From the outside, HireAthena, might appear to be just another Accounting firm. And while, over the course of six years we have worked diligently to maintain the books of hundreds of customers worldwide; it has been with a very different, broader mission in mind. Indeed, we think of ourselves more as a services laboratory; maintaining our accounting apparatus to find ways to automate, and elevate the profession with the technology we have access to in Silicon Valley.
Our mission is to help you find new ways to achieve ultimate efficiency, and real value-add for your customers. How great is our job?!
Integrating automation and workflow into our accounting practice resulted in a 40% increase in our margins. That success has prompted numerous questions from other firms who want to achieve similar results. So today we are sharing the four apps that brought our business to the next level.
- QuickBooks Online (QBO): Intuit is the largest purveyor of tools powering small businesses around the U.S. for a reason – they truly care about solving their customers’ pain points and QBO is no exception to that rule. With QBO, you and clients can get on the same page lightning fast with their secure cloud platform that provides instant access to financials. Automate reports, invoices, and statements, and rest assured that your data is backed up by the best. They also have a sweet partner program for accountants that we couldn’t recommend more!
- Scalus: Did you know that workflow efficiency is the #1 tech concern of 2017 within the accounting profession? With a million apps and clients to wrangle, it’s never been more important to have a central source of record for workflow and client messaging. This made-for-accountants workflow solution has a built-in auditing feature to remove the client blame game and provides transparency to all users. What we really love about the tool is the template library. This enables us to push tasklists out over multiple clients on rinse and repeat functions like payroll processing and 1099’s without missing a beat and keeping everyone updated on status automatically. Candidly, we made Scalus (so we admit we are a little biased here), but its creation was born from the pain points we encountered when scaling our firm. Other apps just weren’t made specifically for the accounting profession so we had to create one that worked for our team and clients. With a 14 day free trial you can’t go wrong. Give it a try and let us know what you think!
- TSheets: Back in 2006, Matt Rissell had 35 employees working in 4 locations and one major problem: employee time tracking. Unable to find a solution, he co-founded TSheets, a GPS-powered timesheet solution that ended up saving him over $2,400 in payroll in the first month. Fast forward to 2017 and you’ll find a company that has consistently grown 100% year over year for a reason. TSheets equips accountants and their small business clients with visibility into who is working, what they’re working on and how long they’ve been working on it. As the #1 rated and requested time tracking system, the product speaks for itself and boasts over 7,000 5-stars reviews online. Their team is just about the friendliest on the planet with a true focus on customer experience and success. Whether you’re billing by the hour or value pricing, TSheets is the #1 way to track your valuable time and make every minute count.
- GoCo: As your company scales, so do its HR needs. Having an HRIS system that is intuitive, robust, and professional looking will help your team during their rapid growth stages and beyond. Your company’s onboarding process will set the tone for new hires, so having a crisp, clean HRIS system in place will wow your team on day one. I9’s, payroll data, benefit elections, and deductions can all be easily stored and managed in GoCo’s secure platform.
- Expensify: Itching to eliminate the pain of expense reports? Meet the pioneer app that is loved and trusted by more than 400,000 companies worldwide with the explicit mission to make expense reports not suck. With it’s simple, user-centric platform, fielding expenses has never been so easy. Personally, we recommend it to all customers and get feedback all the time about how much they love it. Go ahead and give it a try, you can thank us later! 😉
We hope the above apps help you as much as they’ve helped us, and if you have any more suggestions give us a shout! We love testing out new products!