Padgett Business Services of South Austin

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I own and manage a user experience design consultancy. We help clients with user experience strategy, user interface design, and user research.

What challenge were you trying to address with Padgett Business Services of South Austin?

Our main challenges involved reducing the amount of time that we were spending internally on our accounting tasks, such as annual taxes, payroll benefits, and other things that we hadn’t been able to tackle before.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Matt (Owner, Padgett Business Services of South Austin) started out handling our annual taxes and monthly bookkeeping, which right from the start revealed some things that we hadn’t known before about our tax liability. Since then, he’s continued to do the same tasks for us along the way, layering in additional complexities that arose for our business as they occurred.

For example, we now have employees in four different states, and he has helped us maintain compliance with all the required reporting for all of those different areas. He also manages our benefits system, recently helping us transition from one platform to another to facilitate those.

What is the team composition?

We just work directly with Matt. He interfaces with the people at our benefits platform and our finance manager with our bank, but at his company, it’s just him.

How did you come to work with Padgett Business Services of South Austin?

Matt was first introduced to us through another trusted agency owner. We did an initial consultation to gain an understanding of what they could offer and what they might be able to take off our plate. They let us know what things we could be doing differently and what information they would need to get started.

How much have you invested with them?

It’s hard to track the exact level of investment we’ve made since it is distributed across several different forms of billing for different services. But in the six years that we’ve worked together, our total investment has probably added up to about $40,000 with him.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Matt very early on in our company’s existence, sometime around 2013, and our engagement with him has continued ever since.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The time savings are really invaluable to us as a company. He knows so much more than we do and can answer questions right away that we would essentially never have been able to figure out otherwise.

He certainly saves us a lot in strictly monetary terms as well through our taxes and his knowledge of the systems we operate in, but the benefit of the time we’ve saved thanks to him is worth the engagement alone.

How did Padgett Business Services of South Austin perform from a project management standpoint?

The work style of our partnership suits us really well. We talk to Matt relatively frequently, usually around two times per week, and he is always happy to collaborate remotely and respond thoroughly to all of our emails. He is also comfortable using images of tax letters or Google Sheets, which allows us to collaborate with him in whatever way is most convenient for us.

What did you find most impressive about them?

It’s always been clear that we are dealing with a person, not just a business partner. Matt knows our employees by name, he knows how we like to calculate bonuses, and most importantly, he knows what types of questions to ask us in order to get the best results.

One thing that I respect about Matt, in particular, is that he’s not shy at all about discussing other alternatives with us. At times, he has brought up the possibility of us hiring a fractional bookkeeper of our own and the reasons why we might want to do that, along with other possibilities. I always know that I’m getting an honest answer from him, regardless of how it will affect his bottom line.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I really don’t have any areas of criticism for them.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I would suggest you start using an accountant as soon as possible. We would never have realized how hard it was for us to do the things that he has complete knowledge of already, and we definitely would have been blindsided by a lot more of our yearly tax estimates had we not begun our engagement with them.