Customer story

How Breakaway Financial Group turned reporting into a premium service with Coefficient

For Breakaway Financial Group client reporting used to mean a bookkeeper downloading three QuickBooks statements by hand into a Google Sheets pro forma, once a month, for every client, and the reports were too basic to charge much for. With Coefficient Connectors the books now refresh on their own every day, so the team builds far richer reporting without adding time and is building a live Coefficient dashboard as a top tier it can price well above the basic one.

“

Whenever we show somebody the dashboard that we can create for a specific client, they’re like, this is amazing. So it’s an easy sell.

Patrick TraverseOwner, Breakaway Financial Group

3-4x

more expensive reporting packages

new bookkeeping hires

15 hrs/mo

saved on hand-built reporting

Breakaway Financial Group

A wealth management firm that helps entrepreneurs build wealth through their businesses, handling bookkeeping, taxes and financial planning in one place. Patrick Traverse leads a team of six serving about 60 clients, and every engagement is built around the client’s QuickBooks data.

Industry: Wealth management and accounting
Data lives in: QuickBooksGoogle Sheets

How Breakaway Financial Group’s reporting changed

Before

Every client pro forma rebuilt from QuickBooks by hand each month
A bookkeeper downloaded the P&L, balance sheet and cash flow and pasted them in
Adding depth meant downloading more reports by hand, so reports stayed basic
Starter and scaling clients got close to the same report, hard to price in tiers

After

QuickBooks refreshes into each pro forma automatically every day
The team pulls in far more reports with no extra monthly work
Richer reports that the firm prices 3-4x higher

“It enables me to do more with a smaller staff.”
Patrick Traverse · Owner, Breakaway Financial Group

The long version

For anyone sizing up the same build

THE PROBLEM

Every client report was built by hand, every month

Each client had a pro forma in Google Sheets. Once a month a bookkeeper downloaded the P&L, the balance sheet and the cash flow statement out of QuickBooks and pasted them into the sheet so it could run its calculations. Sixty clients, every month.

The pro formas were too basic to charge for

The reports were basic, and close to identical from one client to the next. With a starter client and a scaling client getting the same thing, there was no clear way to price reporting as its own level of service.

More detail meant more manual work

Adding depth to a pro forma meant downloading more reports from QuickBooks by hand each month. More value cost more labor, so the team could not easily give a bigger client a deeper report without spending more time on it.

“
One of our bookkeepers would have to manually download the P&L, the balance sheet, and the cash flow statement on a monthly basis, upload that into a spreadsheet, and then it would do the calculations.
Patrick Traverse · Owner, Breakaway Financial Group

THE BUILD

Patrick started with the Connectors. He connects the firm’s QuickBooks and the client’s QuickBooks to a Google Sheets pro forma, the bookkeeper adds the reports, and the books refresh every day on their own from then on. Setting up a new client takes about 20 minutes, once.

Because the data arrives on its own, the team can pull far more QuickBooks reports into a pro forma without adding to the monthly workload, so a report can get much richer at no extra cost to run. The firm is now building its live dashboard as the top tier, starting from the most advanced version it wants to offer and paring back from there to build the lower levels.

“
I have to connect our QuickBooks and the client’s QuickBooks to a spreadsheet in Google Drive, that takes me 5 minutes. And then the bookkeeper goes in and adds all the reports, that takes 15 mins.
Patrick Traverse · Owner, Breakaway Financial Group

WHAT CHANGED

Reporting became a tier clients pay for

Before, bringing more detail into a pro forma meant more manual downloads, so every client landed on close to the same basic report. Now the team can pull far more QuickBooks data into a sheet without adding monthly work, so a scaling client can get a deeper pro forma than a starter client. Reporting turns into a ladder of service levels, and the top level is the live dashboard the firm is building.

“
We can create a real set of pro formas based on what they’re paying us, have different tiers of clients, with our last tier being a dashboard. Our hope is to create 3 or 4 levels of reporting and have a clear difference in between each of them.
Patrick Traverse · Owner, Breakaway Financial Group

A premium tier that costs about the same to deliver

Because the Connectors refresh overnight, a client on the top tier gets near real-time books, invoicing and billing, and once the dashboard is linked the team does nothing to keep it current. Serving a client that way adds price to the engagement without adding hours to the team.

Easier to sell

The dashboard is also a sales tool. When Patrick shows a client the dashboard the firm can build for them, they ask to have it. Premium reporting now helps win and keep clients, not only report to them.

Data sources: QuickBooks, Google Sheets
Surface: Google Sheets pro formas; AI Dashboard in progress
What runs on it: P&L, balance sheet and cash flow pro formas
Who reads it: About 60 client businesses
Built by: The advisor and bookkeeping team
Replaced: Hand-downloaded QuickBooks statements pasted into sheets

Results

What Breakaway Financial Group got back