How firms use Cradle
Accounting practices, advisory firms and professional-services teams use Cradle's cloud phone system to take client calls from any device, identify callers from their practice management system before they answer, and stop calls creating admin work. These are their stories — filter by industry to find the ones most relevant to your firm.
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Read storyWhat you'll find in these stories
Most stories follow the same shape: how the firm worked before Cradle (usually a desk-phone setup or a generic VoIP that didn't talk to their practice management system), what they switched on with Cradle, and what changed for the team day-to-day once it was live.
The patterns recur because the problems do — phones in accounting firms create predictable admin: clients who phone the wrong extension, calls that don't get logged, voicemails that disappear into someone's inbox, billable time that nobody wrote down. Cradle's job is to absorb that admin into the phone system itself: caller ID against the right client record, click-to-call from FYI or Xero Practice Manager, AI summaries written into the activity feed, voicemails transcribed and attached to the right client.
Stories from larger firms (50+ users) tend to focus on routing, ring-group design and after-hours handling. Stories from smaller firms (5–20 users) focus more on the integrations and the day-to-day workflow saving. Both shapes are useful; what your firm should pull from a story depends on which problem you're currently feeling most.
Where firms typically start
Almost every firm we work with starts with one of three things:
- Replacing a desk-phone PBX. The hardware is ageing, the maintenance contract is expensive, and remote work has made the "phone on the desk" assumption obsolete. Cradle replaces the PBX entirely with a software phone system that runs on laptops, mobiles and (if you want) physical IP handsets too.
- Replacing a generic VoIP. RingCentral, 3CX, MS Teams Phone, 8x8 — these all work as phone systems but don't integrate with FYI or XPM, so every call still creates manual admin downstream. Cradle is the integration layer most generic VoIPs are missing.
- Adding integrations to an existing phone system. Some firms come to Cradle specifically for the integration with FYI or HubSpot and run it alongside whatever else they had. That works too — the integration story doesn't depend on Cradle being your only phone system.
See the accounting-firm phone system page for the broader workflow story, or the FYI integration page if you already know FYI is what you're running on. If you want to model the ROI for your firm before reading more stories, the Cradle ROI calculator takes about 90 seconds.
See what Cradle could do for your firm
Twenty minutes, your team size, your practice management setup. We'll model what Cradle changes for your day-to-day.