Basis 365 Accounting is an outsourced accounting firm that supports small businesses. With services that specifically meet the needs of growing companies, Basis 365 staffs clients with an entire accounting team and serves as the company’s outsourced accounting department. Basis 365 gives clients a simple user experience and peace of mind with professional accounting solutions that are 100% cloud-based.
The Problem
In a services business, it can be a real challenge to provide the same high-quality experience for every customer. To ensure operational excellence, co-founder of Basis 365, Mike Doan, set out to create a set of documented standardized processes and procedures. However, even after he was done with his actual documentation, he was still running into problems:
“We used to keep track of everything in a really long—80- to 100- page—Word doc that I would publish to PDF and share with the team”. But as the company scaled and changes occurred more frequently, that posed a problem.
“Changes were happening too quickly, and I couldn’t be publishing a new PDF every day.”
“Plus, searching through a massive PDF wasn’t a good experience for employees, especially because we’re a distributed team.”
Basis 365 needed a simple, searchable solution that would allow the entire team to access the most current version of the company’s SOPs, and which would enable Mike to deploy any new changes quickly and easily.
The Solution
Basis 365 partnered with Tettra to create an easy-to-use, always-up-to-date, and searchable internal knowledge base. Mike was drawn to Tettra for its simplicity and ability to integrate seamlessly with his company’s current tools. He appreciated that he could easily update and create new documents, and Tettra’s Slack integration was a game-changer for his chat-loving team.
“I didn’t want to log in and be overwhelmed by a bunch of things I could do,” says Mike. “My primary goal was to get in there, document something quickly, and deploy it without having to mess around with a lot of different things.”
Now, rather than sift through dozens of pages in a PDF with poor search, Basis 365 team members can easily search Tettra when they have a specific challenge or question, or when they need to look up information on a customer.
“We’ve broken our standard processes and procedures into smaller, bite-sized chunks,” explains Mike. “We also use Tettra to document what we call a company narrative for each customer, where we document customer pain points, communication preferences, and more.” Easy access to customer-focused information saves time for Basis 365 employees and improves the experience for its customers.
Tettra’s integration with Loom has been another bonus for Basis 365. The integration allows employees to record screencast tutorials, easily embed them in a Tettra page, and share them with the rest of the company immediately. “Before Tettra, we couldn’t embed videos in the Word and Google Docs we were using,” says Mike. “We always had to link out to a Google Drive, and there was a lot of friction in that process.”
Tettra also serves as a repository of firm-wide messages and FAQs.
“Any time I need to communicate firm-wide, I use Tettra. When I blast certain things via Slack, those messages disappear. Now, any company updates I put through Tettra are required reading, and the team can easily reference them again later.”
The Results
As a result of partnering with Tettra, Mike and his team have noticed a new culture of efficiency at Basis 365.
“Tettra has really helped generate efficiency and removed the redundancy of answering the same questions over and over again.”
Now, his team knows to search Tettra before asking a coworker a question. “When people post questions in Slack, they’ll put a disclaimer noting that they’ve already searched Tettra,” says Mike. “Tettra has become baked into how we self-serve. It’s become a part of our culture.”
That self-service has expedited team members’ abilities to continue working in the face of an obstacle. “We’ve used Tettra for three years, so we have a lot of answers in there,” says Mike. “Now, having a question doesn’t slow the team down. We’re all remote and in four time zones—getting a response from a coworker can take a while.”
With Tettra, Basis 365 has created a frictionless knowledge-sharing system that provides easy access to up-to-date information. Through this system, employees save time, learn faster, and gain agency over their work and their ability to persevere through challenges.
“I would definitely recommend Tettra to other companies,” says Mike. “It really serves its purpose for us, and it’s integrated in our process. It’s a real time-saver, and I’m really happy with how we use it and the growth we’ve seen so far.”