How Orbiss runs its entire client lifecycle on monday.com

Meet Orbiss

Orbiss is a 100% remote CPA firm that provides accounting, corporate tax, sales tax, individual tax, payroll and consulting services. The firm runs on SaaS products, so it has no on-site constraints.

The co-founders started Orbiss to modernize an industry they saw as behind on technology, where firms are often slow to adopt new tools.

Orbiss has used monday.com since the start. It began with 3 people and about 15 clients and now has 75 users and 600+ clients. Riley Ogle built the firm's technology function about four years ago and has reworked the workspace as the firm grew.

The challenge

As Orbiss grew, its monday.com workspace held budgets and deadlines, but time tracking and billing lived in a separate system. That gap created three problems.

• Budgets and hours were split. Budgets were in monday.com while time and billing sat outside it, so teams could not easily see whether a client was staying on budget.
• Billing was manual. The old billing tool had no QuickBooks Online integration. The team prepared invoices in one application and re-created them in QuickBooks by hand, and a billing cycle took almost 2 to 3 weeks.
• Performance was invisible until year end. Without live production data, managers could only reconcile employee performance at the end of the year, and employees were sometimes surprised by the results.

Scale made each problem bigger. Orbiss invoices more than 700 clients every month, and its accounting, tax, sales tax and payroll teams depend on each other's work.

"Our budgets all lived in monday, but our time and billing were outside of it. It was always hard to merge those two to figure out whether we were staying on budget."

Riley Ogle, Director of Technology, Orbiss

The solution

Orbiss moved the full client lifecycle into monday.com, from the first lead to the monthly invoice. Connected boards pass information from one team to the next, so nobody enters the same data twice.

From lead to signed proposal

Leads enter a CRM board manually or from the HubSpot website form through Make. Moving a lead to Proposal routes it to one of three proposals boards (accounting and tax, individual tax, or consulting) based on account type. Founders or marketing enter two years of pricing in sub-items. A related contact is created at the start, which lets PandaDoc generate and send the proposal without manual steps.

When the client signs, a PandaDoc webhook closes the proposal item in monday.com and moves the client to onboarding.

Onboarding that starts itself

Signing a proposal also drafts the initial retainer invoice and notifies the billing team. Onboarding is a view of the accounts board, where every client lives. Each department marks its own onboarding done before the client moves to production.

One control board per department

Accounting, corporate tax, sales tax and payroll each have a control board that holds every client and its deadlines. In accounting, sub-items for every possible task are generated automatically. The team marks the services each client signed for, assigns owners and sets the period. One click creates the tasks on a shared deadlines board, and marking a weekly or monthly task done creates the next one with the deadline pushed out.

Corporate tax tracks form type, fiscal year end and return complexity for each client. Its board connects to accounting, so the tax team sees when financials are approved without asking. Each year, a monday form sends an annual tax questionnaire to the client's tax contact and captures the answers on the board. Preparation, review, return notes and quality control are created in turn, with timelines set from budget hours. A single client can carry 40 state and local returns.

Time tracking and billing in one flow

TrackIt syncs with monday.com, so a time entry logged on a task appears on a time entries board, and edits or deletions follow. Approved entries collect per client on a billing review board. The billing team selects what to bill and drafts an invoice grouped by service category. Make previews the invoice in QuickBooks Online, and one more click creates the final invoice there. Paid status syncs back to monday.com, and each time entry is updated with its billed amount so write-ups and write-downs are calculated automatically.

Corporate tax uses progress billing: 50% of budget up front and 50% mid-year, reconciled against time entries at year end.

Live KPIs and capacity planning

Managers see revenue goals for the company, department and team, plus production, billed amount, budget and write-up or write-off for each employee. Dashboards also show top service codes, top clients and time off.

A workload view reads every deadlines board, so managers see each person's total load across accounting, tax and payroll, and can reassign work from the same view. Because each client's tasks are generated at the start of the year with budget hours, directors compare hours needed with hours available and decide whether to hire before tax season.

Connecting the stack with Make

Orbiss worked with Make.com to connect monday.com to HubSpot, PandaDoc and QuickBooks Online, extending what the workspace does on its own into the tools the firm already uses.

The impact

Moving time, billing and reporting into monday.com cut Orbiss's billing cycle from almost 2 to 3 weeks to about 2 to 3 days, across 700+ clients every month.

• Faster billing. The team now reviews and verifies invoices instead of re-keying them into QuickBooks.
• Tighter budgets. Team members see budget and hours spent on each task as they log time, so clients stay within budget.
• Less switching. Logging time on the task itself saves an estimated 0.2 hours per time entry. Orbiss has not formally measured total hours saved.
• Live visibility. Managers and employees see production as it happens, so underperformance is raised during the year, not at year-end review.
• Better hiring calls. Pre-generated work with budget hours shows who has capacity and whether to hire before tax season.

"Billing was taking almost 2 to 3 weeks in the old system, and we've gotten it down to maybe 2 or 3 days now. And that's over 700 clients on a monthly basis."

Riley Ogle, Director of Technology, Orbiss