Leverage Our Expertise To Optimize Your QuickBooks Setup
How Do We Identify Your Needs?
Identifying your pain points and business goals is our process's first step. What problem can The Wren Group solve for you? Why did you call us? What does your current situation look like? What do you like, what do you not like, and what is irrelevant to your business? This is not a time to be shy or hold back! Tell us your hopes and dreams. Be honest about what you hate about your current process. Tell us your non-negotiables and your have-to-haves. The answers to these questions are a crucial step in the process and help create our proposed solution. The more detailed and specific you are, the better.
These early discussions aim to get to know you and your team, build rapport, and document a high-level overview of your processes. We learn about what’s important to you and identify the areas in your business that need attention.
In addition to identifying your current processes, we also identify your goals and your timeline. Whether you’re looking to tighten your processes for a specific reason, like a new product launch, or you want to find investors or go public, documenting your expectations is critical.
Sometimes a Zoom meeting works; for others, an in-person meeting is better. No matter how we connect, you can expect us to attend ready to listen to your pain points, really try to understand what you need from your system, and create a road map to get where you want to go.
What Steps Do We Use To Document Your Process?
Once we learn what you seek and understand your situation and business, we’ll move to the next step, documenting your current process.
Our method starts by meeting with your staff and documenting, from start to finish, the processes that run the business. We use giant three-foot post-it notes to visualize all the steps. Often the sessions are broken down by either department or key players in the business, but at some point, there is a representative from every part of the business in the room. There’s a lot of flowcharting going on! Any (or all) of these areas or departments can be discussed: sales, invoicing, inventory, payables, receivables, collections, human resources, employees, reporting, and third-party integration needs.
In every process review, two things happen: we identify that more than one person is doing the same work and that some people have no idea what their peers are doing. We get every single process out in the open so everyone knows who’s doing what. The discussion opens options to streamline tasks - who is the most logical to handle it? Who shouldn’t be involved? What paper pushing is happening, that is a waste of time, money, payroll, and effort?
The information gleaned from these sessions is very valuable to the business as streamlining saves money and time. From this documentation, we start the process of overlaying the business needs on top of your QuickBooks optimization.
How Can The Wren Group Solve Your Problem?
Once we have your specific situation documented, we start creating a custom solution for your business. First, we begin with the accounting software that fits your needs based on the number of users, whether you need inventory, and how you want to access your software. We research your specific needs for add-ons, reporting, and third-party tools. We’ll obtain pricing for solutions you might need outside of QuickBooks and explain what software we think is right for you. We’ll make recommendations about what we believe will work and be honest with you about the expectations you might have that won’t work. We never recommend or sell anything you won’t use or don’t need. In fact, we will do our best to use the equipment and resources that you already have.
When we’ve put the solution to paper, we’ll schedule a live custom sixty-minute demonstration via our online meeting tool. You and your team log onto our computers, where we show you how QuickBooks will work for you. The demo discusses solutions for the various functions that your business needs the software to solve. The first half of the demo is used to show you the things you asked to see, and the second half opens the floor to questions.
After the solution is proposed and the demo occurs, we have one more meeting so you and your team can tell us what is most important to you, fine-tune any of the solutions offered, and give us the final road map for implementation.
What Is Our Implementation Process?
Now for the fun part! Implementation is what we’ve worked towards during the whole process. We use the information gleaned in the first three steps to build your implementation plan and timeline.
There are usually four parts to the implementation plan: preparation, go-live, month-end, and fine-tuning. Preparation involves all the data lists, templates, processes, logos, templates, and the documentation of process manuals for staff. Go-live is the date we change over the new process, sometimes a Monday or later in the week to give staff time to get the new process, but a weekend break before hitting it the new way on Monday. Month-end processes change but don’t occur until the close of the books, and fine-tuning is taking any part of the process and tweaking it just a bit as the implementation unfolds.
The implementation plans are detailed for each section and have due dates, homework, and a definition of who is responsible for what. We have regular check-in meetings and phone calls, and we meet our deliverable dates. We are available exclusively to you on your go-live date to ensure everything runs smoothly.
After implementation, you can relax knowing our expertise is available for as much or as little time as you need. Want a weekly check-in for a couple of weeks? No problem! Just quarterly? We can do that too. We’re here to make your new software solution work for you, and we have many customers who can vouch for their excellent experience with us.
