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Practice Insight: How to choose the right software for your firm

20th Dec 2019
Brought to you by
Senta by iris

Practice management solution.

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Darren Glanville, director of operations at Valued recently told us about the process they followed at their firm to find the software that was more appropriate for them.

Darren Glanville is the director of operations at Valued, an accountancy firm with offices in Newcastle Upon Tyne and London that provides a range of services from bookkeeping to management accounts, tax, payroll and app advisory.

We recently spoke with Darren about the practice management features that they use at Valued and what this has meant for the onboarding of new clients.

Here’s what he told us.

Finding the right software

“We started looking for a practice management tool around August 2017. We had been using a different tool but we found was it was very linear in the way it worked. We needed more visibility and to be able to allocate tasks to somebody else and reallocate them if we needed to. 

Our previous software was also very disjointed in terms of documents, as we wanted to store them and have the ability to share them with the client from within the portal.

At that time we were also looking at how we were onboarding clients – we wanted to achieve a transparent process.

Initially, we started looking at Trello and then we pulled in the onboarding element through Asana, so we could allocate tasks to clients, they could upload their documents, we could make them accountable for the tasks that were allocated to them, etc. That worked well, we had a lot of positive feedback from clients. But we still felt we could do more. 

So around July 2018, we started looking at different practice management solutions, but we found them very lightweight and not very visually appealing. 

That's when we looked at Senta, and we liked the fact that it could integrate with GoProposal, which we were using already. For us, it meant we could have a single unified approach to onboarding.

Seamless client onboarding

Now we pull through all the client details from GoProposal, we don’t have to manually re-enter them. We can build the proposal and send it to the client.

The moment they sign it off, Senta changes the status from prospect to client and pulls all the jobs in automatically. It links with Companies House so that we can see all the filing deadlines, which was amazing because before that we had several spreadsheets as control sheets working through the firm. This for us is a game-changer. 

We then introduce every new client to their client manager who teaches them how the portal works and what they can do with it, such as looking at their deadlines and uploading documents, and even ask us questions through the system, which are filtered through a Q&A section.

Clients have full visibility of what their deadlines are throughout the year, whether that's accounts, tax, VAT, or confirmation statements. 

Personalisation 

We have personalised many things in Senta, starting with the welcome message that we set up for staff when they join the organisation and they first log in. The fact that we can also set up a welcome message for our clients, add our contact information and opening times and put our logo there is amazing.

We are also now getting questions from other accountants asking us about how we've set it up and that's really interesting for us, the fact that we can pass on our advice and learning of how we implemented it.

Deadlines and reminders

We can set the system to automatically send out emails and trigger points. For example, on 6 April we can send out a tax return questionnaire through an email through Senta and automatic reminders every month.

That's been fundamental for us and it's changed the way we work with our clients. Now we can get on with tasks much quicker in the year.

We’ve also allocated our own internal deadlines so that we can try and become more productive throughout the year with our clients.

One of the reasons we chose Senta was the flexibility that it gave us in designing and setting up the tasks and workflow to the way that we work as a practice. We have full customisation of who does what within each specific job, who reviews it, etc. 

But more so, we can choose how to work with different job types. We get feedback from our team about whether a particular process is working. If something has to change, we can make changes.  

This works both ways, it could also mean we can add additional steps to give us extra layers of confidence and security knowing that things are being done. Equally, if the staff feels that some tasks are unnecessary, we can remove those and streamline the workflow even further.