Castleton Festival

Jack Porter, CPA and CFO of Castleton Festival, an entity dedicated to introducing young musicians and singers into the opera, can’t overstate his love for working in a digital environment. “There is no way I could do this job effectively if we didn’t have SmartVault.”

Before taking on the role of CFO at Castleton in 1996, Jack earned decades of experience working at a national public accounting firm and within the financial banking industry. His long history in the accounting profession means that he’s witnessed the transition from paper to digital.

“Years ago, it was all paper and a lot of manual processes. Then I moved into scanning documents and maintaining them as PDFs on my computer,” Porter explained.

In 2011, Porter evolved his accounting processes further after learning that there was an even more efficient and secure way of working—using SmartVault for online document storage and secure file sharing.

“Our auditors were the ones that suggested we use SmartVault. They explained the efficient integration with QuickBooks® and all the other benefits of a cloud system, like automated backups of data and increased security of file sharing,” said Porter. “It was all true. SmartVault saves me so much time.”

Playing Favorites…

Porter was quick to point out a few of his favorite features in SmartVault.

“I’ll be honest; I just recently discovered the drag-and-drop feature in SmartVault. I love it! It seems like a little thing, but it saves me so much time. I don’t have to go through several steps to save a document anymore…click Attach, browse to the location, hit Save. It’s one easy step using the drag-and-drop function.”

In his role as CFO, Porter also has to investigate transactions on a daily basis. The integration with QuickBooks makes locating invoices fast and easy. “Invoices are attached directly to QuickBooks transactions, and that makes finding needed documents so much easier. In the past, before SmartVault, tasks like this took much longer to complete. I can’t imagine the amount of time I save annually, but I know it’s huge.”
Porter is also a big fan of SmartVault’s technical support.

“I can’t say enough good things about the support team. It’s just so nice to call for help and actually get a human on the phone immediately.”

Porter’s first call to the support department was what locked in his biggest-fan status. “I was experiencing issues with SmartVault loading when I opened QuickBooks, and often I had to restart the system. It was frustrating. I called support and right away they identified the problem. I was directed to a setting in QuickBooks that needed to be changed, and that fixed the problem on the spot. I don’t find that you get personalized and knowledgeable support like this much anymore.”

He also likes knowing that automated backup is built in to the solution. “I haven’t had to use it yet, but it sure does offer peace of mind knowing that I could get my data back if anything happened to it.”

Final Words…

Jack Porter sings the praises of SmartVault, asserting that he “…could not do his job without it.” Managing a non-profit, he deals with volumes of paperwork, so being able to organize and share all documents using SmartVault saves an immense amount of time and has helped to adopt a streamlined audit process.

“SmartVault has made the auditing process so much more efficient,” Porter stated. “Not only is sharing documents with our auditors fast and easy, but it’s also much more secure, and that’s priceless.”

In a word, SmartVault has brought “harmony” to the Castleton Festival office. Working within a purely digital environment has helped to streamline a cumbersome audit process and enable its CFO to work at peak productivity. “I feel like I can’t say it enough; I don’t know what I did before SmartVault,” Porter said.