Case Study Archives - The Latest on Accounting Tech for SMEs

Long-Distance Cloud Accounting From Port Hedland to Perth

November 6, 2014 by Brittany

CASE STUDY: Kathi Hebbard, Director of The Bean Countess, started her business services firm in 2008, she was living in North Western Australia in a small regional area. The Bean Countess is a small business (with a total of 4 staff) offering accounting, bookkeeping and business systems to a range of different businesses throughout Australia, providing the vast majority of their services in an online capacity.

The Pain Point

The regional accounting firm had staff and clients spread over a large area. It needed an online accounting program that people could access from wherever they were.

The Bean Countess’ office is in Brisbane, Queensland and its bookkeepers are in other parts of Queensland and New South Wales. Hebbard’s clients range from Port Hedland to Perth in Western Australia and New South Wales.

Hebbard only visits one client in person.

“We were looking for software that would facilitate staff living in different locations, clients in different locations and have a smooth workflow for everybody,” Hebbard says.

“At the time, the cloud was only just being talked about and there weren’t many softwares available. I researched all of the cloud accounting software I could find… and there were some that could do certain aspects of the business, but not others.”

The Software

JCurve is a relatively new cloud-based application which is a better fit for small businesses than NetSuite, the online ERP system on which it is based.

JCurve Solutions has turned off all other NetSuite modules except for the accounting module which starts at AU$50 per user per month.

Kathi Hebbard, Bean Countess — Kathi Hebbard, The Bean Countess

As a business grows it turns on more modules as required until it is using the full version of NetSuite.

“JCurve is bringing its capabilities down a level to make it accessible to smaller businesses that don’t have the money to invest in proprietary software. And it’s very adaptable, which is fantastic,” Hebbard says.

Was Set-Up Easy or Hard?

The transition to JCurve was relatively easy for Hebbard due to the small size of her business. “It was just a matter of moving our accounts over to JCurve and setting up our customer base. JCurve helped us a lot with getting the new system initiated and smoothing out any teething issues.”

Who Is It Good For?

JCurve is a good fit for small to medium businesses with multiple locations and wanting flexibility in their back office. “It removes the need for you to have as many administrators or accounting staff on site,” Hebbard says.

“That’s a huge advantage to go and hire your talent wherever it is, instead of limiting yourself to what happens to be in your town or nearby you,” she says.

What I Liked

The workflow capability of JCurve is its best feature “without a doubt”, Hebbard says.

The Bean Countess’ employees could access JCurve straight after implementation through an employee portal. Here, employees can find the tasks assigned to them, log their time and download and upload documents to the system.

“It allows my staff to be very flexible in that they can work from anywhere,” says Hebbard.

JCurve is highly adaptable for businesses in different industries. One client with two retail stores in New South Wales is about to open two more. “She can seamlessly run those four stores on the same software, her inventory and everything, and have no problems whatsoever. That would be a lot harder on different accounting software,” Hebbard says.

JCurve’s modular design makes it easily expandable. Modules include inventory, payroll and CRM, as well as more advanced features such as marketing, e-commerce, multi-currency and more.

What I Didn’t Like

Hebbard’s one complaint about JCurve is the steep set-up cost.

“I think I paid around $10,000 or $12,000 which for a really small business is a really big amount of money. Even for a medium business, it’s still a big hit.

It would be good to see a way to make it more affordable, or to be able to even pay it off over two years might be an option,” she says.

However, she says the recurring costs to renew the license are reasonable.

“For one administrator and support JCurve is about $2,500 per year,” Hebbard says.

“It is definitely a huge step up from the price of the other cloud software for small business… but it has all these other capabilities that basic accounting software just doesn’t have.

“So, it’s really dependent on the needs of your business and we pay for it specifically for the workflow and online filing capabilities. I think it’s worth it.”

Accountant Gives Staff the Keys to Payroll

October 16, 2014 by Sholto Macpherson

CASE STUDY Andrew Seinor takes company culture so seriously he chose his payroll based on it. Perth-based accounting firm the H Factor is focused solely on business consulting – it doesn’t even offer compliance services for its clients’ tax returns. Instead the H Factor’s primary line of work is in teaching the benefits of business culture. The firm’s own culture is quite radical as far as businesses go. The four full-time employees are supported by casual staff; there is no office nor any plans to have one. And technology is a serious concern. “There’s a fairly high creative element to our work,” managing partner Seinor says. So when Seinor looked for a better way for staff to look up their payslips he wanted a better solution than logging into the company’s online accounting software, Saasu. “We wanted something a little more complex and sophisticated” for handling staff requests, Seinor says. “If we left it all in the accounting program our staff would have to log-in to see their own stuff. That doesn’t feel right to us.” Seinor found a dedicated online payroll program, KeyPay, which had an employee portal where staff could download their payslips and apply for leave. The flexibility of the self-service portal was a way of extending our business culture, Seinor says. “We don’t have an office so you can’t just walk in and ask for all your information. The portal helps us share information and gives employees control of which accounts they get paid into, the superannuation fund they use and all those things which they completely self-manage. “It also says something about our professionalism and the way we want to treat them.”

Making Payroll Pay

Many of the H Factor’s employees use the KeyPay portal to download past payslips to check the hours they are working compared to what what they are paid. “They don’t have to ask us, they can get it from our system. That says a lot about how we want to treat them and changes that relationship for the better,” Seinor says. His favourite features with KeyPay are the automated superannuation calculations and the leave accrual. “I have absolute confidence in all the reports I get out of it,” Seinor says. These reports include total hours worked, leave accruals, leave balances and time management. KeyPay also calculates superannuation and future obligations. “We also look at it from a cashflow perspective. Being able to see all our payroll in one place and in the past six weeks we can see how much we have spent. it makes things easier to predict,” Seinor says. “You can do all the same stuff in Saasu but it’s not as user friendly.” There were few alternative payroll apps that worked with Saasu. Seinor briefly considered outsourcing payroll completely but decided it would be better to find an app that they could also use with clients. The H Factor has now set up KeyPay to help clients with their own payroll requirements. The fact that KeyPay is online promotes collaboration and openness, which compliments the culture of the H Factor, Seinor says. “For us it’s really trying to practise what we preach.”

Do Staff or Customers Like KeyPay?

“The staff love it because they’re in control. They know where their money is being paid into, they know there’s a leave process, it’s clear and unambiguous,” Seinor says. If an employee wants a past payments summary they can go and download it at any time. The freedom to check their pay details removes payroll compliance as a source of potential conflict. “Our staff aren’t worrying whether we have paid them properly or if it’s been paid into the right account,” Seinor says. “We can talk about the things that are important to us, and in the professional environment that’s especially important.” The cost benefit of KeyPay is intangible and therefore difficult to measure – but it’s still significant, Seinor says. Super payments often take time to sort out among multiple staff, and the payroll queries that followed each payrun have disappeared with the portal. “No-one wants to have a conversation where the starting point is the employee is concerned that they haven’t been paid properly. There’s an element of anxiety taken out of the process.”

Best Thing about KeyPay?

“The portal component and the super payments. Even with four or five staff they all have different superannuation funds. That can become a nightmare pretty quickly. Some of our clients have 30 staff and being able to do that in one transaction (is great). The best thing is it makes us look good.”

Worst Thing about KeyPay?

“None that I can think of.”

Why One Accountant Chose To Run His Firm on Xero

October 15, 2014 by Sholto Macpherson

CASE STUDY

Timothy Munro, an accountant with an avid interest in technology, was immediately attracted to online accounting software Xero when he first came across it in 2008.

“The main attraction was the time saving. I loved the automated bank feeds and I could work on it from the office at home. I could see how this would revolutionise the way we would interact with our clients,” Munro says.

Munro began using Xero for his 18-staff firm for several reasons, not least because he knew it would help him become an expert in the program and better explain how it worked to clients.

Moving to an online accounting program had other benefits. Munro’s firm Change Accountants used a desktop accounting program on a PC which could only be accessed by one person at a time.

Munro or a staff member entered all receipts and invoices manually which took a long time.

Once the firm began using Xero for its internal accounting, Munro could give several people access to the program from any device with an internet connection. One staff member could do the payroll while another could simultaneously send invoices to clients.

Change Accountants was also one of the first firms to move to the cloud-based practice management suite, CCH iFirm. The suite created invoices which flowed straight through to Xero, as both online programs had been designed to swap information through their application programming interfaces, or APIs.

“We didn’t have to re-do invoices and we had debtors ledger that was always correct,” Munro says. Most accounting firms do their accounts in their desktop accounting program and every month have to reconcile the debtors ledger in the practice management suite with their accounting program. “That’s inaccurate and it takes a lot of time. Having an always perfectly up-to-date debtors’ system in Xero was just brilliant,” Munro says.

Counting the (Time) Savings

Change Accountants later moved from CCH iFirm to Xero Practice Manager which had better integration with the firm’s own Xero file. The online accounting software has lead to many improvements in productivity across the firm which save many hours of time for partners and admin staff.

Munro estimates that the automatically updated debtors ledger and invoice list saves a couple of hours a month in admin compared to a desktop program.

While most clients are on fixed price agreements, the firm uses a Xero-compatible app called Debtor Daddy to reduce the time spent chasing debtors by two hours a week.

Other major time savings come from automatic coding of transactions flowing through the bank feeds into Xero. Change Accountants no longer needs an admin to spend two to three hours a week entering bank and credit card transactions.

The firm uses several other Xero “add-on” programs such as Spotlight Reporting, which generates monthly board reports and quarterly summaries.

“I can push one button and it sucks in every month and prepares a board report for our firm,” Munro says. “It saves me about two hours a month with my reporting requirements to head office.” (Change Accountants is part of the CountPlus, an ASX listed company.)

Xero uses an employee portal that lets staff apply for leave and look up payslips, activities which otherwise would have required admin time to manage. Xero’s payroll automatically calculates superannuation payments and tax payable. “Payroll takes five minutes to do once a week,” Munro says. These two features save two hours a week.

Change Accountants’ staff typically rack up many expenses which they record using the Xero Touch mobile app. Each employee takes a photo of the receipt, allocates it to a job and is repaid through payroll. This saves about an hour a month, Munro says.

Are Staff or Clients Happier?

The firm’s staff love the Xero employee portal. “If they misplace a payslip or summary they don’t have to bug anyone in admin, they can just download them,” Munro says. Many people make leave requests on their phone or from home, he adds.

“They might be out on the weekend and they realise they need to take leave and we can process the request during the week. They love having the flexibility.”

The ability to view accounting information on the road is a big plus for Munro. As the MD he likes to keep an eye on what’s happening. He travels with a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 and can open up Xero in the internet browser wherever he has a mobile connection.

“It gives me comfort being able to get an instant update on cash flow and what’s going on with the business. I can do that anywhere, anytime,” Munro says.

Although the firm’s accounting program is for internal use, it still has a small impact on clients. Change Accountants has connected payment gateway eWay to its Xero file so that customers can pay their invoices online immediately. “People love making the payments process easier, they can do it faster,” Munro says.

What are the Best/Worst Things about Xero?

“The clean, simple, easy-to-use interface makes it easy for our team to process information in Xero,” Munro says. “It doesn’t make the accounting side of things something that’s dreaded so they get onto it quicker. And because it’s up-to-date I can make better decisions.”

Xero could be improved by adding more user types, Munro says. He has had to give some team members higher levels of access than he would otherwise like just so they can process invoices and statements. Xero needs finer controls that can better define what a user could do, he adds.

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Automated Timesheets an Easier Way to Pay Staff

October 13, 2014 by Aimy Chen

CASE STUDY

Garth Belic, director of accounting firm Revolution Business Services, typically spent an hour each day entering timesheets into his online accounting program to figure out pay conditions and superannuation for his staff.

The firm sold outsourcing services such as payroll, stocktaking, bookkeeping, invoice processing and accounts payable automation. The tight-knit team of four staff added up to six casuals to perform stocktakes on an ad hoc basis.

Paycycles also blew out because employees couldn’t enter their timesheets directly into the accounting program, Saasu. The program didn’t have the ability to write rules for employees’ wages which took into account the many variables in calculating a salary and benefits.

Belic and his team were creating payslip earnings and interpreting the time from handwritten timesheets prepared by clients. Complex payroll awards that were difficult to manage manually also made things difficult, Belic says. The firm’s clients followed a range of government-mandated pay awards including the General Retail Industry Award.

Detour From Data Entry

Revolution Business Services is a heavy user of cloud apps. It developed an in-house stocktake application that eliminated the use of manual count sheets, and Belic knew that there had to be a better way of running payroll. “We push the envelope to make sure double-handling does not occur,” Belic says.

Belic applied the in-house motto “never enter data twice” to the payroll process and decided to switch to KeyPay, a niche payroll app, in March 2013.

Staff now use an online timesheet to record their hours directly into KeyPay. KeyPay pushes the number of hours into Saasu automatically, with no data entry required by Belic.

He no longer needs to work out the appropriate pay rates for hours worked as KeyPay uses templates for pay rates and payroll conditions to calculate wages before sending them to Saasu.

Revolution Business Services also created an online sign-up form for KeyPay to add new employees, such as when it needed to quickly expand its causal workforce for stocktaking.

“Now it would be more like 10 minutes [to process payroll] with no issues. The real time-saving we experience is the limited amount of rework required when compared to conventional payroll software where the user is left to interpret pay conditions and rates,” Belic says.

Employees entered and maintain their own personal bank and super details using KeyPay’s self-service portal. Belic and his team started to see the right pay every time.

“It has allowed us to scale and fill our client base with more outsourced payroll work. I would suggest our efficiency is tenfold in payroll as a result of Keypay,” Belic says.

Accounting Firm Searches for Stress-Free Hiring and Firing

October 7, 2014 by Sholto Macpherson

CASE STUDYNatalie Trionfi felt concerned when she left an Australian bank to run a small accounting firm in Melbourne’s northern suburbs. She always had an HR department to oversee the writing of contracts, compliance with legislation and correct wages.

“HR is really, really important in every business, whether they know it or not. There are so many fines you can get these days with bullying and harassment if they don’t have the right procedures in place,” says Trionfi, office manager for Hansens Accounting, a 12-staff firm which turns over $2 million a year.

HR is a common weakness in small businesses and can take up a lot of time. Dedicated HR staff are too expensive yet the penalties for paying staff incorrectly can be enormous.

However, Trionfi was also short of time to spend on any one activity. She has several staff to manage, runs the back office and all internal projects including IT.

“I’m the right-hand girl to the partner. Anything that runs this place I manage,” she says.

Hansens had set up an online HR management service, EnableHR, a year before Trionfi had arrived. The firm uses it to store all contracts and performance management reports that are updated regularly with every government decision.

“It’s a one-stop place for our contracts. You don’t have an HR manager to ask how things happen, EnableHR does everything for you. It’s really easy,” Trionfi says.

Keeping on Top

There is a huge difference between Hansens’ HR procedures before and after the EnableHR system, Trionfi says. She is still trying to find contracts and performance reviews from before 2012.

“I assume they’re in one central place on a C: drive somewhere under HR. The issue is how do I look up contracts from three years ago? Even last year’s performance review – where would I find it?”

In theory there’s nothing wrong with storing contracts in a folder on a computer, as long as everyone knows which folder. However, in moving to an online system it’s removed the need to search for the files themselves as they are all saved into EnableHR.

An up-to-date set of documents and procedures is critical to maintaining consistency for staff and compliance with regulations. Trionfi knows several clients at Hansens who have no HR system at all. Some don’t bother with contracts, or sketch out something on a piece of paper. “It is quite scary for anyone who is running their own business and have one or two staff,” she says. “How do they manage their staff? Do they have contracts in place? How do they manage performance and where is everything documented?”

EnableHR is Trionfi’s first online HR management solution. Navigation is fairly straightforward and didn’t take long to pick up, she says. “Anyone can get on and do it. Even the receptionist could get on it and say this is very easy to navigate.”

In a business with 12 staff there are issues every day around payment of wages, hiring, firing, requests for maternity leave or annual leave, and so on. EnableHR includes step-by-step checklists for the most common processes. The instructions on the online service are updated regularly by FCB Workplace Law, Australia’s largest specialist workplace law firm.

“It makes life easier. You follow it and you know you’re doing it right. Without a system you think what you’re doing is right, but you can never assume,” Trionfi says.

Hansens uses EnableHR to fill holes in the firm’s knowledge base and skill set. The processes required to recruit and retain staff are often skipped in small businesses, resulting in poor hires or higher turnover. “Accountants don’t know how to interview or reference checks or performance management or the legalities. That’s not what they do,” Trionfi says.

Top Performers

OH&S (occupational health and safety) and performance management are Trionfi’s favourite tools. She uses the service monthly for leave requests such as following up medical certificates, recruiting and inducting.

“It’s because I’m not a specialist in HR that we can manage performance and know that we’re doing it right and have the right forms,” she says.

“I know that my contracts are right which is a huge thing. Normally I’d just go to HR and say, ‘I need this’, but now I’m doing it. I know the basics of how HR work and now I know I’m doing it right,” Trionfi says.

It is difficult to estimate the dollar value of the service. Without it Trionfi says she would spend a lot of time calling HR specialists for advice. She has saved many hours in writing and updating processes to make sure performance reviews, hires and fires were carried out consistently, she adds.

“Last month I had two starters. It would have taken me forever because we just updated all our contracts. I did it through the system (EnableHR) and it took half an hour per person,” Trionfi says.

She estimates the same process would have taken a day and a half per person, taking into account delays in requests for information from lawyers and advisers, without EnableHR.

Similarly, performance reviews are much faster. Trionfi estimates it takes 1.5 hours per person to update employment contracts, conduct a performance review interview and send signed letters for the firm’s 12 staff. Without the service the process would have taken a week in total, she says.

“The best thing is that you know everything is in one place. The contracts are updated to the latest legislation and it just makes everything so standard and easy,” Trionfi says.