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Keeping Books uses WorkflowMax to establish a more efficient workflow and streamline their admin tasks. Learn more about a day in the life, their favourite WorkflowMax features, and reporting must-haves!
User Stories is a regular column on the WorkflowMax blog where we talk to businesses who are using WorkflowMax to manage their projects and improve workflows. We get a company to walk us through their workflow process and explain how they use different features. Every company is different, and every firm has different methods and processes for managing their projects. By taking a look at what others do, we hope to inspire you and help you gain an understanding of how WorkflowMax could work for your own business!
This week, we’re talking to Elizabeth Stuart from Keeping Books, a Melbourne based bookkeeping firm.
Welcome Elizabeth!
Tell us about your company. Who are you, and what do you do?
At Keeping Books, we’re small business financial specialists. We work alongside business owners and managers as their comprehensive accounting team. Our work provides seamless bookkeeping and accounting administration for our clients, ensuring they receive best-practice financial information tailored to their individual situations.
What kind of clients do you work with?
We work with small businesses throughout Australia who do not have internal accounting and bookkeeping departments. From florists and café owners to designers and architects, it’s a varied client base that keeps our day-to-day workflow very interesting.
What challenges were you facing when it came to your workflow?
Like any business, establishing a workflow that was efficient for our own business was crucial. Our business requires a substantial amount of administration to keep track of client requirements and billable hours. Each client has separate jobs, leads, projects and time management that we need to be constantly managing. Without integrated and flexible administration software, it wouldn’t be possible to function as efficiently as we do.
What was the most important factor to you when choosing project management software?
There were a couple of ‘must haves’ when it came to finding the right project management software for our business. One of these was the necessity for a cloud-based solution. As technology progresses, the need to be accessible in mobile locations becomes even more crucial and WorkflowMax gave us the freedom to be able to do this!
We also needed software that would be flexible enough to integrate seamlessly with our current accounting software, as well as give us the ability to brand and customise our documentation for each client. This helps give our services and reporting a more professional touch.
Apart from WorkflowMax, do you use any other software tools to manage your business?
Alongside WorkflowMax (XPM), we also use Xero – which integrates beautifully with WorkflowMax – Office 365 and Wordpress.
Walk us through the life of a project at your company, from beginning to end. What are the steps in the process and how do you use WorkflowMax or other software at each step?
We process our workflow in two different ways based on new work for existing clients and new client proposals.
For existing clients with new work, we categorise these jobs as a ‘planned’ in WorkflowMax. This enables us to constantly be reminded of the job on our dashboards and internally plan work around these. We see it as maximising our own internal ‘workflow’ processes. Once a ‘planned’ job commences, we track our time hourly and invoice our clients weekly.
For new potential clients, we use WorkflowMax to generate a proposal and enter these new prospects into our system as a ‘lead’. This way, all our quotes and client information is managed in one central software program, accessible to our relevant staff. Once we have confirmation of the new client work, we begin tracking hourly time and invoicing our new clients weekly.
What kind of reports are you creating with WorkflowMax?
Invoices, Quotes/proposals, Project Status, Debtors, WIP Management and Timesheets.
Want to find out more about WorkflowMax's powerful reporting capability? Check out these additional resources:
What do you love most about WorkflowMax?
WorkflowMax tied all our accounting processes and software together. It gave us a central flow for our internal processes and helps us deliver our financial services more efficiently to our clients.
We now have clean, systematic administration of all our jobs, timesheets and invoicing, ensuring our cash flow is always at its best.
WorkflowMax has been such a valuable asset to our business. It has saved us time on administration, clarified our internal process and enabled us to start earning money as a small business, helping other small businesses.
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Thanks Elizabeth for talking to us about how you use WorkflowMax!
If you’re running a company using WorkflowMax and want to talk workflow with us, then drop us a line – we’d love to hear from you. Just send an email to mallika.goel@xero.com and we’ll be in touch!
