How PlumbBooks increased their revenue by 40%

Challenges

While being an excellent software for accounting purposes, QBO can be too overwhelming to oversee high-level financials. To simplify this process, the PlumbBooks team initially found an online plugin to export certain reports from QuickBooks into individual Google Sheets files for each client. This approach worked ok, but it was neither accessible nor did it resonate well with customers.

What PlumbBooks’ clients really needed was an easy-to-access, visual representation of their business. They wanted to compare financial performance by periods, track goals against performance, and monitor key metrics related to revenues, expenses, margins, etc. While Google Sheets could provide plenty of that, the end result proved to not be scalable, intuitive, nor visually appealing.

Ultimately, PlumbBooks was looking to outdo their competition by offering something extraordinary to their clients, such as a user-friendly dashboard template that would automatically populate with data and require little to no effort to set up.

How Coupler.io helped solve the problem

Based on the requirements, we chose Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) as a data visualization software due to its simplicity and native integrations with Google Sheets. For extracting data from QuickBooks Online, we went with a Coupler.io importer due to its reliability and ability to fully customize the data refresh schedule so it fits the requirements of every client.

Nowadays, when PlumbBooks onboards a new client, they’re given a simple spreadsheet to fill in. Clients are asked about their financial goals for an upcoming month, the number of trucks they operate, the hours and days they plan to work, and their percentage goals for profit and specific expenses. Since these fields are treated as input to the dashboard, when clients have changes to business operations, all they need to do is update the respective fields in Google Sheets, and a dashboard in Looker Studio will adjust accordingly.

Under the hood, Coupler.io importers automatically pull four different reports for each client - Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, Account Payables (AP), and Account Receivables (AR). A PlumbBooks employee then links each tab to the Looker Studio template only once. Since no business is the same, we also accounted for the ability to customize the templates by adding a parameters tab, where the accountants can tweak the template to their liking directly from the Sheets without the need to edit the Looker Studio dashboard itself. They can also track any errors in the setup and fix them based on the provided hints in a separate dedicated tab.

Impact on business

The dashboard itself features:

• High-level overview of the revenues, expenses, and net profits of a business

• Filters for detailed comparisons by periods

• Results vs goals digest for each month

• Account payables and receivables summary

• Bank account balances

• Key metrics like EBITDA, profit margin, revenue per day or units, etc.

• Ability to adjust KPI percentages directly from G-Sheets

Ultimately, dashboards were met with an overwhelmingly positive reaction - clients loved it and PlumbBooks’ team freed up a lot of time to focus on growing the business. The numbers speak for themselves:

• Revenues soared by ~40% in 2023

• The team saves 4-6 hours of manual setup for each client

• Cheryl: “Because of these reports, we have people waiting to work with us and they don't even ask about pricing”