Michael Callahan & Associates, a Virginia-based CPA firm, uses Kintone to run a paperless office and to run all of its key internal and processes.
The company stays on the leading edge of technology to provide accounting, bookkeeping, payroll, individual and business tax services to their clients.
“We use Kintone all day, every day, whether it’s tracking our staff members’ time on a client-by-client basis in order to tell the profitability that we really have on each client,” says owner Michael Callahan. “We use it for project management, so that every staff member knows what each other is doing, as well as process management, to pass different tasks on to manager level and back to staff level.”
Michael also built an entire training app to onboard new staff with step-by-step training modules for each procedure.
"This gives everyone the same learning process so that no matter what client issue comes up that everybody has the same knowledge and the background to be able to complete whatever step it is."
Michael researched other software solutions that could accomplish what he needed, but in a matter of a few hours and with little coding knowledge, he was able to recreate the same solution inside of Kintone's all-in-one platform.
"That's how customizable it is," he says. "Not only was my solution in Kintone effective, it was considerably less expensive than what this single solution was offering."
Since starting Kintone in 2014, he's grown from having 80 and 350 clients and 4 to 14 employees who are all using Kintone. "It's kept up with us this whole time," he says.
Before Kintone, he was using a mix of Microsoft products but found them antiquated.
"There was no process management involved," Michael says. "We knew what the steps were for different projects, but nothing was automated about it. You had to manually go to different places to find different things. It took a lot longer to get things done. There was no type of reminders or anything like that. Honestly, at that point, if we didn't find something to automate a lot of the process, our growth would have been stifled."
Michael and his staff use Kintone for everything related to the firm including email and social marketing, CRM, bookkeeping, payroll, password storage, operations and project management. In all, they have about 2,500 active records for projects, including those with Box, Quickbooks and Office 365 thanks to Kintone's open API connectivity and Zapier partnership.
"Kintone makes us look good," Michael said. "When the client calls and has a question, we can pull the information up and everything we need to know about them is right there."
And it's been great for reporting.
"I can immediately see where everything stands and how far along a project is," he said. "It saves us a ton of time."
Learn how easy it is to set up process management and run your entire business on Kintone. Join us for a webinar on August 23rd to hear Michael's best practices for leading an efficient, paperless business that can seamlessly connect to other solutions.
About the Author
Nicole is Director of Marketing at Kintone, with 10+ years experience in content strategy, campaign management, lead acquisition and building positive work cultures of empowered, purpose-driven team members. She spent seven years as a journalist, previously serving as a CBS San Francisco digital producer, NPR contributor, Patagon Journal deputy editor and reporter for several publications, including the Chicago Tribune. She's passionate about the tech for good space, social entrepreneurship and women leadership. On the weekends, you’ll likely find her putting her Master Gardener skills to use in at community gardens in Oakland.
