Assisting companies in managing their day-to-day administrative tasks was Varntige’s business, but when their own internal operations needed assistance, they turned to Accelo.
Having served in multiple administrative roles and understanding the pressure of forever fighting against the clock, Chantelle Good made it her mission to help hardworking service professionals carve out more time. Recognizing there were lots of redundant tasks (like manual data entry) weighing down employees and impeding business growth, Chantelle founded Varntige, a virtual assistant service for professionals fed up with the headaches of being stretched too thin by administrative work, in 2015.
Leveraging a distributed team specializing in functions like reception, bookkeeping, graphic design, administration and more, Varntige helps professionals in small and medium-sized businesses by taking on their administrative tasks and eliminating the costs of additional employees.
“Virtual assistants like us can work for anyone without them having to hire staff, and the best part is that they only have to use us as they need us. Yet, we are available during all working hours, which is very cost-efficient,” Chantelle says.
While extremely efficient at helping other businesses, Varntige faced their own internal operational struggles.
The day-to-day business was being run out of four outdated, disconnected tools including Outlook Forms and Tasks – meaning important information and client work was scattered with no efficient or reliable way of finding it.
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“I know first-hand how hard it is to run a successful business and focus on revenue-generating client work when there's a lot of administrative tasks holding you back,” said Chantelle.
Desperately in need of a streamlined solution to unite the team, clients and data in one place, the hunt began. Like most professional services businesses, Varntige wanted to put their efforts on providing high-quality client work and rely on technology to handle the rest with as much automation as possible.
“I researched and tested four to five products, but Accelo was the only solution that did everything we needed it to do. By that, I mean it could track leads and client communication, manage tasks and, most importantly, manage time,” Chantelle explains.
Accelo’s integration with Dropbox and Office 365 improved Varntige’s efficiency across the board. Easily accessing client communication history, sending and receiving attachments, syncing calendars and setting up workflows helped the team stay on track.
“Now, on any given day, my team works directly out of Accelo’s Taskboard where they can easily see what they’re supposed to be doing in order to stay on track,” says Chantelle.
Accelo’s automatic time-tracking features accurately began logging all billable work for fast and easy invoicing. “We outline in all our invoices where we spend our time during a set retainer period, which Accelo manages too, so that our clients get clarity on how much time is being spent doing what, which is necessary for people like us. We need to be able to show our clients exactly how much work is being done. We also have internal retainers set up for staff to track all of their non-billable work so that I can see how much time is being spent on clients versus my day-to-day requests.”
Employees and clients were no longer left in the dark on project or task statuses because all the information was easily accessible in Accelo.
“Without Accelo, running my business would be impossible. It really is the best software available for professionals charging by the hour for their services!”
Accelo gave the Varntige team back valuable time, increasing productivity by 15% and saving on average two hours per day per employee. The automatic time tracking increased billable time by more than 15% each week while reporting capabilities saved on average 25 hours of non-billable work per week.
"Before Accelo, if I had to do monthly progress reports, it would take around 30 minutes per client. So, with my 50 clients, that would take around 25 hours every week. That’s 25 hours of non-billable revenue I’ve recovered now, all thanks to Accelo!"
Additional time saving came from Accelo integrations, specifically with accounting tool Xero, since invoices are sent through Accelo and captured in Xero.
“Spending this time with clients — and growing the business — means I'm expecting to see a 250% increase in growth by the end of the year.”
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