Hurried, worried, and buried in data

Hurried, worried, and buried — that’s how Daniel McCraine, Founder and CEO of McCraine Associates, describes the clients he serves. As a tax and finance consultant for small businesses, his clients hand over mountains of tax forms, corporate filings, legal drafts, financial assets, then hope magic happens behind the curtain.

Trouble was, Daniel’s own curtain was a makeshift but workable amalgamation of Trello cards, Make automations, and Google Sheets so wide they scrolled for days.

“There’s so much data to collect,” he recalled. “And all client data needs to be in the same row. So we’re getting into the double F’s and starting to push into the double G’s, and to try to scroll all the way across to read client data is ridiculous.”

As a professional running a small business himself, that scrappiness is the name of the game. But said scrappiness can only stretch so far. It was when Daniel and his team began to spend more time hunting cells than helping clients that he realized his behind-the-scenes needed something better.

The tip of the Grist iceberg

A forward‑thinking client nudged him toward Grist. Some tinkering later, and Daniel spotted the hook – Grist’s card‑style widgets can give every distributor a tidy and personalized dashboard, while its access rules can keep sensitive rows hidden to all but the necessary clients for each page. Light‑bulb moment. That meant one source of truth where data gets touched once, thus minimizing errors, and not a single column gets duplicated.

Switching from a familiar setup and tech stack to a new one will always be daunting for organizations. At first, Daniel’s team made the switch stepwise, dipping their relational database toes in the water by continuing to use third party forms for intake and Google Sheets as the backend source of data, with Grist as the frontend UI for clients. 

Even this minor solution was an upgrade for McCraine Associates.

“Why aren’t we just doing everything in Grist?”

What tends to spark these light-bulb moments for companies using Grist is the flexibility it provides. Users like Daniel come in with a specific usage in mind. Then, they get a feel for it. Tinkering brings new ideas to the surface. In Daniel’s case, as he got more familiar with Grist as a frontend reporting tool, another such revelation came to fruition – “why aren’t we just doing everything in Grist?” 

They’d still been using third party intake forms to assess clients and generate documents, yet they realized their forms can easily be created in Grist, removing the need for third party solutions and extra monthly costs to their tech stack. 

Moreover, their long-established Google Sheets data could easily be transferred to a Grist doc, meaning no data needed to be touched more than once, and deliverables can be shipped through one platform.

This is the foundation of Grist’s real value – it grows and scales with your business and your ideas. For McCraine Associates, what started as a frontend data viewer became his business’ complete hub of project and client management.

“Grist is the line of sight. It’s the project manager. It’s the window into what’s happening with the clients.”

–Daniel McCraine, CEO & Business Consultant

Collect data once, view it anywhere from any angle

Today, the clientStatus column in Grist has replaced an entire “client data sheet” workflow from Google Sheets. Team members log in, glance at a traffic‑light status, and drill into only the fields they need: no more version confusion, security risks, or scrolling to column GG.

By setting up dashboards and views that break the data apart in Grist, McCraine and his team can peer through a focused window of individual clients, their business, assets, documents, and pending tasks – easily. 

“It’s so easy for clients to understand their data in Grist’s views and widgets, and it lets them update it very easily, very quickly.”

–Daniel McCraine

20% faster, dollars back to the bottom line

Since moving to Grist, McCraine Associates turns around deliverables 20% faster. That shaves days off each engagement per quarter and lets the consulting firm retire multiple paid tools, dropping monthly overhead.

“For us, it’s truly an end‑to‑end product.”

–Daniel McCraine

Looking ahead, Daniel’s roadmap is simple. Build intake forms directly in Grist, manage and store all data securely in Grist, report and deliver insights in Grist, and keep chipping away at operational costs. This is what a structured spreadsheet-database brings McCraine Associates and other small businesses.

Ready to see how Grist can cut your tech stack and centralize your workflow?