Withum

Nina started to see the reality of her team having more free time to focus on CAS as she joined Botkeeper in her first round of clients, her “beta group”.

“We started with a beta set of clients,” Nina said. “We tried to make the clients as different and as alike as possible. We wanted them to all have the same hour requirement of work and the same type of work, but we wanted to spread it out amongst different managers.”

With best practices in place from their learnings with the beta group, Withum worked with Botkeeper to create an easy formula for evaluating good-fit clients for Botkeeper.

“Evaluating clients to put on Botkeeper came down to three key elements: the client’s transaction volume, the ease of getting access to the client’s financial information so we could easily integrate it into the Botkeeper Client Portal, and lastly, making sure Withum could save at least 4 hours per client,” Nina said.

With a strategy in place, Withum started to onboard more clients to Botkeeper.

“As we started to onboard more clients, we went through Botkeeper’s efficient Scoping Tool in the same way we would scope clients for Withum,” Nina said. “It was just kind of reverse-engineered. We would look at the costs and the benefit and what was most important to our client and then decide what processes we want Botkeeper to handle. Our Growth Partner, Drew, was essential in making sure we were clearly delineating Botkeeper’s responsibilities and setting up a client playbook that created the best value for the client, Withum, and Botkeeper.”

With 62 clients on Botkeeper so far, Withum has saved 280 hours per month — and counting.

“After our successful initial beta group, we were stringent about making sure we picked clients that we could save at least 4 hours of time each month by onboarding to Botkeeper,” Nina said. "However, as we onboarded more clients, we saw such tremendous value in all of Botkeeper’s work, and we got to a point that even if the client only needed a couple of hours of work, we still found it valuable to put them on Botkeeper."

We have already seen savings of over 280 hours per month on just our first 62 clients onboarded to Botkeeper. That’s over 4.5 hours saved per client per month and we only expect the hours saved to continue to grow as we onboard more clients and take advantage of more of the Botkeeper services.”

Botkeeper has allowed Withum to become a more review-focused firm and is helping them to support their client-centric mentality. They have eliminated the need to bring on 3-4 new full-time accountants, totaling over $325,0000 in salary savings.

“With Botkeeper, Withum is able to be more review-focused,” Nina said. “It has allowed us to get out of the preparation mode and more into the review mode. It has created this amazing upward stream of productivity and has eliminated a need to bring on 4 more accounting hires. Everything that we are able to push down to another level allows our top-level people to do more of their best work. And I think that's what we've seen as the biggest benefit of Botkeeper to our clients because we are able to get the bookkeeping automated with Botkeeper, the Withum team can now spend more time focusing on the numbers, the processes, and providing better solutions to our clients. All the levels of our team were able to move to be more client-centric because of our Botkeeper partnership.”

For Withum, Botkeeper is far more than a technology solution.

“From the beginning, we always looked at Botkeeper as a part of the Withum team,” Nina said. “They are not just a technology solution, far different than any other technology vendor we have integrated at Withum. We meet regularly with Drew, who helps us make sure our clients are still receiving the highest quality and the highest level of service they always received from Withum.”

Going Beyond Bookkeeping With Botkeeper

An unexpected but welcomed impact of bringing on Botkeeper is growth in ancillary services requested by clients.

“Over the last few months, we have seen a huge growth in asks for additional tax work, software, and other things like that from our clients,” Nina said. “I think that's a direct correlation to having Botkeeper because we have been able to free up our people to have more conversations with our clients. We are now able to spend more time hearing their problems and challenges and helping to create solutions to solve them. I can’t wait to see what the impact of Botkeeper is in the long-term.”

As for the future, Botkeeper has helped Withum create new solutions for clients and has created new cross-departmental opportunities.

“With Botkeeper, I see the future together with Withum as twofold: Botkeeper can help us continually bring in clients at different levels and do it economically for the firm and for our clients,” Nina said. “We can then grow clients at an earlier level. I also see Botkeeper as a way for us to partner more cross-functionally at Withum. Right now, other departments are coming to the CAS team and saying we have this client that needs a solution, and we're identifying it and then running it. In the future, I’d like to see Botkeeper packaged as a solution for tax and small business clients that aren’t necessarily day-to-day. CAS is seeing such a tremendous impact, and I know each and every division at Withum will also see an impact with Botekeper.”

Botkeeper is Not an Either-Or Solution For Accounting Firms

As a leading Botkeeper Partner, Nina has spoken to many firms considering Botkeeper and addressed their concerns around automating lower-level tasks.

“Client accounting services or outsourced accounting services are going through such a growth phase that you should continue to be able to pull more work in with a minimal lift,” Nina said. “ Even if that is not the case and your firm is completely static, I think that it's very important to have a little bit more trust in your team members. Those that are doing the transaction-type processing are capable of doing so much more, it is just they are stuck in this consistent work month after month, day after day; they can’t just develop these other skills. It doesn’t take a big lift to get them from transaction posting to actually reviewing and then being able to talk to clients. I think it's really important to trust in the process because I think a firm will find that there are other things that staff can be doing that’s their highest and best use of time, and they don't have to think of it as an either-or solution.”