Accounting Firm for SMBs Delivers Higher Quality Service with GQueues and Google Apps

Swimelar CPA, PC is a tax preparation, accounting and bookkeeping service in Frisco, Texas. Principal and founding member Michael Swimelar leads the four-person team to service clients across the U.S. Swimelar CPA provides a full range of accounting solutions to a growing client base, including on-site and remote tax preparation, consulting services and payroll.

Meeting Deadlines While Managing Growth

In 2012 Swimelar CPA realized they needed a better way to manage work as their business continued to grow. At any given time, the four-person team handled up to 140 clients from different states, all with unique payroll regulations. Swimelar CPA's main challenge was continuing to provide high levels of service for existing clients while onboarding new customers.

Michael Swimelar, the firm's founding partner, noticed his team struggling to remember and organize all the different payroll deadlines and special client requests. Missing deadlines could result in heavy government fines for clients. Swimelar decided he needed to change the way his team was organizing information and managing their work.

At first he pieced together a system to manage projects with Tasks in Entourage for Mac. However, it lacked features to support team collaboration, reminders and repeating tasks for clients' recurring needs. Swimelar continued his search for a task manager that could accommodate these features and shortly after found GQueues.

GQueues enabled Swimelar CPA to share and organize tasks with tagging, due dates and reminders, which helped manage their growing client base. Also, GQueues' Google Apps integration made it an ideal solution since the business was built on Google products. "It really is a big deal that GQueues integrates with Google Apps," Swimelar commented.

Working More Efficiently with GQueues

GQueues helps Swimelar CPA easily organize, share and track assignments. The team uses shared queues so that tasks are visible company-wide, allowing all members to see the current status of projects and collaborate in real-time. Swimelar assigns work to team members with GQueues' Google Contacts integration, making it clear who is responsible for each task.

Swimelar CPA tags payroll tasks by the state in which each client resides. Then when it's time to process payroll, they go through each tag and process all the clients for that state, making it easy to follow the local government regulations. In this way, the team is able to focus on groups of similar work at once, instead of multitasking. This prevents careless mistakes and incurring government fines for missed deposit dates.

GQueues also provides a way for the team to track client-specific requests and details needed to complete their payroll. For instance, when a client wants their payroll withdrawn from a different bank account, or needs to change their withholdings, the team member handling that case records that in the task notes.

As Swimelar CPA employees process their email, they turn incoming requests into tasks using the GQueues for Gmail extension. They also create tasks on-the-fly using the GQueues Chrome Extension without having to log into their account.

Achieving Better Results Together

By using GQueues, Swimelar CPA has been able to deliver higher quality customer service as business continues to grow. Repeating tasks and Calendar integration helps keep the team on schedule and eliminates missed deadlines and government fines for their clients. Tagging helps them organize client work, preventing tasks from falling through the cracks. Swimelar noted, "With GQueues we're able to deliver much higher quality service. We get all the projects done on time - I'm really happy with it."

The team is also more accountable for their work now that they use GQueues. By creating assignments, everyone knows who is responsible for each task. For Swimelar, that means less stress: "As the owner of the firm, knowing that everything is tracked and remembered in GQueues is huge. It gives me peace of mind so I can sleep!"

Additionally, Swimelar CPA now accomplishes more in less time. The flexible tagging system allows them to categorize and process work quickly. "We're more organized and we're more efficient," Swimelar remarked. Turning emails into tasks and recording tasks on the fly speeds up their workflow.

Improved teamwork is Swimelar CPA's biggest benefit gained from GQueues. With their streamlined system, they can take on more work and more clients. As Swimelar commented, "The collaboration GQueues enables for our business is huge. We couldn't function without that capability."