Transitioning into any new solution for your firm can be a scary thing. After all, it’s change. There are new interfaces to learn, new procedures to put in place, and the ever-dreaded learning curve. You are also putting a lot of trust in a new provider, and you hope they will keep their end of the bargain. It doesn’t matter the app or solution; we are always facing those fears in our minds as we try to shift our firms into safer and less turbulent waters.
One thing that is certain, is that if you don’t go in with a plan, it’s going to be rough.
When I was looking for a CRM (Customer Relation Manager) to bring the pieces of our workflow and our client communications together, I went to my team and asked them what they needed and what they wanted to be in our CRM solution. The results were, it had to be easy, and it had to work with as much of our app empire as possible.
Having a plan starts here, before you search for the solution. If you go app shopping without a true idea of what you want, it will be easy to end up with something that will not be a good fit.
Take the time to make a list of needs and usability questions, yours, and your team’s. Put aside a few days on your schedule to do some live demos, take copious notes and screen shots and at the end, ask for a follow-up email with links to the resources you asked about during the demo.
Using this approach, I came back with Intuit Practice Management and 2 other contenders for the next stage of finding that right solution.
To get a deeper look at Intuit Practice Management, make sure to join our webinar on November 3, "Gain Clarity and Transparency in Your Firm with Intuit Practice Management." You can register here.
The next step is the scariest because it requires some willingness, investment, and trust on our side. Try it. Yes, try the app. You don’t know unless you try. Your team needs to try it to. Don’t go in blindly, though, do a team huddle, get the parameters of your trials, and plot out what exactly you are trying to test during this time. You should see rather quickly which one is liked best and used the most.
Your usability of the app will have heavy weight, but always remember if the app is not used or visited, the data will not be there for you when you need it.
Within 3 days of our trial, my team came up with the winner, Intuit Practice Management! Now we had to plot our next course, implementation.
Implementation with some prep work before, smooths the journey to full adoption. Just diving in can work, of course, but knowing the stages to get to your goal will build you a much stronger foundation and is a lot less messy and controlled. The more complex an app, you will find more planning is needed.
We needed to go in with a more developed plan. With Intuit Practice Management, it was to sit atop ProConnect Tax and in turn QBOA, GoProposal, and Microsoft 365. We use Microsoft Teams built up with our workflow, lists and task management, with all kinds of automations already in place. We also have the company phone and text messaging inside Teams.
We took all that into account and came up with a plan. Here are the steps we followed:
- Sign in Microsoft.
- Prepare the tax return work templates to match/enhance our workflow and tasks in Teams.
- Sign in ProConnect Tax.
- Verify all returns came over correctly.
- Prepare the Recurring work templates as above for bookkeeping and payroll.
- Assign to clients.
- Sign in GoProposal.
Before we started the implementation, we used the following steps to get ready:
- Verify what app talked to what app and what data or lists they sync between them.
- Clean up Microsoft contacts.
- Clean up shared client list ProConnect Tax and QuickBooks Online.
- Clear Planner board in Teams and put it up to date.
- Verify all tax return statuses in ProConnect Tax were accurate and change statuses that were not.
- Clarify between us what we wanted to see and be able to do or not have to do in Intuit Practice Management.
- Watch Intuit Practice Management webinars.
- Clarify during transition time what lists were to be done without fail so nothing would get lost.
- Review and plan the disconnect of any apps that are not in use or would be obsolete with the adoption of Intuit Practice Management.
While a brief overview, behind that we scheduled times and meetings to accomplish everything. In those meetings and scheduled times, we had a focus on what needed to get done and we worked as a team to get Intuit Practice Management to where we needed it to be.
We have just closed tax season 2021 and because of all the use of Intuit Practice Management we did from mid-season to the end, the next part of our journey is clear. There is still work to be done, but now we are at the fun part, doing the final tailoring and adding the bling to make it ours. 😊
To get a deeper look at Intuit Practice Management, make sure to join our webinar on November 3, "Gain Clarity and Transparency in Your Firm with Intuit Practice Management." You can register here.