Client Success Story
Accounting Firm Leaves Manual Work Behind and Grows by 50% in 3 Years
Accelo’s intuitive ticketing and project management functions ease the stressful tax season for a growing business.
Background
Larson Accounting, founded by Carol Larson in 2004, is a successful accounting firm based in Orlando, Florida. It provides tax services, bookkeeping, business startup consulting, annual report completion and more for clients across the US. The business specializes in helping immigrants navigate US taxes.
Challenges
With 6,000 active clients, the team at Larson is busy year-round, but they used to find it especially challenging to manage tax season. Most of their data lived in spreadsheets, and they would often unknowingly engage in double entry.
The manual methods were inefficient and made it difficult for the firm’s leaders to find accurate information and make wise decisions. Despite offering 100+ services, the business wasn’t differentiating between ticket types, so there was no way to analyze trends across its client base or decide whether to cut or expand services.
In early 2019, the leadership team decided to seek out software that could address all of their frustrations. They initially searched for a ticketing solution but knew they would also benefit from a platform that could display billing and invoicing history and integrate with QuickBooks Online.
Solution
When Carol and her colleagues discovered Accelo, they realized its project management capabilities could solve their tax-season woes, and its request inbox functionality could help them respond to clients more quickly.
They decided to implement the Tickets product first and consulted with Accelo’s Professional Services team to understand how other accounting firms use the platform. After these enlightening conversations and having witnessed Accelo’s potential during implementation, the leadership team brought on a new Systems Project Manager, Sergio Matocanovic, to further maximize the staff’s efficiency in the platform. He loved its robust automation capabilities right away.
“What I like most about Accelo is that I can create custom statuses and fields for each service and use custom triggers to automatically change the status,” he explains.
Connecting Accelo to other useful platforms expanded its usability. Seamless integrations with Microsoft 365 and QuickBooks allowed the team to tidy up their records so they could have peace of mind in case of an audit. And integrating with MailChimp made it easier to frequently connect with clients via templated email campaigns.
Once Accelo was fully set up for Tickets, the Larson team decided to implement Projects.
They experienced a huge jump in visibility because of one of Sergio’s favorite features: the Activity Stream. In their first tax season with Accelo as a partner, there was no more missing work — and a lot less stress. Clients could also access their all-important tax documents via the client portal, cutting back on unnecessary outreach.
Results
For this formerly overwhelmed business, scaling is now an achievable goal.
In three years since adopting Accelo, Larson Accounting has grown by 50% — jumping from 20 to 30 employees.
The team currently manages over 40,000 tickets and 11,000 projects with the platform. Consolidating this workload in one place and reviewing it using easy-to-read dashboard reports has greatly impacted how management makes important moves.
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Even employee onboarding has been simplified: Sergio spends a few hours providing one-on-one training and finds that most people pick up on how to use Accelo quickly because of its intuitive nature.
When something pops up that the team doesn’t know how to do, Sergio is confident Accelo will be there to help. He and the support team have become “good friends.”
Accelo's support team is the best support team ever. They are so kind, helpful and fast. They always understand the importance of the tickets opened, and we always get our questions and issues addressed.
Sergio Matocanovic, Systems Project Manager
In the near future, Sergio’s priority is to incorporate even more automation into the team’s daily work. He says they’ll take advantage of additional custom triggers, and possibly the open API, to continue replacing repetitive tasks and growing the firm’s impact.