Example: an accounting firm with four accountants and a manager working for about forty clients. Every month the same work comes round: collecting purchase and sales invoices, posting bank statements, running payroll, filing the VAT return and closing the month. Deadlines are kept in a spreadsheet the manager updates on Mondays, while arrangements with clients sit in each accountant’s own inbox. When someone is off sick, nobody knows exactly where she stopped and what is still missing.
This is an illustrative example that many firms will recognise. Below is how you organise such a team in NodiTeam: every client has its own project, every monthly deadline is a task with a person responsible, and hours are logged on tasks and turned into an invoice.
What was getting in the way
- ✓Deadlines lived in a spreadsheet that was always slightly out of date.
- ✓Only each accountant knew what she was doing for which client.
- ✓Before month-end the work piled up on one person while another had room to spare.
- ✓Extra work for clients (advice, special reports) was billed from memory or not at all.
A project for every client
In Work → Projects the manager opens a project for each client and adds the client when editing it. Hours logged on that project’s tasks are then offered to that client for invoicing. Larger clients can have subprojects, for example one for payroll and one for bookkeeping.
At the start of the month the manager adds that month’s tasks to each project’s board:
- 1Adds a task with a clear title, for example “VAT return for October”.
- 2Picks the person, the Start and Due date, and the priority, high or urgent for statutory deadlines.
- 3Enters Estimated hours, so it is clear later whether the work took longer than usual.
- 4Breaks the steps into subtasks: purchase invoices, sales invoices, bank, checks, filing. Progress shows right on the card.
- 5When the work is done, the accountant moves the task to In review, and the manager checks and closes it.
Questions about a client stay in the task’s comments, not in someone’s personal inbox. If a colleague takes over the task, she sees the whole conversation and the attached files. A request that arrives in Chat can be turned into a task straight from the message.
Deadlines on a timeline by person
On the projects page, the Timeline button shows every task as a bar from start to due date. A 2 weeks or month view grouped By person shows at once whose deadlines pile up in the last week of the month. The manager can move a task to someone else in good time, before it becomes urgent. Overdue tasks are outlined in red and a red vertical line marks today.
Each accountant sees her own work on the dashboard, and the manager sees the tasks waiting for review. On the board you can filter tasks by project, person and priority, and the List view shows all projects with their tasks and statuses in one place. The manager adds the weekly deadline review to the dashboard with Add meeting, with repetition and participants, so it is in everyone’s calendar every Monday.
Extra requests from clients
Clients often ask for things outside the monthly work: a report for the bank, help with an application, advice. In Work → Client wishes the manager clicks Invite client and sends them a link to the client portal. On the portal the client sees only their own requests, the replies and the status. With Plan the manager enters estimated hours and a project, a task is created, and the client gets an e-mail every time the status changes.
Hours and the monthly invoice
Accountants log hours in Work reports → Work log and pick the task when they do. An entry that is the same every month, such as a client’s regular monthly bookkeeping, is marked Repeat every month and is added to each following month automatically.
Once the administrator turns on invoicing from tasks, at the start of the month the manager opens Finance → Tasks to invoice and selects a client. They see lines by task and person with hours and hourly rate, and Add overhead work adds hours that were not on any task. Then Continue to invoice opens the invoice form with all the lines. Every logged hour is invoiced only once, so next month only the new hours remain.
What changed
Monthly deadlines are no longer in a spreadsheet but on each client’s board, with a person and a due date. On the timeline the manager sees where the crunch will be before it happens. When someone is away, a colleague takes over the task with the whole conversation and its subtasks. Extra work for clients is recorded as a task with hours, so it no longer goes unbilled.