Lavoie CPA Took a Full Client Close Down to 45 Minutes with Truewind

Three Numbers That Changed

• 45 minutes monthly close | One client's full monthly close completed, including balance sheet reconciliations
• 8 → 15 clients on AI | Client entities running on Truewind, April to October 2026
• 2 roles not backfilled | Staff-level positions Lavoie no longer needs to fill as it grows

Company Snapshot

Company: Lavoie CPA, PLLC
Industry: Outsourced accounting and fractional CFO for high-growth companies and nonprofits
Founded: 2009
HQ: Charlotte, North Carolina
General ledger: Sage Intacct (every client on Truewind)
Products used: Truewind bank and credit card feeds, prepaid and fixed-asset modules, Workpaper Agents posting to Sage Intacct

Lavoie CPA is not a traditional CPA firm. It runs the finance function for its clients, from transactions through CFO stewardship, across software, healthcare, professional services, nonprofits, youth sports clubs and a college athletic conference. Founder and CEO Sharai Lavoie describes the team as "lean but mighty," and the firm has standardized on Sage Intacct for nearly every client it serves.

A Scale Problem Dressed Up as a Reconciliation Problem

Lavoie had previously tried buying a technology solution to solve the manual close work. The firm brought in BlackLine for close management and reconciliations, and found itself doing the work twice: once in the workbooks the team had built over years, and again in the tool.

"It didn't feel like we were automating. It was like we're constantly implementing," Sharai said. "We could accomplish the workbooks and everything that we built quicker than we could do it in BlackLine. So we were essentially having to do it twice."

Unable to find the value in this tool, the firm pulled back and moved task tracking into Monday.com. This gave the leadership visibility across every client and every person. But the reconciliations themselves stayed where they had always lived: in a balance sheet excel file per client, rebuilt every month by hand.

Sherice Sims, who runs close operations and the Sage Intacct connections for Lavoie's clients, honed in on the bottleneck well: "It's mainly on the balance sheet reconciliations and identifying what needs to be fixed," she said. "And then understanding the entries. If they have a new entry, like an investment entry, sometimes they get hung up on that. And then the payroll. We have two clients that have maybe 30 to 50 people, and just running those payroll entries."

The surrounding systems did not help; the team had to stitch together components that weren't a good fit for each other. Add-on modules didn't fit into the system. Brokerage statements arrived as multi-page PDFs. A youth soccer client's revenue ran through a four-page Excel workpaper and a pivot table that Sherice rebuilt around the third business day of every month. Each new client meant another set of workbooks and another set of hours.

For a firm that sells Sage Intacct alongside its services, those hours were the margin. "At this point, essentially we're selling Sage Intacct with our services," Sharai said. The business value wasn't simply in making the reconciliations faster. Rather, the business value was in how to take on more clients without the staff and senior roles that each one used to require.

From Advisory Member To Going All In

Sharai first met the Truewind team in New York while serving on the advisory board of the AICPA and CPA.com startup accelerator. She shared the same vision as Truewind for the future of the accounting profession and its relationship with technology.

"Once I saw Truewind, I was like, oh, wow. We're spending a lot of time struggling with BlackLine for no reason at all," she said. "It was really exciting for me because it's everything that I wanted for the past six, seven years."

Lavoie and Truewind traded notes on features and how firms like Lavoie actually operate. In February 2026 the firm went all in, partnering with Truewind to bring an agentic native workspace for accountants to all their Sage Intacct customers, with Sherice as the admin provisioning the Sage connections.

The implementation plan was built around proof, not a long rollout. The goal was one client, one close, one entry synced into Sage within the first week of March. From there, each client's workflows were added one at a time.

Hand Over the Workbook, Get Back an Agent

Rather than redesign Lavoie's close, Truewind learned it. The firm handed over the balance sheet reconciliation workbook it had built and the monthly input files that fed it: payroll registers, brokerage statements, Stripe and Braintree exports, donor platform reports.

"We gave them our balance sheet reconciliation workbook and said, this is what we do," Sharai said. "And so they're able to create the Workpaper Agents so that we can accomplish that through Truewind. They already had the prepaids and the fixed assets, so that made that part easier. But then everything else, like our payroll clearing and accrued expenses, our loans, and then the investments, that's all going through Truewind."

The deployment was efficient because both sides knew what they had to do. Truewind's agent solutions team built the first version of each agent from Lavoie's own workpaper. Sherice rolled it forward the next month, reviewed the output, and posted the entries to Sage Intacct herself, with the journal book and supporting attachments the firm's audited clients require. As of October 2026, Lavoie has 70 live workpapers, and Sherice had run 67 of the 92 rollforwards.

Onboarding a new client got shorter. "It hasn't taken long, really, to get up and running," Sharai said. "Once Sherice is like, okay, we're gonna do this one, she connects it. We have the initial part of making sure things are coded the way that they should be, and then it's connected and off to the races."

Two modules Lavoie had been running elsewhere moved over outright. The firm stopped using a different prepaid module in favor of Truewind's, which Sharai called "a lot smoother." And for bank and credit card activity, she said the flow through Truewind was smoother than connecting directly in Intacct, while still landing in Intacct's bank transactions so entries can be marked reconciled for auditors.

Where the Hours Went: Closing a Month in One Sitting

The clearest result came from a client that was onboarded onto Truewind from day one rather than migrated. In August 2026, Sherice told the Truewind team she had closed its entire month in one sitting.

"One of our clients, I was able to do everything through Truewind for the whole month, and I did it all at one time in about 30 to 45 minutes," she said. "And that's with me doing the balance sheet reconciliations. So it was a huge win, and our team is super excited, and that's where we're trying to get all of our clients."

Matt DeWald, Lavoie's Vice President of Financial Consulting, saw the same thing from the other side of the firm. "For one of our clients that we now have fully loaded on with you, it took us an hour and a half to close the financials for them with one person," he said. "That excludes revenue, so that's the one piece we still have to do. But I was like, wow, that is incredible value."

The numbers behind those two closes, as of October 16, 2026:

• 15 client entities live on Truewind, up from 8 in April. Seven were added in six months, five of them on a single day in September.
• 70 live workpapers, 15 of them recurring agents, with 92 rollforwards completed. The heaviest are payroll journal entries, payroll, and brokerage.
• 117 journal entries posted to Sage Intacct through Workpaper Agents since mid-April. Lavoie staff posted 105 of them.
• 5 Lavoie staff seats, all active in the same week.

The pattern underneath those numbers is the one Sharai set out to build. Truewind's team did the first setups; Lavoie runs the recurring work. Ninety percent of the Sage posts and 73% of the rollforwards were Sherice's.

The firm's own view of the relationship is just as direct. "We have weekly internal touchpoints about Truewind and how we're doing, and everyone's smiling," Matt said.

Adding Capacity to Drive Growth, Not Cuts

The time savings were never the point for Sharai. The point was what the firm could carry without adding people.

"It's not just about the time savings. It's about the scale." When asked how many roles she was able to not backfill, she was precise: "Right now it's definitely two. And I don't have to replace it quickly, even at the pace that we're growing."

That capacity is now built into how Lavoie takes on business. Every new client signed since spring 2026 has started on Truewind on day one. The platform is written into the firm's onboarding framework, the Lavoie Way, and into the Sage Intacct implementation proposals Matt sends to new clients.

"We don't talk about a client now without talking about Truewind with it," Sharai said. "We call it the Lavoie Way. We have this whole framework now, and Truewind is tucked into that for how we onboard and everything."

For a firm whose margins are between the software it resells and the services it delivers, that is the business case. "Something like what you're doing with Truewind coming along beside that will allow us to gain capacity so that we can regain some of that margin," Sharai said. "Having Intacct and Truewind together is huge for us at this point."

Before and After

Sharai's summary is the one she gives other firms. "I think that for any accounting department that's not utilizing it, you could be wasting a lot of time," she said. "I can't say enough good things about the product and the team."

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