Mary Cooper
2 Min
Welcome to #TestimonialThursday! This week’s interview is with Shawn Dowds, founder of Meridian Accounting & Tax Service Ltd., a full service Canadian Tax firm that has made the gradual move from old-school spreadsheets to paperless billing.
Why did you choose TaxDome?
We were looking for a way to transition into an online virtual accounting office. TaxDome offered us a portal through which both we and our clients can easily log in and upload information. We were interested in moving in this direction, so we signed up, even though the platform still didn’t have the many features that it has now.
How has integrating your business management with TaxDome made a difference for your firm?
After the oil crash of 2014-2015, a lot of our clients have physically moved away from our community and working with TaxDome has allowed us to keep those clients. We now have clients all over Canada that we were able to retain by offering them this virtual option. Our clients are based in Red Deer, New Brunswick, Victoria BC, Grand Prairie, Fort McMurray and more (Editor’s Note, Meridian is in Saskatchewan) – 10-15% of our client base prior to 2016 has relocated in the past several years and using TaxDome has allowed us to continue to provide services to them.
We started with one license for me (the firm owner), but we plan on adding licenses for our team members as we continue to integrate our processes and get our team on board fully. We’re still only scratching the surface with TaxDome’s features – we are excited about the time tracker and invoices. Step by step over the next 12 months we intend to implement TaxDome more and more in our daily workflow.
What do you like most about TaxDome?
We deal with a lot of government returns and forms – the virtual signature saves me quite a bit of money and time. We were using RightSignature before and TaxDome has eliminated the need for us to pay an annual fee for a separate signature software. We have also stopped paying for a website administrator and plan to transition to the website builder included in TaxDome.
We currently use paper-based billing which we track in an excel spreadsheet, and can’t wait to get billing paperless which should increase efficiency quite a bit.
Are there features that you feel are missing from TaxDome? Or features that you wish could be added to TaxDome? (Note that we can consider adding these as well as let you know expected roll-out dates)
It’s been six or seven months since we began using TaxDome and I can tell you that I am very satisfied with the progress of new features being released – most of my wants have been checked off the list, most notably the digital signature.
Quite a few clients have been uploading not only the tax return we just prepared but also their docs for the last 7 years. To tell you the truth, one of the things that bogs our office down a lot are requests for information – documents we’ve delivered to clients previously that they no longer have access to or can’t find . Having the ability to let clients access older or archived files is going to be priceless as far as efficiency is concerned. I’m very excited about the bulk upload feature that was just released which will help facilitate this.
Not off the top of my head, other than that the program is great and keeps getting better. I’m happy with the product and looking forward to implementing it office-wide and seeing how much more efficient it can make us.
Mary Cooper
Mary is a passionate technical writer who takes care of help documentation, social media and blog posts at TaxDome. She knows for sure that the best thing she can do to make the world a better place is to keep writing, so she does. And when she is not at her desk, you can find her traveling, doing yoga, gardening, or having fun with her kids.
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