75 CAS Ops: Choosing A Workflow Management Tool

On today’s episode of CAS Minute, we’re diving into workflow systems for CAS firms. We’ll cover why workflow is more than just task management, what features to prioritize, and the pros and cons of leading tools like Financial Cents, Karbon, Canopy, and mainstream project management software. If you’re looking for a scalable, efficient way to manage client work and quality control, this episode is for you.

Key Takeaways:

• Why workflow is more than just a task list.

• The must-have features in a CAS workflow system.

• A comparison of leading workflow tools.

• How to ensure quality control and scalability.

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Full Send | Accounting & Data

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Transcript

You've gotten to a point where you've started to build your firm. You know what direction you're going and you're doing really well based on a variety of systems that you're using, but you don't actually have a workflow management system yet. Or maybe you have one. It's just not working too well. There are so many options out there.

Karbon, canopy, Financial Cents, ClickUp, Asana, teamwork. There are a thousand tools that you can choose from and it's, Super overwhelming to understand what is the best tool for my firm in order to provide a great service, to create a good experience for my team and to help me scale. Like where do we start?

The truth is the best workflow system is the one that you actually use today. We're going to talk about how do we evaluate, how do we choose the right system for your firm, the features that actually matter and why task management just really isn't going to cut it for a growing CAS practice and why workflow needs to be centric to that.

So why does a CAS firm need a workflow system in the first place? When you think about a firm that has a defined workflow versus a firm that just operates on gut instinct or operates on a series of spreadsheets, Outside parties are going to look at these firms and try to make an evaluation on which firm has the better ability to grow, to scale, to take what they've got in place and expand upon it rapidly.

And when I say rapidly, I'm talking about particularly external parties, private equity, venture capital. That's how they're going to be looking at your firm. Do you have an infrastructure in place that allows you to scale? and you could also think about this through the lens of a solopreneur firm.

If you're running your race and you're trying to maximize your time input, you can look at it through the lens of private equity to say, how can I maximize my firm in order to give myself more time? Maybe it's not an exit or an acquisition or a future state that you're evaluating. Maybe it's purely through the lens of how do I introduce Tools to give me more time.

A firm that has definition in their workflow will by nature, create more efficiency in the work that they do. So the risk that you, that you take by growing without a structured workflow is that you're, you're starting to run into bottlenecks. You're starting to. Run into missed deadlines, poor client experience, poor communication, because it's not all arranged in the same manner.

It's not all connected to one another in the client service rhythms. Maybe you have a task management system, but that's all that it is. It's just tasks. the thing here to think about is that. Realistically, any system that you have created is better than no system. It's better than just logging into your client's QuickBooks files, marching down the balance sheet, making sure you've reconciled things, getting those reconciliations in Excel, and then sending out a deliverable.

That in and of itself will not give you freedom of time, will not give you freedom of scalability. Or a better outcome in the future. But if you've got something documented, maybe it's ClickUp and you've got a series of tasks that you're marching down. Great. That is a fantastic starting point and maybe enough for you, but I can assure you that if you're starting to look to scale and grow, bring on team members, look at additional volume of client workload, you will have to have a system in place to manage that work.

Now, how do we start to create a distinction between workflow and task management? Task management ultimately is just a list of things to do without the additional context, without the additional dependencies, and really no triggers or automations on top of the tasks that create a workload after that task is completed.

A workflow is more driven upon a sequential action driven framework that ensures that every client deliverable follows a structured process. So within this workflow, there are tasks that have subsequent actions that need to be taken. And based on the completion of those tasks, it starts to kick off another process.

So when you think about a workflow for a month end close, once the month end close process is complete, so the tasks that make up the close is completed, that then kicks off a task and a process for review. It kicks off a process for financial reporting, for advisory, for client check ins, for scheduling meetings.

How can we start to create triggers that drive these next actions automatically? Rather than just saying, we've closed the book, send an email to the client without that next step, and maybe sometimes if you're not taking those additional steps, you've got month end close, and then you're hopping into the daily, weekly, or monthly rhythms that happen after the month end close for that day-to-day work with your client.

So what are we looking for as a CAS firm in a workflow system? Like I mentioned, we're looking at scalability. We're trying to understand, can this system grow with our firm? Does it have the capability to serve us if we have 10 employees, 15, 20, 50 employees? Does this system allow for automation and triggers to reduce the amount of manual handoffs and tasks that need to be completed on a monthly rhythm with our clients?

One bonus is that. It may have an integration with your general ledger, so you may have the ability to integrate directly into QuickBooks. I've seen Keeper has this, Financial Cents has this, there's a lot of tools that have this native integration that create a really material benefit to your accounting workflows in a service capacity for your clients.

Does it allow you to collaborate with your clients? Can your clients upload documents? Can they ask questions? Can you dialogue with them in this system? And or create approval mechanisms for your team as you review the work that goes out the door. So thinking about quality control features. Does it allow for those Approvals, those review checkpoints, audit trails.

Do you have a way to check in on the work that you're doing? Lastly, I really want to start looking at reporting and insights. How are you actually managing your team? How are you managing capacity? How are you managing client communications? How are you managing the work that gets done scalably across a cohort of clients?

And can you slice that information by cohort to understand how are we servicing our e commerce clients? Well, how are you servicing our service based clients very well? A good workflow management tool will have these things to allow you to manage scalably. You do have to make a decision whether or not you want to go with a multi featured platform that does a little bit of everything or one that's more CAS specific.

So examples there is multi feature could be a ClickUp or an Asana or a Monday or a CAS specific tool would be a Karbon, a Keeper, a Financial Cents. So those CAS specific tools may lack. Some degree of flexibility that those mainstream tools have. However, they are far more specific to your accounting workflows.

And I think may provide a really good foundation because it's so specific to what you do. Like I mentioned, there's a lot of options in this space, Financial Cents, Karbon, canopy, jetpack, there's, there's so many options. It's super overwhelming. The absolute best thing that you can do is go check out Jason Stats resource on workflow management tools.

And there is a whole list of features and

data to support what's happening in each of these tools. A phenomenal starting point to evaluate what's the right system for me.

So how do we go about choosing the best workflow system for your CAS firm? One, identify your bottlenecks. Where does your work get stuck? Is it the onboarding process? What system allows you to create more efficiency in the onboarding process if that's where you're getting stuck? You then need to prioritize must have features.

What are those things that you have to have? Do you have to have a GL integration or can you solve for that in a different manner? Once you have an identification of what are the bottlenecks, what are the core must have features for you and what are nice to have, start testing. There are free trials.

There are betas available for you to hop into and just navigate the UI, navigate the tool to understand, is this something that I naturally understand how to use really well, because that will be a proxy for how well your team is capable of integrating this new tool. Once you get to the point of your testing tools, you have a good familiarity with them.

You feel good about them. You got to get the team buy in. You've got to get team adoption in order to create an effective onboarding rhythm with this new tool. Once you get through all of those things, Taking an inventory and audit of your current processes will be really helpful to start getting operationalized with this new software.

You can start to implement those simple and repeatable workflows for your core services, and then start to tack on the more ad hoc or more advisory related services that are maybe non core and then start to create a review period, start assessing what's working and what's not working with this new tool.

So on maybe a quarterly basis, Probably a little bit more frequent than that early on, on a monthly basis, is this tool serving our needs really, really well? Cause it will be a constant tinkering with a tool to fine tune it for your needs. Now there's no single best workflow system for your CAS firm because every firm is a little bit different.

And so it depends on your needs. It depends on your service model, your team, but there's one thing that's clear by nature of having a defined workflow tool.

It creates scalability. It ensures quality. It improves efficiency and creates so much optionality for you, even as a solopreneur, all the way up to a scaling firm. So choose your system, commit to using it and start refining it as you grow. Make 2025 the year where you start to create better rhythms with your workflow management system.

I hope that's helpful. Till next time.