Intuit® Practice Management helped Heather Satterley grow her firm more than 200%

Heather Satterley has always been drawn to helping small businesses.

She started by coaching business owners on how to use QuickBooks® at her mom’s accounting firm, long before Heather became a CPA herself. She had no idea that three decades later, she’d be running an accounting and business consulting firm — while still passing on her knowledge of QuickBooks to help business owners succeed.

Heather opened her burgeoning Rhode Island firm in 2019. Through the COVID-19 pandemic, she hired remote employees to expand her business, setting standard operating procedures to encourage consistent standards of excellence. With her team’s collaboration, processes, and automation, Satterly Accounting Services has more than doubled its client base and increased revenue 223% in the first eight months of 2021 alone.

“Standardization always makes it easier to bring on clients,” Heather says.

Taking practice management from scattered to streamlined

As Heather’s business grew, her existing practice management solutions didn’t scale. For example, client onboarding required a network of Google Workspace documents, folders, and spreadsheets, along with ShareFile, email, and Zapier connections. Even with the streamlining and automations, the system was highly manual and tricky to learn. It could be hard to implement consistently, leading to variable client experiences. Heather knew it was time for a change.

“You have to make the commitment to say you want your firm to be streamlined, you want to improve your processes, and you’re willing to do the work until you’ve achieved your goals – and that’s a real investment,” says Heather. “But, it’s well worth it, because once you get on the other end, your practice can be amazing.”

Satterley Accounting Services made the investment in Intuit® Practice Management.

“It was kind of a no-brainer for us because I knew the functionality would work,” says Heather, an Elite QuickBooks ProAdvisor® who uses many Intuit ProConnect™ products. “We were already using ProConnect Tax, which has a very tight integration with Intuit Practice Management. I’m actually able to see the filing statuses and access the tax returns via a link right inside the software.”

The benefits were clear for integrating across Intuit and QuickBooks products to give Heather, her team, and her clients a seamless experience – and Intuit Practice Management gave the firm the consistency and automation it needed to scale in 2021.

“Intuit Practice Management gives us the ability to set the standards or standardize our process across all our clients,” Heather says. “We have the whole client onboarding process down to a few simple, automated steps, something that is difficult for many firms because it usually takes a lot of time when done manually.”

Benefits for the whole firm

The software provides Heather’s leadership team with another big in-house benefit: easy analysis of their current engagements and efficiency. It empowers them to make smart decisions, meet deadlines for clients, and increase productivity.

“We get an overview of where we are in each engagement,” she says. “We’re also able to review metrics over how we’re doing as far as turning work around.”

Intuit Practice Management unlocks collaboration and smooth hand-offs among her team so they can meet the deadlines and grow as professionals. Heather is invested not only with  her clients, but also her employees to help them grow and thrive. That’s where Intuit Practice Management helps the firm’s leadership team support opportunities for employee growth, using the practice management data.

“If there are certain parts of the tasks that we feel employees are struggling with, we can see this by the amount of time they’re spending on a project and the interactions they’re having with the clients,” says Heather. “We’re able to identify where we need to step in and offer additional training and coaching to help them meet where they want to go.”

With Intuit Practice Management, the Satterley team wins back time with automation and standardization, and turns it into time for investment in learning and growing the firm. All of this has led Heather to the reality she was searching for: “amazing.”

At a glance

• Customer: Heather Satterley, CPA, MSI
• Firms: Satterley Accounting Services and Satterley Training & Consulting
• Location: Portsmouth, RI
• Size of firm: Five employees
• Niche focus: Small businesses
• Intuit Software: Intuit Practice Management, ProConnect Tax Online, QuickBooks Online Accountant, QuickBooks Payroll Elite, QuickBooks Time.

With Intuit Practice Management, Heather has seen a:

• 105% increase in client growth and 223% revenue growth in the first eight months of 2021, due largely to standardization that makes it easier to bring on clients.
• 88% reduction in client setup time, from four hours to 30 minutes.
• Decrease in time for bookkeepers to pay clients’ bills, down to 15 minutes.

Find out how Intuit Practice Management can help your firm be more productive and efficient. Contact us today for a demo or call 833-978-6830.