Overview
Moyer & Company is a full-service accounting firm based in downtown Franklin, Tennessee, with a second location in Chattanooga. Now approaching 15 years in business, the firm is led by three partners and serves small business owners, with a focus on professional services clients and a strong emphasis on value alignment. The firm manages nearly 700 tax returns and a roster of monthly accounting clients. Managing Partner Brian Moyer leads the firm’s operational accounting (CAS) and bookkeeping practice, while the firm’s two other partners lead the tax side.
Challenge
Moyer & Company’s tax department ran on PracticeCS, a Thomson Reuters product the firm had used for years, largely because it was simply what came with being a Thomson Reuters shop rather than a deliberate choice. The firm even tried moving to Thomson Reuters’ newer Onvio platform at one point, then moved back to PracticeCS when that didn’t work out. Through it all, Brian says the experience never really improved: the system felt archaic, and day-to-day billing was a genuinely manual, paper-heavy process. Billing reports had to be printed out, pages and pages at a time, and marked up by hand with a pen before an admin could finally send invoices out to clients.
Bookkeeping, meanwhile, wasn’t running on any real practice management software at all. Brian managed that entire side of the firm out of a Google Doc, tracking team workload, client allocation, and productivity manually, with a separate small piece of software handling time tracking on top of it.
The two departments had no shared system and, as a result, no shared visibility. Staff on one side of the firm often didn’t know who on the other side was responsible for a given client, and finding out meant walking over and asking, not looking it up. As the firm grew, that patchwork became harder to sustain, and Brian and his partners recognized they needed a single, full-firm system that could scale with them, not five different disconnected habits held together by good intentions.
Solution
Moyer & Company evaluated a handful of platforms, including Canopy, before landing on Firm360. Brian, who wasn’t personally in those early conversations, says the decision came together quickly once his partners saw it, and it wasn’t driven by price.
“Choosing Firm360 was a value-based decision. It is absolutely the right tool for us.”
The firm went all in from the start. Rather than easing into the switch, Moyer & Company deliberately blocked off three months during a slower stretch of the year to fully implement Firm360 across both departments at once. Brian credits Firm360’s implementation team for keeping the process both fast and controlled: knowledgeable enough to drive the process forward, but attentive enough to slow down wherever the firm needed it to.
Results
Since implementing Firm360, Moyer & Company has consolidated years of disconnected tools into one system and unlocked changes to how it runs the business that weren’t possible before:
- One Unified System Across Departments: Firm360 replaced PracticeCS, a Google Doc–based workflow, Dropbox, and a separate time-tracking application, bringing tax and bookkeeping onto a single platform for the first time in the firm’s history.
- A Modern, Faster Billing Process: The printed, hand-marked billing reports are gone. Brian describes the new process as simply making sense: “It just functioned logically… it just made sense for how a firm should operate.”
- A New Subscription Billing Model, Made Possible: Moyer & Company moved its entire client base to subscription billing, something Brian says the firm’s old systems would have made nearly impossible to even consider, let alone execute.
- Faster New-Hire Onboarding: After hiring three new teammates in a single month, the team was able to train them on Firm360 in about an hour, with new staff finding the system intuitive enough that Brian says he isn’t “coaching a whole lot on where things are.”
- Deeper Client Relationships Without Added Headcount: Client counts have held steady or grown, but the firm has been able to deepen the level of service it provides each client without a corresponding increase in staff.
Asked where the firm would be without Firm360, Brian didn’t hesitate: still disjointed between departments, with a frustrated team, and stuck operating in the present instead of planning ahead. Looking back, he says the decision to switch is one he’d make again without a second thought:
“We operate better. We operate faster. We operate more accurately. Our teammates are happier. Clients are happy, and I don’t know that we’ll be able to outgrow Firm360.”
