Cedar Consulting Group is not your typical accounting firm. Operating as a specialized advisory team with distinct service lines in tax, legal, and valuations, they're often brought in to handle the complex situations that make other accountants scratch their heads.

"We're the accountant's accountant," explains Sunny Jaggi, who leads the tax services division. "We're brought in as specialists to deal with issues like M&A transactions, estate planning, taxes on death, and cross-border work."

With approximately 15 team members handling over 100 high-stakes projects annually, Cedar's work is both specialized and time-sensitive. Their clients expect precision, but their internal communication system wasn't delivering the same level of excellence.

The forwarding nightmare

Before Missive, Cedar Consulting Group relied on Outlook with Office 365 as their primary platform. The team experienced a common problem that plagues professional service firms: the endless cycle of forwarding emails.

This inefficient process not only cluttered inboxes but created confusion about task ownership and missed deadlines. Their attempts to implement project management solutions like Karbon didn't solve the problem – team members simply wouldn't adopt them, continuing to default back to Outlook.

"If information is not being updated, it's of no use," Sunny notes. "We were simultaneously using Excel to track stuff because people never felt comfortable getting off Excel."

The missing link between project management and email

Cedar Consulting Group found themselves caught between structured project management and the day-to-day reality of living in their inboxes. They had recently transitioned to Notion for project management but were still missing a crucial component.

The disconnect between their project management system and email workflow meant that unstructured tasks from client queries often fell through the cracks, despite being directly related to active projects.

Enter Missive: where emails become actionable

After discovering Missive through an online search, Sunny tested it with his executive assistant for three days before rolling it out to the tax team, and later to the legal and valuation teams.

The adoption has been noticeably better than with previous tools because the benefits were immediately obvious:

• Private comments within emails eliminated the need for internal forwarding
• Tasks could be created and assigned directly within conversations
• Canned responses streamlined frequent communications for information collection and proposals
• Ability to consolidate emails from multiple domains for white-labeling purposes

"Chats, private comments, and tasks within emails have been the hit for us," Sunny shares. "And the canned responses for frequently sent emails have been highly beneficial for efficiency."

A natural extension of how professional services firms actually work

What made Missive stick when other solutions failed? It aligned with how Cedar Consulting Group actually operated day-to-day. Rather than forcing them to change their workflow to match a rigid system, Missive adapted to their natural communication patterns.

"Not every little thing can be structured so much," Sunny points out, referring to the many subtasks and judgment calls that come with professional services work. "There's professional discretion. There's judgment to a number of things, and you just don't know where things are going to land."

Missive's ability to bring structure to email communications without sacrificing flexibility proved to be exactly what the Cedar team needed.

Building towards the future

Cedar Consulting Group continues to explore more advanced features in Missive to further optimize their workflow:

• Team spaces to better organize communications by department
• Shared inboxes to enable delegation of the principal's email
• Contact books for automatically routing client emails to the right team members
• AI rules to escalate urgent emails and create custom filters

"We're always looking to self-improve our practice and processes," Sunny explains. "First we transitioned to Notion, and now we're continuing to optimize Missive."

For Cedar Consulting Group, Missive has become more than just an email client – it's a critical part of their communication infrastructure that connects their specialized teams and enables them to deliver the high-quality advisory services their clients expect.