Stearns Furniture

Latoya Jablonski, partner in four (yes, four!) businesses, is always looking for ways to increase efficiencies with back-office processes. Stearns Furniture Co. is one of the company’s Jablonski operates with her brother, and like most retail businesses, she deals with a lot of paperwork. Before moving to an online document management and storage system, she dealt with all paperwork manually.

“Everything was handwritten,” Jablonski recalled. “And even though we used QuickBooks®, we still had to print out all documents and then scan them to get them into the system. On top of all this, we had no way of sharing files electronically between businesses.”

Consider running four businesses without the aid of an online file sharing and storage system, and you can imagine the piles of paper that accumulated and the excessive time required to locate and exchange documents.

“If our accountant needed docs for one of the companies, I would physically have to go to that location and dig through files to locate them. It was painfully time consuming,” said Jablonski.

They just “clicked”

When she started her search for an online document management and file sharing solution, she knew that it had to integrate with QuickBooks.

“I went to the QuickBooks website and found SmartVault. It was one of the top-rated systems for integration. I had a feeling that SmartVault was going to be the solution that saved me.”

Jablonski registered for the trial version and was up and running quickly. In fact, when a SmartVault representative followed up with her just a week later, she already felt like a pro. “The system is so intuitive, I felt like I was at about 98% on use. From there, my SmartVault rep answered any outstanding questions.”

At the trials end, she was sold. Jablonski went all in with SmartVault as the solution to her paper-heavy, manual, and exceptionally time-draining accounting processes.

Like BFF’s, the solutions “just clicked,” according to Jablonski. “The integration is fantastic! The applications talk to each other, making it easy to electronically file all documents. I no longer have to run between offices to locate requested files. Now I just navigate to files within our organized folder structure and provide a link to access documents. SmartVault and QuickBooks are like great friends that work very well together.”

WNTL (What’s not to love)?

SmartVault proved to be the key in connecting Jablonski’s four offices. Not only has she experienced off-the-charts time savings (by eliminating office hopping alone), but she also offered a list of other things that keep her loyal to SmartVault:

• On-demand access: “I can locate or send links to files 24/7 from any office.”
• Customizable folder structure: “I love that I can set up and organize my files, my way.”
• Superior support: “I absolutely love the people at SmartVault! They are so helpful and responsive. I always get my questions answered quickly.”
• Data backups: “Data is automatically backed up, and that gives me great peace of mind.”

Final Words

For Latoya Jablonski, it was all about getting out from under piles of paper and the time consuming nature of running four “unconnected” businesses. “Just eliminating the running around between sites has been an enormous help.”

Today, with SmartVault and QuickBooks working together in perfect integrated harmony, Jablonski has far more time to concentrate on growing her businesses. “I’m still working on scanning in historical documents so that everything is in SmartVault, but overall, I could not be happier with the time I’ve saved by losing manual processes and heaps of documents.”