Two Practice Management Systems, Zero Double Entry: Bridging Financial Cents and CCH Axcess™

How a growing CAS department kept Financial Cents while the rest of the firm stayed on CCH Axcess Practice — without manual re-entry.

Client Advisory Services (CAS) is now the fastest-growing service line in public accounting. The 2024 CPA.com & AICPA PCPS CAS Benchmark Survey reports a 17% median growth rate for CAS practices in 2023. Respondents projected 99% growth over the next three years. That growth has a quiet operational side effect inside many firms. CAS teams often run on different practice management software than the rest of the firm.

The pattern is common. The CAS department picks a lighter, modern tool — Financial Cents, Karbon, or Canopy — to handle task management and time tracking. The broader firm continues on CCH Axcess Practice for billing, WIP (work-in-progress), and tax workflow. Each side gets a tool that fits its work. The seam between the two systems becomes the problem.

This case study covers an integration we built between Financial Cents (FC) and CCH Axcess™ Practice. It now runs at two firms.

Why one firm ends up with two practice management systems

Several patterns drive this in firms with 20 to 300 staff. CAS teams need project-based, recurring task management. Tax teams need return tracking and engagement billing. The native fit is rarely the same tool. Many CAS teams were also stood up after the firm standardized on CCH Axcess, so the new department picks what fits its model. Acquisitions bring software with them, and migrating a department mid-busy-season is rarely worth the disruption.

The Journal of Accountancy noted in 2022 that CPAs running CAS practices typically adopt different software, track time differently, and bill differently from their tax peers. That observation has held up.

The result is a firm where the CAS team and the tax team work in different systems by design — and where billing data still has to land in one place.

The problems with running two practice management systems

Three problems tend to surface in firms running two practice management systems.

The first is time entry. When two practice management systems are in play, time entry is usually the choke point. CAS staff log time in their daily tool. Billing happens in CCH Axcess Practice. Without an integration, somebody re-enters time into CCH — usually an admin or a billing manager — by Monday morning. This is not unusual. The 2026 Bookkeeping Firm Tech Stack Report from Financial Cents surveyed 261 firms and found that roughly 70% re-enter data between tools at least a few times per week.

The second is master data quality. Clients, projects, and service codes get added in one system and not the other. Within a quarter or two, the two lists no longer match. Lookup rules silently fail.

The third is billing visibility. Partners pulling realization or WIP reports from CCH miss CAS hours that did not get re-entered in time. Decisions get made on incomplete data.

The cost is not always obvious. In a 50-person firm with a 10-person CAS team, manual time-entry transfer can absorb 4 to 10 hours per week of admin time during busy weeks. That is the cheaper consequence. The harder one is partner-level decision-making on partial data. CPA Practice Advisor reported in April 2026 that the average accounting firm now runs about eight different digital tools to handle core operations, with 41% citing manual entry friction caused directly by a lack of software integration.

What the integration actually does

The system we built runs on a daily schedule. It connects three components: the Financial Cents API (Application Programming Interface), the local Data Axcess Utility (DAU) database that mirrors CCH Axcess data, and the CCH Axcess Practice user interface.

Time entry import in CCH Axcess Practice does not have a public API, so the actual import step uses Microsoft Power Automate to drive the CCH user interface. Many integrations stall because firms assume both vendors expose APIs. They often do not.

Here is how a normal weekday looks. At 10:00 AM, the system pulls the last 14 days of time entries from Financial Cents. The 14-day window catches entries staff post retroactively. The system filters out anything already imported to CCH on prior runs.

It then runs a mapping pass. Clients match by ID, staff match by email, and service codes parse from a "Code – Service Name" format. Project names translate from Financial Cents' static format to CCH's tax-year and period-based naming convention.

Each staff member then receives an email with their own time entries attached as an Excel file, with any mapping errors flagged. They have two hours to fix issues in Financial Cents — a missing service code, a wrong client, an unposted entry.

At noon, the system imports the cleaned data into CCH Axcess Practice. The administrator gets a confirmation email with the results, plus a separate exception email if any records failed. If errors come back, the administrator fixes the underlying data in Financial Cents and replies to the exception email with the word "Resync." The system picks up the reply, runs the affected day again, and skips entries that already imported.

On Mondays, the schedule shifts earlier. The preview email goes out at 8:00 AM and the import runs at 10:00 AM, so partner reports reflect the prior week before Monday meetings.

Three details are worth calling out for firm leaders. Staff are not asked to learn a new tool. The billing system stays the source of truth. And the two-hour preview window is deliberate — it catches data errors before they hit the billing system, not after.

What the firm gained

Three outcomes generally show up in this kind of integration.

Hours recovered. The admin team no longer re-enters CAS time entries every week. Based on similar implementations, that recovery typically runs 4 to 10 hours per week, depending on CAS headcount and entry volume. Over a 12-week busy season, that is roughly 50 to 120 admin hours that go back to higher-value work.

A single source of truth for billing. Partners pull WIP and realization data from CCH Axcess and trust it. CAS hours arrive on a known schedule, not on an admin's manual cadence. Realization conversations stop being held up by "we still need to enter last week's CAS time."

No forced migration. The CAS team did not have to abandon the tax and CAS workflow tool that fits its model. The tax team did not have to adopt a CAS-friendly tool. Each side kept what works.

A side benefit shows up in master data quality. Because the integration runs a daily comparison, it surfaces clients, projects, and service codes that exist in one system but not the other. That comparison turns into a daily admin email — a useful forcing function for keeping records aligned.

Three implementation pitfalls to plan for

Firms thinking about this kind of integration should plan for three issues.

The first is API coverage. Financial Cents has a usable API for time entry. CCH Axcess Practice does not expose time entry import as an API call. The import step has to drive the user interface using RPA (Robotic Process Automation). That carries a small ongoing cost — when CCH updates the user interface, the automation may need adjustment. The tradeoff is manageable, but it should be budgeted.

The second is naming convention mismatch. Financial Cents project names are static. CCH project names update with tax year and period. The integration has to translate one to the other. A firm with 200 active projects and 14 service codes generally has enough variation to need a written mapping document.

The third is master data hygiene. The integration only works if clients, staff, and service codes can be matched across both systems. Firms with duplicate client records, inconsistent staff email addresses, or ambiguous service codes should plan to clean those up before going live. The integration will surface the mess. It will not fix it on its own.

Where this pattern applies beyond Financial Cents and CCH Axcess

The same architecture works for several common pairings:

• Karbon + CCH Axcess Practice. Karbon handles workflow and client communication. CCH Axcess remains the billing system. Time and project data sync on a similar schedule.
• Financial Cents + Practice CS. Same principle, different target. Practice CS exposes data through SQL.
• Two CCH Axcess instances after acquisition. When firms merge, they sometimes run parallel CCH tenants. A scheduled sync can hold them together while migration is planned or deferred.
• Drake or another on-premise tax engine + a modern workflow tool. The tax engine stays where it is. The workflow tool drives status, and the integration carries dates and milestones across.

The common thread is not the specific tools. It is the recognition that forcing one practice management system on every team often costs more than it saves — and that integration is sometimes a better answer than migration.

What to assess in your environment

A few questions are worth asking if any of this sounds familiar:

• How many hours per week does an admin or manager spend transferring time entries between systems?
• How often do partner reports show CAS hours that arrived late, or not at all?
• How frequently do client and project lists drift between systems?
• What is the realistic cost of forcing one practice management system on the team that does not currently use it?

If the answers point to friction, the next step is usually not a migration. It is a small assessment of which data crosses the seam, how often, and where errors enter.

Silver Sea helps CPA firms scope this kind of integration without committing to a build. If two systems are quietly costing your firm time, book a discovery call and we will review your setup and tell you what we see. You can also see what else we build on CCH Axcess™.