By the Numbers
- 15-minute payroll runs
- PTO requests and approvals take minutes, not several hours of back and forth
- “Dozens” of hours saved on hiring and onboarding during peak tax season
The Solution
Discovering the Power of BambooHR Through Rightworks: When Accounting Plus first met Rightworks, they were intrigued by the way Rightworks envisioned the future of accounting as well as the cloud-based tools and resources they offered to help the industry thrive.
“Jumping into Rightworks really opened our eyes to thinking about software in a ‘best-in-class’ way,” says Denise. And it was at a Rightworks conference that Denise and Accounting Plus were introduced to BambooHR as a possible solution to their PTO pains. At that point, the transformation Denise’s firm had experienced after partnering with Rightworks gave tremendous weight to the recommendation.
“We were instantly wowed by the capabilities,” says Denise. Though it was PTO problems that initially led them to seek out an HRIS, Accounting Plus found a lot more than a PTO solution in BambooHR. “It’s solved problems for us we didn’t even realize we had.”
PTO Tracking Is a Snap: “All that back and forth is gone now. The manager gets a PTO request, they can see who's out during that same period, and can make snap decisions on whether or not to approve the request. I’m sure that’s another several hours saved by our managers not doing the back and forth thing.”
A Payroll Solution That’s Easy to “Love, Love, Love”: “With BambooHR® Payroll, things have really moved in the right direction. Doing payroll is a lot less painful than it used to be when we were exporting spreadsheets and hand-entering data. So we love, love, love the new payroll feature. We can literally do payroll in 15 minutes these days.”
Dozens of Hours Saved During Seasonal Hiring: “When it comes to posting open positions, it’s nice to just set that up and assign it to the right group of people within BambooHR. The ability to just post one job and push it out to different platforms is amazing. If we were to actually sit down and count out the time savings, I'm sure it measures in the dozens of hours per year pretty easily, even for a company our size.”
Slick and Professional Onboarding: “One of the things we didn't expect to love was the onboarding. It feels so slick and professional to send the onboarding packet to a new hire, with the forms they need to fill out, and the directions for what to do the first day. Both our new hires and our managers love the experience! We also use the hiring platform for all of our hires, and really love that it funnels into one place and we can have multiple managers screening those resumes. So again, BambooHR solved some problems for us that we didn't even realize we had.”
No More “Old School” Accounting: “We truly identify as a modern firm now thanks to Rightworks. They’ve helped us shed all the remnants of ‘old school’ accounting. There are no papers on my desk even during tax season, and it never would have happened without Rightworks. We work closely with a coach, and the first two years, she worked hard with us to define capacity, and to get our pricing up to where it needed to be in relation to our area and beyond. She gave us the courage to make those sorts of decisions. We use their website, too, and their prospect-gathering platform and that’s been very seamless for us.”
A Big Company Experience at a Small Company Price: “BambooHR took us up a level. We feel like we're offering a big company HR, payroll, and onboarding platform at a small company price. The platform enables us to do the sorts of things that companies of 500, or 1,000 or more, are able to do for their employees and managers.”
An Evolving, Scaling Platform: “BambooHR continues to evolve and that's been so exciting. There’s nothing more frustrating than a software company who abandons their product the day you sign up with them. BambooHR is constantly innovating and evolving and I love that Rightworks does the same.”
A Monumental Shift in Retention: “The Rightworks perspective, the modernization, and the changing of the ideals about what it is to be an accounting firm employer have helped us retain our younger hires. They’re just not going to work the way we worked. I don't even work the way I used to work, working a hundred hours a week, dead tired, sleepwalking through the last month of tax season. And I don't think we ever would have evolved without the influence of Rightworks.”
A Fresh Take on Employee Experience: “My favorite set of BambooHR features are Performance Management and Employee Satisfaction. We use those features to the fullest, the employee surveys and feedback. Sometimes you don’t know when someone has a recommendation or is dissatisfied, even if you do one-on-ones with your staff. BambooHR has given people a platform to say things anonymously that have helped us, and we’ve been able to retain employees because they’re able to do that.”
Best Product for a Competitive Price: “I can't think of a single product on the market that can even compete with BambooHR for a firm our size. They have what I’ve found to be the best product for a really competitive price. And I wouldn't hesitate to recommend any firm owner to check it out! The robust set of services we get from BambooHR to manage the HR functions of our firm are invaluable.”
A Deep Well of Invaluable Resources: “Rightworks didn’t exist when I started my business, but I wish I were my twenty-five-year-old self again starting this business with the tools we have now, including the coaching and resources, the content library, and the events. If I'd had access to these things thirty years ago, we’d have been on a completely different path.”
Fast-Track to Growth: “I would recommend Rightworks wholeheartedly to a young, new firm owner—especially a young, new firm owner who's taking over from an older, more traditional firm owner. As they say, “You don't know what you don't know.” As a young person, you may have an inkling that things can be different, but it’s really hard to invent that yourself. That's where Rightworks could come in and can really fast forward the process. I’m so happy to see BambooHR and Rightworks teaming up. They’re two fabulous companies that really work well together for firms like ours.”
The Challenge
Tedious PTO Request and Approval Processes: “The interaction between employees and their managers in the PTO request, approval, and denial process was very tedious to track as our team grew, with emails back and forth, and the manager having to say, ‘Oh, let me check and see who else is out that day.’ Then they’d manually have to check schedules. We had a PTO approval problem.”
Legacy Solutions Resulting in Hours-Long Payroll Runs: “We've been doing our own payroll—of course, we would as an accounting firm—for a long time. And we'd really struggle with benefits administration and PTO tracking especially. ... Each payroll run was a couple hours’ process at least.”
Seasonal Hiring Surges During Tax Season: “We might hire one to three full-time professionals per year. Tax season, though—we hire a dozen people, including preparers, administrators, and processors. So we have a flurry of activity at the end of the year, with several different people managing those hiring roles.”
Lack of Tools to Support a Modern Workplace: “We've always tried to be as forward thinking, innovative, and cutting edge as we could be, which is quite difficult in the accounting market. There aren't a lot of cutting edge tools available to us. When we found Rightworks, we were really working to shed some of the ‘old accounting firm’ ideals, like working until two in the morning, doing as many returns as you could do, and coming in bleary-eyed and tired. This is not the way accountants want to work anymore, especially the young people.”
Two “Fabulous” Services
See for yourself how well BambooHR and Rightworks work together to create game-changing solutions for your business.
