Scratchpad vs Dooly for CPA Firm Business Development

Between January and April, a firm's client-facing staff have no time for business development at all, referrals still come in, but follow-up gets pushed to May. That seasonal pattern means a firm's pipeline needs to survive months of near-total neglect without falling apart, which is a different requirement than a SaaS sales team managing a steady weekly cadence.

A referral that arrives in February and does not get a follow-up call until June has usually gone cold, not because the firm did anything wrong, but because nobody wrote down enough about it in January to pick the thread back up months later. The firms that handle this well tend to treat the slow months, May through December, as the real business development season, and busy season as a period to simply not lose ground rather than a time to make progress.

A referral rarely comes with a clean opportunity record. It comes as a name, a mention of what the prospective client needs, audit, tax, advisory, and a note about who made the introduction. Capturing that context well at the moment it arrives matters more here than in a typical SaaS pipeline, because the gap between the referral and the actual follow-up call can be weeks or months, not days.

Dooly's note templates can be built around that specific moment: who referred the prospect, what they need, and by when, linked to a new opportunity record the same day the referral comes in, rather than relying on a partner's memory once busy season ends.

A partner with strong relationships with three or four referral sources, an attorney, a banker, a few existing clients who send business, benefits from seeing every open referral from each source in one place. Scratchpad's grid makes it fast to scan which referrals are still open, which have gone quiet, and which need a check-in before the source stops sending more.

That last point matters specifically for a referral-based practice: a referral source who never hears back on introductions they made tends to quietly stop making them, and a grid that flags stale opportunities catches that risk before it costs the firm future referrals.

A staff accountant's median salary runs about $83,680 a year before benefits, with senior hires closer to $109,810¹. Firms often reach for another hire when growth stalls, but if the real problem is that half of last year's referrals never got a proper follow-up, adding headcount does not fix a pipeline that is leaking before anyone gets to work it. Fixing the follow-up process is the cheaper problem to solve first, and it is worth confirming which one is actually broken before hiring.

A simple audit answers this quickly: pull every referral from the last twelve months and check how many got a documented follow-up within two weeks. A firm below half is looking at a process problem long before it needs another body in the building.

Roll out whichever tool the firm needs during the slow months, not in February. Start with Dooly if referral details are currently landing in a partner's inbox and nowhere else, since getting that capture habit established before busy season means less gets lost when things get hectic. Start with Scratchpad if the referrals are logged somewhere but the firm has no fast way to see, across every partner, which ones have gone stale.

Either way, plan for a light-touch busy season: partners will not adopt a new habit while working sixty-hour weeks, so the goal for January through April is simply that whatever was already logged before the rush does not get lost, not that anyone starts a new process mid-season.

Use these rules to time and choose the rollout:

• Roll out during the slow months rather than in February, when client-facing staff have no time to learn anything new.
• Start with Dooly if referral details currently land in a partner's inbox and nowhere else, so the capture habit exists before busy season.
• Start with Scratchpad if referrals are logged somewhere but the firm has no fast way to see which ones have gone quiet.
• Treat January through April as a maintenance period where the goal is simply not losing what was already tracked.