so besides being a practical solution for getting those codes, the complete communication flow, including the texting back and forth, is all in that one channel.
one caveat is that you want to make sure you have set permissions so you don’t get pinged non-stop. by adding the element of easy texting, be it an app like slack or liscio, if you don’t know when to turn it off, life could get a bit crazy. your team will also need to learn how to use the threads and to create rules for who and what should and should not be in the channel.