Problem
Managing Financial Complexity for Contractors
This accounting consultant was managing dozens of general contractor clients, each with different billings, deposits, proposals, and outstanding payments. The existing system—built entirely in Google Sheets—was difficult to scale and riddled with redundancies. Relationships between projects, subcontractors, and financial milestones had to be manually tracked, leading to errors and delays.
ClickUp, while useful for task management, lacked the financial relationship modeling and dashboard clarity needed for live visibility into contractor finances. The consultant needed a way to unify data, track recurring financial workflows, and present clients with a real-time, user-friendly dashboard—without building dozens of disconnected tools.
Q1
Solution
Centralized Client Portfolios with Dashboard-Level Visibility
SmartSuite provided the consultant with a powerful foundation to create interconnected apps across clients, including Projects, Proposals, Payments, Subcontractor Bills, and Client Deposits. Using Linked Records, Formulas, Dashboards, and Document Designer, the consultant designed a live dashboard for each client showing:
- Total billed vs. paid
- Remaining balances
- Subcontractor payments due
- Net profitability per project
Automations streamlined updates across the portfolio, while Permissions and Custom Views ensured each contractor saw only their own data. Each client had their own workspace or solution, with the consultant managing visibility and edits from a centralized view.
The consultant also used Export Workflows to sync QuickBooks data into SmartSuite, further consolidating reporting and reducing manual data entry.
Q2
Result
Scale, Simplicity, and Smoother Client Relationships
With SmartSuite, this consultant moved from fragile spreadsheets to a scalable, dashboard-first system. They now manage 10–15 clients in parallel, each with tailored visibility into their finances.
Recurring financial tasks are templated and automated, eliminating errors and saving hours each week. The consultant now invites clients into SmartSuite directly—controlling access and building trust with live data transparency. And when clients outgrow the shared workspace model, the consultant spins up new solutions, instantly populated with the same financial framework.
“I want to have one place to manage everyone, but each client sees only their view—and SmartSuite lets me do exactly that,” the consultant explained. “It’s cleaner than ClickUp and gives me real-time dashboards that actually work.”
Q3
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