Powerful Accounting
Powerful Accounting
Can a CPA maintain a thriving business with a six-hour work day, even during tax season?
With the right tech automation, this accounting firm is eager to point the way.
CPA Dawn Brolin is the “Designated Motivator.” As CPA and owner of full-service accounting business Powerful Accounting in Windham, Connecticut, Brolin is an energetic business owner and business coach.
She leads a small, highly effective team. “I don’t work more than six hours a day,” Brolin states.
The right high-speed scanner, she says, is indispensable to optimizing an accounting firm’s time and workflows.
“I used to wear the 80-hour badge of honor,” admits Brolin. “But was I really being productive those 14-hour days? I teach people how to be efficient and productive, not busy,” she says.
Instead, three overarching components enable Powerful Accounting’s efficiency and shorter work days:
- Document management and collaboration software
- Fast digitization with ScanSnap® iX1600 Receipt Edition
- Lean process management
This structure has enabled Brolin to maintain a prosperous full-service accounting firm while also coaching college softball full-time.
Improving processes created satisfying workdays
The seasoned CPA has been in the field for 25 years, and she is passionate about her practical approach to creating a rich, balanced life as a CPA.
Her life outside of work is both meaningful and accessible now that her work days are more manageable. Brolin said that she doesn’t miss practice and doesn’t bring work with her.
She says when she knows she needs to leave to coach, she doesn’t want to have to come back, and she doesn’t, thanks to optimizing her processes. Likewise, she can visit family across the country and stay on top of her work thanks to improved processes.
“Now, if you've ever worked with somebody under audit— lots of paper. It’s all about how you set boundaries in your workflow. And the scanner has to be part of that workflow,” the CPA says.
Brolin has used a scanner of some kind for most of her career. To Brolin, the workflow and way forward to shorter work days is something every CPA and accounting business can achieve, but that in her experience, many firms don’t.
Her approach is lean. She said that paper documents are still important, but that a predominantly paperless workflow is achievable and is fundamental to her productivity.
Staying organized with lean processes
Flatbed scanners were one of the only options when Brolin first started, and scanning page-by-page for financial documents was tedious.
But when she left a partnership and went back on her own over a decade ago, the first step she took was to go paperless. “All right, we’re going to get a ScanSnap and get SmartVault,” she told her team.
As an early adopter to digitization, Brolin began using SmartVault, the cloud-based document management software to collaborate with her team. SmartVault recommended ScanSnap scanners to her. ScanSnap® easily integrates with SmartVault software to digitize the firm’s large tax documents and to create shareable secure files.
The ScanSnap® iX1600 Receipt Edition automates data extraction, creating editable files everyone on Brolin’s team can review. Because of it, Brolin said, she can scan a tax or financial document to her remote team member and they don’t need to talk about it.
“It’s so much bigger than just another tool or a piece of equipment in your office. Without that tool, I’m dead in the water,” Brolin asserts.
Freedom to securely collaborate from anywhere
ScanSnap® features Wi-Fi connection and direct scanning to the cloud, enabling her team to receive client tax and finance information instantly and securely.
Employing secure document management allows her team to work remotely and instantly. From depreciation schedules to 1099s, a single document to large insurance docs, they get scanned and sent directly to the software. “[As] soon as you’re done, work papers go right into the scanner, right into SmartVault,” Brolin says of how her team collaborates.
ScanSnap® saved time processing tax documents
Brolin says that she continues to see many professionals overwhelmed with paper clutter in their work life. “When you’re in a room and everyone is talking, it’s such an overstimulation. Papers do the same thing to me,” Brolin notes.
Still, IRS representation creates “lots of papers,” Brolin acknowledged. Organizing the lengthy checklist of personal and business documents requires secure storage and scanning speed.
The ScanSnap® iX1600 Receipt Edition is an office scanner with a document feeder that is faster than other models she has used, too.
Powerful Accounting can scan reports, returns and piles of paperwork in, as Brolin notes, “not even a minute.” She included with a laugh that the ScanSnap® is so fast that it’s “coming through like fire.”
“This is my assistant. This is an extension of my work. This (scanner) is an employee. That’s the way that I look at it,” Brolin says.
She also advises clients that audits can and do happen, and may be happening more post-pandemic. She encourages both clients and accountants to be efficient in how they prepare.
Clients need her and her team to be at their best, especially during audits. Because she optimized her processes with dependable equipment and software, Brolin confidently says that now, “we look like heroes, because we have everything together.”
Dawn Brolin is a seasoned CPA and productivity coach for accounting professionals and firms. She delivers webinars and hundreds of keynote speeches. Brolin has appeared on popular news programs and received numerous awards in the accounting industry.
Optimized for Quickbooks®
Product Features:
- Direct-scanning to Quickbooks® accounts
- Exclusive Invoice and Receipt OCR processing features
- 33% faster for more productivity
- Easy touch-screen navigation
