Compliance Service of America (CSA) is a consulting firm specializing in local, state, and federal licensing and regulation for all levels of the alcoholic beverage industry, nationwide. Our clients include restaurant and grocery store chains, golf courses, brewpubs, wineries, grape growers, breweries, distillers, importers, and wholesalers. Any company that makes or sells alcoholic beverages can benefit from our services.
Daylite came to our attention while looking into project management software that attorneys use. We were so pleased to find Daylite because it’s the program we had dreamed of! We literally spent a long time making a detailed wish list for the ideal software program to enhance how people work. We were thrilled to find how closely Daylite matched our requirements. Now the improvements in Daylite 4 have checked off the rest of our boxes. Our work is very technical and complicated. The legal requirements for alcohol production, sales, and service are different for every state in the country. There are different rules, different forms, and different timing in each state. For example, getting an alcoholic beverage license is pretty straightforward in California, whereas Texas is a whole different story. And the requirements frequently change. For this reason, we’re constantly learning, and there’s a lot to keep track of to avoid having to ask the same question twice. We make lot of notes for each project and collect a lot of data from each client.
The best thing about my job is I get to work with people who are very good friends of mine. We’re a very close-knit group. Also, we have long-standing relationships with many of our clients and lots of the regulators we work with. So it’s a very people-oriented business. It’s fun to be able to talk to people all across the country and it’s nice to have a history of our contact with clients and colleagues in Daylite to pull up as a reminder of our last conversation or e-mail exchange with them.
There are a few law firms that specialize in alcohol law, and there may be a couple of consulting groups that help clients with alcoholic beverage licensing and compliance nationwide. However, most experts in our field focus on only one or two states. The more states, the more complicated and demanding it gets. To provide the quality of service we want, we have to work closely as a team and be extremely efficient and effective.
The way we work is a bit unusual because we pass around projects a lot. Daylite gives us a way of managing projects so we know where things stand, what is coming up, and what is on everyone’s to-do list. Sharing projects and tasks and information in Daylite is a big part of our workflow. Before Daylite, this meant passing around paper files and making a lot of effort to keep each other in the loop. Now that we have Daylite, it is so much easier and more efficient. Every week we do an overview of all our professional projects to make sure everything is moving along properly and Daylite makes this possible with the use of pipelines. We have different pipelines for different types of projects. We have 120-160 active projects at any given time. We’ve also devised ways to use Daylite to manage our administrative responsibilities too. We recently started making quotes in Daylite so we can print out fee agreements before starting new projects. One of our staff members has learned to create reports that automate many types of functions such as requesting Fed-Ex bills of lading and writing cover letters. When it’s time to send a package of forms to a client, Daylite makes a list of enclosures and even signing instructions, based on the information in our project. I also use Daylite for my own personal appointments and projects.
Aprile has been a fabulous helper! All the questions we posed have been answered. We had to delay our transition to Daylite 4 because of other priorities, so we went through an awkward period of learning Daylite 4 while still using Daylite 3. We needed technical support a lot during that phase and everyone was very helpful.
Our biggest opportunity for growth is in our efficiencies so Daylite is a key part in that. Daylite helps us systematize repetitive processes, spread the workload around, and keep track of crucial information. We have plans to use more reports and improve our organization and data management. One new thing we used Daylite for this year is managing the company Christmas list. We send out Christmas cards and in the past it took way too much time. With Daylite we were able to manage it much more easily, which made Christmas a lot happier this year!**
