The start of your Enkel journey
If you’re reading this article, you probably have some familiarity with who we are and what we do as an organization. To recap, Enkel is a bookkeeping and financial operations firm focused on providing pain-free services for entrepreneurs and nonprofit organizations. Our highly specialized staff and approach to client success allows you, our client, to focus on what’s really important: strategy and growth. When you decide to engage with us, we have a proven and streamlined process to get you and your team up to speed and comfortable with the systems that allow us to work together most effectively. In essence, we guide our new clients through a focused and collaborative onboarding process that is intended to align everyone's understanding of the delivery expectations. In this article we will discuss what it’s like to work with Enkel in the first 90 days and how these important steps help set the foundation for a successful working relationship. Read on and, most importantly, reach out if you want to learn more about how we can support your organization!
Client success: your onboarding guides
We have a dedicated team of individuals whose job it is to work closely with clients in the first 90 days and follow the established onboarding process to help ensure a smooth transition. There are clear steps or phases to the onboarding process that you will go through as you’re getting started with us. They include:
Kickoff call: Consider this a warm and friendly introduction to the onboarding specialists who will be helping you get set up for maximum Enkel success! On the kickoff call you will go over what account and system access will be essential so our teams have what they need to do their jobs thoroughly and effectively. One way to make this step productive for everyone is to carefully consider what third-party platforms you currently have in place to manage your financial operations data. Having this information readily available will help speed up this first stage of the onboarding process.
Welcome call and checklist completion: The collaborative approach we take with the kickoff call will allow us to build an accurate and detailed checklist to be sent to you after the meeting. This checklist will include instructions on how to share important banking information, Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) accounts, accounting software and other third-party platforms. This welcome call, which is an hour long, usually involves live troubleshooting to ensure all checklist items are complete.
Accounting deep dive: Once our team has all the access they need, we politely ask our clients to leave things with us so we can complete our deep dive. This allows us to build a preliminary understanding of all of your accounting processes and organizational context before returning to you with questions. The deep dive stage allows us to communicate back to you any issues that might need to be addressed and our observations from what we have seen in your accounting system. This deep dive stage results in a second checklist of items we share with you. We will appreciate your engagement at this stage and will set up a meeting to discuss the nuance of what we uncovered. There is also the potential for some follow-up meetings around more complex processes.
Tools training: While our accounting team is busy with their deep dive, we will focus on providing training to you on the stack of systems we use to make our ongoing working relationship as pain-free as possible. This includes Karbon (our client communication and task management platform), Dext (effortless invoice, receipt and expense management) and Plooto (streamlined approvals and payments). Don’t worry – our teams have many years of experience getting clients on board with these systems and will work closely to make sure you feel confident.
Tried and true recipe for success
After working with hundreds of clients over a 7-year period, we have certainly experienced bumps in the road with respect to client onboarding. (That’s just the truth!) Part of the reason we are so thorough and committed to our process to bring clients on board is to make sure things are set up properly in the beginning to avoid any challenges in the ongoing working relationship. One aspect of our tech stack that has been known to cause some minor friction is our company-wide use of the Google Workspace. Those who are committed to different software and file management systems (ahem… Microsoft 365, for example) can sometimes experience a bit of a learning curve when coming over to our side. With that said, the role of our client success and onboarding team is to work through these possible points of friction in a collaborative way. The goal is to make sure everyone gets to where they need to be: confidence in their books and more time to focus on strategy and growth!
