MYOB Archives - Digital First

MYOB Gives Fans First Taste of Connected Practice Vision

May 3, 2019 by Sholto Macpherson 2 Comments

This year MYOB has shown the first fruits of a long-awaited revamp of its Accountants Enterprise and Office software. Well, not so much a revamp as a staged rollout, and it’s only getting started. There’s plenty more to come under its “connected practice” vision.

Still, it is a very positive sign for all those firms still running MYOB Accountants Enterprise and Accountants Office. Not that larger firms had many options, given Xero’s commitment to focusing on firms with under 20 employees. But it’s clear that the “wait and see” approach is paying off.

Some elements of the cloud suite mentioned below are in public beta (such as the compliance workflow), some are due for release later in the year. Some concepts such as the MYOB Advisor are original to MYOB, others have been borrowed from point products in the Xero ecosystem, but MYOB’s pitch is that you only need to buy one product to have it all.

This won’t satisfy the early adopters who are willing to put up with the inconvenience of multiple products in return for cutting-edge features and the highest possible efficiency. But MYOB looks like it is doing enough to hang onto the larger firms that move more slowly. As long as it keeps hitting its delivery windows. (See final section)

Compliance in the Connected Practice

Efficiency was a strong design goal, from collaborating with clients to running bulk coding queries in the dashboard. The layout is intended to help accountants plan and prioritise work around BAS lodgement, says Lisa Baldacchino, MYOB senior product manager.

A client filter works across all parts of the connected practice suite. It has just four tabs across the top of the screen for transaction processing, tasks, documents and advisory.

The transaction processing column shows a file summary; the number of unallocated transactions, the type of subscription (eg. Essentials), a quarterly summary of the financial year that look like heat maps, and a percentage automated indicator.

The latter feature is a nice idea – reminiscent of Receipt Bank’s practice platform – that helps you help your clients. The more efficient their compliance the better the service the firm can provide with reporting, etc.

You can filter clients to just see quarterly BASes and when they are due. Filter again by transaction processing to see who has the most transactions to process.

Instead of going into each file to generate a coding report and attaching it to an email, accountants can bulk generate coding reports for all clients and automatically post it to the document portal.

BAS fields are prefilled from the client file, and once given the ok are posted into the document portal for an e-signature.

In fact, the portal gets quite a workout with the new setup. Users can use it to send checklists out to clients for documents as well as queries. MYOB’s cloud corporate compliance product (in beta) will use the portal for electronic signing of forms to make changes to companies.

MYOB have done a good job looking at the ways they can use data to increase the speed of compliance across a client base. Forms and fields across the suite are linked so that entering data in one section such as a tax file number populates in all the others. Ledger data is automatically pre-filled into a trial balance, for example. And the suite will automatically prefill some forms by pulling information from the ATO.

The connected practice suite shows the ATO status of activity statements (eg. overdue) and information about upcoming BAS lodgements. The transaction processing column shows the amount of work due for each statement.

“It saves a lot of time in reconciling those two lists,” says Baldacchino.

MYOB claims that a large proportion of a company tax return (70 percent) will be automatically prefilled. Form fields are deep linked which means you can click on a number and see the source behind it, such as an MYOB worksheet. If you manipulate the number in the source document it is automatically updated in the return.

The new suite is billed as more user friendly, and certainly the interface does a better job of displaying information. Tiles at the top of the compliance screen jump to different parts of the workflow; trial balance, asset register, financial statement, tax reconciliation, and company return.

MYOB counted the number of mouse/keyboard clicks it took to complete common tasks and looked for ways to reduce them. You can see this in small but important productivity lifts users will appreciate, such as the ability to build a favourites list (My List) for your current clients. Entities are listed in groups so that you can see all the tax returns for companies, individuals or trusts within the group.

Workpapers gets a boost, too. Data from the previous year is rolled over to the next year, so you have that data to start the compliance workflow. The trial balance screen includes a column with icons showing which accounts have workpapers attached. MYOB plans to add an AI feature which will analyse account groups and suggest where workpapers are required.

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Advisory in the Connected Practice

MYOB Advisor, an acquisition which is now firmly tucked into the suite, is a very solid addition to the business reporting lineup. The biggest benefit is that it is a very fast way to generate valuable advice.

It takes two minutes to generate text summaries of important events in a business’ finances over the past period.

It’s the text summaries that make this product work so well. The auto-generated text insights are straightforward interpretations of the data, but they cut down the time it takes an adviser to decide which things to mention and what to say about them.

It also means that a relatively inexperienced adviser can use the tool to reveal all the important occurrences in the past quarter’s trading. So junior accountant can print off a report and still give some useful advice to a client.

Of course, this tool doesn’t turn an accountant with no experience into a grey-hair guru with decades of business experience. But even just following the script with small businesses and asking them, “what happened during this period with this account code?” could help them understand their decisions a little better.

The report is broken into sections with dynamic graphs. You can click on the ranges on the accounts receivable bar graph (current, 1-14 days, 15-30 days, 30 days+) to include or exclude those figures.

If a business has a large amount of very overdue invoices, an adviser can choose to show only invoices more than 30 days overdue.

New Owner – New Priorities?

The big question is what MYOB’s new owner thinks of the ambitious revamp. The company has committed $50 million to R&D over three years from 2019 to 2021. Will KKR turn out to be a cost-stripper like Archer Capital or an investor like Bain?

“KKR are very excited about our strategy and growing the business,” says Dave Weickhardt, MYOB’s general manager for product, when I asked him late last week. Hopefully for all those MYOB AE firms out there that money is locked in.

Image Credit: MYOB

FYI Docs Pitches “Zapier for Firms” Platform for Multi-App Automation

February 22, 2019 by Sholto Macpherson 4 Comments

Automation is all the rage in small business accounting software. How come automation in practice management software has moved so much slower?

“It’s almost (worthy of) a detective story,” says Rob Cameron, CEO of FYI Docs, a new practice management software. “A VC asked me, ‘Why hasn’t someone done this already?’ It’s because you’re dealing with unstructured information.”

Compliance requires sourcing many types of documents from different areas, often requiring clients to fetch themselves. On the other end, firms can slow down jobs by moving them through various levels of approval. In smaller firms, the work of managing documents, jobs, emails and billing occurs across multiple systems. Automating tasks across those systems hasn’t been possible.

This is why the average job to complete a tax return is still about 23 hours, according to FYI Docs’ research.

Cameron saw the potential of using an integration platform such as Zapier to trigger tasks across multiple applications. FYI’s goal is to use scripts running over several apps to reduce that compliance window to 11 minutes.

This involves using algorithms to identify the content of emails, to systematically create, name and store reports and other documents, and to move and assign tasks between staff and projects.

FYI Docs squarely competes with Karbon, a similar concept and tool co-founded by three former Xero executives, Stuart McLeod, Ian Vacin and John Freeman. The differences appear to be FYI Docs’ singular focus on becoming an open process automation platform that moves client data between an array of applications (like Zapier). Karbon has approached the same problem as one of communication and customer relationship management (CRM).

(Another factor which could have as much impact on growth as product design: Xero shut out Karbon from sharing data with any of its practice tools due to a falling out with management.)

How does FYI work?

FYI automates the capture, filing and processing of source documents to support accounting and tax. Here’s an example of one of its automated workflows working across multiple apps:

Identify key documents required to complete a workpaper
Find the documents in a client’s HubDocs account
Import, file and name the documents following practice-wide rules
Update the associated workpaper with cross links to the source documents
Compare and validate the amounts in the workpaper

Cameron says the firm has automated 30 processes and has a long roadmap of many more. “We have 12 months of glorious process automation coming up,” he says. The completed processes include monthly billing, onboarding clients, ASIC payments, annual statements and tax assessments.

For the latter, FYI contacts ATO for a tax assessment, checks it with Xero Tax to see that it agrees, then brings it with the resulting file and metadata into FYI. It then creates a templated email to send to the client.

FYI can run custom processes across Xero (blue client file) such as running a defined set of reports to support Xero Workpapers. The reports are saved in the customer file in FYI as links to Xero.

FYI can automatically capture documents from Dropbox, Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive and file them in FYI, eliminating the client request goose chase. All activity in FYI is tracked in an audit log.

A slightly more unusual automation identifies negative sentiment in client emails. If a client complains to an accountant about fees or quality of service, FYI will instantly notify the partner.

“The interesting observation is how much the world has moved onto emails, and how they’re all sitting in everyone’s inbox and unstructured,” Cameron says. “They are a very rich source of information but also a risk as well,” he adds, referring to Australia’s recent royal commission into banking.

FYI has been designed specifically for firms running on Xero Practice Manager and brings together document management and CRM, and process automation. The platform is not a standalone practice management solution, or at least not yet.

Xero Practice Manager handles all the task management, time and billing. Xero also acts as a central database for clients and staff. To technologists, Cameron explains FYI as a combination of Microsoft Office 365, (document management), Hubspot (CRM), Asana (task manager), and Zapier (process automation.

The open-door policy with Xero has made it possible to deeply integrate the products. Instead of storing a PDF from Xero Workpapers in the FYI Docs client file it stores a cross-link that opens up the document in Workpapers. (Tasks don’t flow from FYI to Xero Practice Manager – yet.)

A strong history – with the competition

“This is the fourth time that I’ve built this product,” Cameron says. In 2006 Cameron sold a document management solution to MYOB called Level 31 which helped accountants move to a paperless office. That took seven years to build and sell (starting from 1999).

Cameron stayed on for five years as MYOB’s global head of product strategy for accountants. He then left and built the management accounting tool Dovetail, “a combination of bookkeeping and virtual CFO”, which he sold to MYOB just two years later in March 2014.

Then followed his second stint at MYOB as platform strategy manager for the company’s Accountants in Practice division.

A chartered accountant for 20 years and a successful software entrepreneur twice over to MYOB. Why shift to its biggest competitor?

“I was inspired by the Xero story,” Cameron says, citing its launch from Wellington, New Zealand into a billion-dollar powerhouse with a global footprint in just 12 years.

It’s also clear that a good dose of pragmatism helped Cameron decide to focus exclusively on one accounting platform, and why this time he chose Xero and not MYOB.

“When you work with a single platform your ability to onboard goes through the roof. Rather than doing all (practice management solutions) and having a crappy user experience across all of them,” Cameron says.

As one of the first to market with cloud-based practice management software and the first to make it free, Xero swallowed a good chunk of firms in two key categories; early adopters and small to medium practices. These don’t pay as much for practice software as the larger firms on MYOB Accountants Enterprise. But it is easier for smaller or more entrepreneurial firms to switch to new products and they are more open to trying new things.

FYI Docs includes features such as an approvals process and customisation through extra fields to handle large firms with multiple offices and many partners. But Cameron is not keen to sell to them. “I don’t enjoy working with them that much. Their decision time frames are ridiculous,” Cameron says. “We are going after 50 seats. We’re not going after the multinationals.”

According to Cameron, Xero is investing time and resources in helping Cameron bring FYI Docs to market as quickly as possible. Cameron has had deep access to developer teams working on the practice management tools including Xero Tax and Workpapers as well as Xero Practice Manager.

Xero’s vision and delivery for practice management has been spotty over the past three years. It has launched excellent ideas such as Xero HQ. But it has failed on more pressing stuff such as better integration between Xero Workpapers and Xero Practice Manager, both acquisitions. Firms don’t pay directly for Xero’s practice management software so it’s not surprising that their development is not a priority. Is Xero supporting FYI Docs because it is doing what Xero could never afford to build itself?

FYI Docs will be at Accounting Business Expo 2019 at Darling Harbour, Sydney, on March 20-21. You can register for a free ticket here.

Rob Cameron is presenting two session at the expo, details below.

Tuesday 11:50am – 12:20pm

Why Process Automation is the Killer App for Faster Compliance

Wednesday 10:05am – 10:35 am

Cloud document management – finally a solution that doesn’t ask your practice to compromise

Image credit: FYI Docs

MYOB Doubles Down on Supplier Feeds: Accountech.Live 18

October 26, 2018 by Sholto Macpherson Leave a Comment

Banks feeds were the killer feature that fuelled the rapid rise of cloud accounting software. But the bank rec is not fully automated yet. MYOB says it knows what will take it another big step closer – detailed supplier feeds.

MYOB is investing in higher quality, direct feeds to plumbing distributors Reece and TradeLink and office king OfficeWorks, with line item detail flowing directly into AccountRight and Essentials.

The idea is to create a “holistic” approach to expense management, says MYOB product manager Dale Dixon.

“We found that customers struggled to keep track of expenses on the job,” Dixon said. “The Reece integration brings in the (item) lines of what they purchased and also allocates to the job in the system.”

MYOB AccountRight can switch on tracking for reimbursables in each job. Tradies give a purchase order number at the point of sale which is added to the invoice. Then when the tradie invoices the customer the software automatically adds a selection or all expenses.

“In the past you got your paper copy of your statement and worked out which ones you have invoices for that work. Now you can integrate it end to end,” Dixon says.

MYOB is not the first to add feeds to major suppliers (Xero has OfficeWorks and Reece already) but it is the first to add line item detail. This one change will make a huge difference to the speed of bank reconciliation, says Dixon.

“We are working with a bunch of suppliers to automate those feeds. It’s not just about getting the bill in the system, it’s about automating the workflow,” Dixon adds.

The supplier feeds are one part of MYOB’s push to improve data processing. It has also switched from billsapp@myob.com.au to a unique email address for forwarding invoices to an “in tray”, similar to Xero’s Inbox.

Now a company can hand out the unique email to suppliers so they can send bills directly to the accounting software, or multiple staff within a company can forward invoices they have received.

MYOB Essentials can also store receipts as well as bills by attaching them to transactions in the bank reconciliation screen, Dixon says.

You can hear more about MYOB’s plans at Accountech.Live, November 13-14 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. Register for free now.

Session: The next killer feature in accounting? Holistic expense management

Presenter: Simon Dennis, head of partnerships at MYOB

When: 10:05am – 10:35am, Tuesday 13 November

Image credit: MYOB

GreatSoft Brings A Cloud Practice Suite for Big Firms to Australia

September 18, 2018 by Sholto Macpherson 4 Comments

MYOB’s attempted purchase of Reckon APS at the beginning of this year – and its knockdown by the regulator – unearthed some pretty frank statements about the technology roadmaps for the two software companies.
Reckon’s main explanation as to why the combined entity wouldn’t be anti-competitive was that it was so far behind on its cloud strategy and couldn’t afford the investment required to catch up. Reckon has since reversed that position and says it is going full steam ahead. But the moment of candour has drawn the first major competitor to Australia (and it may not be the last).
GreatSoft is a cloud practice management suite born in South Africa from the original Sol6 software. Unlike Sol6, which has evolved into MYOB Accountants Enterprise in Australia, GreatSoft is 100% in the cloud. It is used by many large accounting firms, including three of the Big Four in South Africa.
GreatSoft has made a soft landing in Australia – targeting the MYOB and Reckon APS firms that were alarmed by the statements and reversals in the past 12 months. It has made contact with all the major accounting software companies and is busily connecting to popular practice management and tax compliance tools in Australia.
Worryingly for Reckon, the Australian managing director is one of the founders of APS and former manager of Reckon’s own accounting division, Brian Armstrong.
In his first interview as managing director for GreatSoft Australia, Armstrong reveals his plans for taking on Reckon and MYOB on home ground.

Digital First: So who is Brian Armstrong?

Armstrong: I was originally the owner and operator of Sol6 in South Africa. I then ran Sol6 Europe with Brian Coventry, then ran international operations from Australia. I then broke away and was one of the four founders of APS in 1997 and was CEO until its sale to Reckon in 2004. I ran Reckon’s accounting division until 2011. Since then I have been doing business consulting and in the last couple of years working with GreatSoft on their international plans.

Digital First: What is your relationship with Reckon these days?

Armstrong: Since leaving Reckon I have had nothing to do with them in anyway.

Digital First: Why?

Armstrong: No real reason. My time was up and it was the end of the road. They had never engaged with me in any way and I had no need to engage with them.

Digital First: What’s your relationship with GreatSoft?

Armstrong: The guys at GreatSoft I’ve known for 25 years or more. Bruce (Morgan, CEO) and Imtiaz (Lorgat, CTO) were part of Sol6 operation, they ran Cape Town. We did a back-to-back deal and Bruce and Imtiaz bought it out from me.

Digital First: Why are you getting back into the software game?

Armstrong: That’s a very good question. When I got out of it (and left Reckon) I said, ‘That’s me done’. I’ve been doing it all my life. There is a great opportunity and we’re aware of the challenges of coming to the market.
But as we look at more recent times and the announcements of MYOB and Reckon that they don’t have a cloud solution at this time… We feel that the timing is right.
We have talked to cloud (accounting software) providers and have been really surprised about how many are keen to work with us, in compliance and productivity tools. They have difficulty integrating with the legacy suites of APS and MYOB and they are locked out of that world. They see it as a great opportunity for themselves and we see it as a great solution for accounting firms that is really advanced and gives some freedom of choice with what they use. The closed world is a thing of the past.

Digital First: Practice management is a tough game with bigger firms. Glacial sales cycles, complex deliveries. Are you up for it?

Armstrong: It’s a sweet spot for GreatSoft. It is a more difficult delivery model, with more intensive support and reporting requirements. The company has had a lot of experience there. We have had a lot of people who have worked in multi-partner, multi-office and multi-service lines.
The timing is really a combination of three things – the product is there now and the openness of other providers to work with us and the fact that we think the incumbents are a fair way off bringing something to the market. And I saw that as an opportunity to help the guys with their expansion plans.

Digital First: What are the expansion plans? What are you thinking?

Armstrong: We had a stand at the Accounting Business Expo (before we started selling here) because we wanted to gauge interest. I guess I wanted to know how many firms were open to exploring the idea. We had a lot of interactions with a number of firms and it gave us encouragement that they want to find a viable replacement.
GreatSoft is not APS in the cloud – there are differences, but there are also similarities. It is scalable, it has been designed for larger firms, and that feedback has been great to get from the firms. We have been talking to a lot of firms about integrations and doing some proofs of concept and looking at database conversions. We have done it with APS and MYOB clients. That’s been quite a win for firms to see that yes, it can be done.

Digital First: So what happens next?

Armstrong: Now we have to get those integrations completed as soon as we possibly can. That’s going to take real effort in the next couple of months. We want to see the applications working and single client showing all the data from disparate systems.
We have legs on the ground – a business development guy Daniel Fourie and Imtiaz is here talking to firms. We are just visiting firms and talking them through what we can do and a lot of them are really interested and saying, ‘Show us what you’ve got’.

Digital First: Which integrations do you have and which are you working on?

Armstrong: There are so many – superannuation, tax, compliance, document management, and accounting applications. We are probably working with at least 8.

Armstrong: It is complex at the moment. We have concluded business discussions with all the vendors we need integrations with.

[Updated with comments from Imtius Lograt, GreatSoft CTO: Some integrations have started – BGL, NowInfinity. Nimbus has completed and iManage has started. Xero is agreed but not started yet. There are a host of others – payment providers, debtor management (QuickFee, FeeSynergy, Apxium) – at the moment my priorities are determined by the firms we are in engagements with.
Quite a few of the vendors are happy to be part of an ecosystem including GreatSoft. We have met with 20 firms of decent size, and everybody wants in on this concept of choosing their solution platforms.]

Digital First: Which integrations do you have with accounting software?

Armstrong: Xero is a key one for us from a tax perspective. We are looking to deepen that partnership – they have a similar strategy with a connected practice and integration points with other providers. We are exactly the same (in philosophy) in the practice management space.

Digital First: Do you have your first customer in Australia? I heard you were close with one firm.

Armstrong: No, we haven’t signed them. We have done a proof-of-concept and a database conversion. We want to go about this in a slow, conservative way and not get ahead of ourselves. These integrations are a key piece for most of these firms. They say, ‘We hear you, show us’. That’s why we need to do the work.

Digital First: You mentioned a single view of the client? How does that work in South Africa?

Armstrong: We want to give the experience that when you view the client you’re getting a full view of all the information associated with the client. Not just practice management but tax, company secretarial information, superannuation, accounting – all that needs to be available and rendered in the client view.
In South Africa that’s what exists because all those applications are managed and owned by GreatSoft. There’s a lot of merit in an integrated strategy and it’s one I personally think that if you have an integrated view of the client there’s a significant benefit.
But that’s contingent on all those applications being state of the art. If you’re in the situation where they are falling behind, you will have integration (with a suite approach) but not the best applications for each function. Instead of trying to develop each of those themselves we are selecting the best in class. You would go into the client console and see all the data from disparate applications and databases. That gets more complicated as you go across multiple offices.

Digital First: What state is the API? Have heard that it’s not where it needs to be?

Armstrong: With one of the (software) providers the developers worked together for a couple of days and got it completed. It comes down to which providers are open and willing to work with us. There are different levels of API and integration. And giving these guys surety that we are working with them and not sharing data.
There seems to be a lot of distrust about sharing data or knowhow and using it elsewhere. You do need to be open and transparent with all the providers and the data flows that you need, and that’s only in the relationship with that provider and not with everyone else. And so we’re very respectful of that and the NDAs that we have in place.
We are making very, very fast progress – I’ve been surprised at the pace of progress today. I didn’t think we would get this far in this amount of time.

Armstrong: Our strategy around this open platform is the key for us. We have to maintain that open stance and I think that really is important for these firms that they have this freedom of choice that they have been lacking for some time now. I believe that we can move quickly on that and it does give us an opportunity. Developing cloud solutions is not insignificant and particularly when you’ve got a broad base of apps to move forward. We need to take advantage of that when it’s available. I do know it’ takes a lot longer than some of the timelines that I’ve heard.

Digital First: What functions does GreatSoft cover?

Armstrong: We cover the full gambit from time billing, time capture, expense capture, workflow, business process automation, and business intelligence reporting (on time, fees and billing). Everything that’s required to run the practice from an internal management perspective.

Digital First: Why would you not build a suite in Australia like you did in South Africa?

Armstrong: It largely comes down to the extent of the relationships with other providers and making sure that the integrations are seamless and elegant. If they are clunky people won’t want to go there. If you have these strong relationships then you are best in class. It doesn’t make sense to make a tax app unless you’re forced to go down that path.

Digital First: I know you do a lot with large firms, but what is the smallest firm in South Africa using GreatSoft?

Armstrong: In South Africa they have sole practitioners using it. But the more relevant example would be three of the Big Four are using it for practice management and for other modules as well. A lot of the second tier firms are using it too.

Digital First: How much will it cost?

Armstrong: For the practice management suite it’s going to be in the order of $50 per month for practice management and $60 per user per month with the business intelligence tool for reporting. It is a lot less than the incumbents and I think we have to go in aggressively to start with and give early adopters some keen pricing initially. All up we are going to be competitive.

CCH Opens iFirm to Xero Tax, MYOB and Microsoft Power BI

July 20, 2018 by Sholto Macpherson 3 Comments

In a sign of the times, CCH iFirm is adding connections to other vendors’ accounting software in a bid to improve efficiency for accounting firms. While accounting software for SMEs has long used API connections to integrate with hundreds of other business apps, practice software has tended to stay within its walled garden.

Xero and then Intuit were the first to open up their free practice management tools to third-party apps for notifications. But both tools are only suitable for very small firms. In Australia, iFirm is the cloud suite with the most potential to fit firms with hundreds of employees.

It’s a great move by Wolters Kluwer and one that couldn’t have come at a better time.

The dramatic statements revealed during MYOB’s aborted acquisition of Reckon APS showed that the two companies are years away from developing a full-blown cloud practice suite.

CCH iFirm, made by Wolters Kluwer, positions itself as next-in-line for the throne. It includes an online tax module, which neither MYOB nor Reckon have matched.

However, iFirm has lacked a major drawcard – a tightly integrated, cloud accounting app for SMEs. Xero’s rapid accumulation of market share has encouraged firms to consider the free Xero Practice Manager before iFirm. The software company could capitalise on this winning streak by expanding its practice tools to firms of all sizes – but it’s not interested.

Xero stated to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission that it didn’t want to invest in making software for firms with more than 20 staff.

There are two interesting aspects to this development. How deeply is Xero prepared to integrate with iFirm? Initially the connection is just to Xero Tax; will it eventually connect client files to another vendor’s practice suite?

And then there’s the Microsoft Power BI integration. What exactly can you do with a BI tool when it is natively integrated with your practice software?

In this edited transcript, Russell Evans (CEO of Wolters Kluwer Asia Pacific) and Daniel Wyner (regional director) give a frank assessment of the market and where they intend to take integrations for iFirm.

Jump to:

Integrations with Xero

Russell Evans: What we’re hearing from particularly small and medium sized firms is that they’re looking for real efficiency gains in workflow. Let’s assume (firms are) moving toward fixed price engagements, if you’re only getting two and a half thousand for a job that you used to get 4000 for, that’s all about hours on the job. Now, given that Xero have captured a good slice of the market in the small and medium firms with their tax product, it makes sense for us to support our clients who want end-to-end efficiency. Xero Ledger into Xero Tax and running the job on iFirm practice management. We’re just starting to do that now. Initial indications are it’s going to be a winner for the market and therefore good for us.

Digital First: What exactly are you launching?

Daniel Wyner: Effectively it is an API connection. From within iFirm’s practice management screen, you will see the client database from Xero Tax. You can also launch that client’s tax return from within iFirm’s practice management screen. It will also show the relevant meta tax to say that a return has either been filed or lodged, signed, etc. You don’t want to be flicking between different products to see the status of what’s going on, so we’ve managed that workflow entirely within iFirm’s practice management solution.

Digital First: That sounds great.

Daniel Wyner: You can assign your staff to whoever needs to do the job, add all the necessary checklist programmes, procedures, jump out to Xero Tax and do your tax return by launching it from within CCH iFirm. That’s phase one. Phase two, which will come Q4 in Q1 next year, will be adding CCH iQ to Xero Tax. The myth that “I need to be with one provider” from the desktop days has been blown away. We want to facilitate whatever the practices want to do.

Digital First: Will there be deep links from workflow screens in iFirm to the Xero client files themselves?

Daniel Wyner: Just Xero tax.

Digital First: Do you think you’ll get to a point where you have deep links to say, Xero, QBO, MYOB? If you click on the file and just open that client’s cloud files – is that the vision?

Daniel Wyner: I think anything is possible. It comes down to us proving out that this is the right workflow and that value proposition. There’s no reason why we wouldn’t.

Russell Evans: It also comes back to the use case. There’s a lot of collaboration at the moment between the accountant and the general ledger. Rather than waiting for the end of the year to do the adjustments in June or waiting for a tax trigger, accountants are using it on a monthly basis.

When MYOB come to market with a cloud tax product, and accountants want an end to end MYOB ledger and MYOB Tax plugging into iFirm practice manager, if our clients start banging on the door and saying “We want to operate support in that open environment,” we’d absolutely be behind that as well.

Digital First: What’s the reason for not pushing the Xero integration globally? Is that an internal decision as opposed to a technical one?

Daniel Wyner: We’ve only focused our discussions with Xero locally and therefore it’s really been focused on the Australian market.

Russell Evans: I think it’s also a maturity curve decision as well. Look at the proportion of small businesses that have made the shift into a cloud based accounting application. Australia and New Zealand are a long way ahead of other markets, so therefore the customers that we’ve been engaging with have been far more vocal about that desire to work in an open environment, to be able to plug in different applications for greater efficiency.

Russell Evans: There is an intensity in our conversations (with firms). This is a kind of anecdotal number, 60% of accountants have a copy of the Australian master tax guide on their desk. Over the last six years we’ve had a very strong focus on digitising the master tax guide and getting it into the market and we’ve done that with CCH iKnow. Last year we plugged iKnow into Xero Tax. Our quest is really to provide accounting firms across the region with a digital experience. Plugging into providers like Xero makes sense for us because then we’re still relevant to accountants.

Digital First: What were the engagement stats like for iKnow with Xero Tax? That integration has been out about a year?

Daniel Wyner: I don’t know the numbers off the top of my head, but a significant number of firms have signed up to either a paid subscription or a premium offer. It’s well over the hundred mark. The next phase is making it far more actionable. That’s where IQ comes into the piece.

Digital First: You’re saying 100 firms? That doesn’t seem like a lot –

Daniel Wyner: It’s in the hundreds, I just don’t know.

Digital First: Okay. Enough proof to turn around and invest more in integrating CCH iFirm more closely with Xero. Are you intending to do that with any of the other products, like QuickBooks Online?

Daniel Wyner: Yes. We’ve had conversations with multiple providers about where we could look at that. Say accountants (use iFirm and) run their books on Xero or QuickBooks. At the moment you can run (your firm on iFirm and use Xero for the firm’s accounts). That integration’s been there since well before we acquired iFirm because of the old days of Acclipse and Xero starting out together.

Digital First: Clearly there’s overlap here between Xero Practice Manager and iFirm. What size firms are you targeting?

Daniel Wyner: When you’re over five staff, firms have a willingness to spend a little bit more money because they know that it’ll be something a little more sophisticated. Up to that 50 user mark, the politics within a firm, the number of partners and so forth, it’s an easy decision making circle. They can drive the change management. Changing the practice management solution, which is at the heart of a firm, it’s no small undertaking at all. Our data historically have suggested firms stay on a solution for about eight to ten years because they don’t want to go through that change management.

Azure Migration and Stability Issues

Digital First: I did hear some stability issues with iFirm over the past 12 months. I was wondering what the story was with that and if it’s been resolved.

Russell Evans: Yes. So in July last year we moved from our own data centres into the Microsoft Azure environment. We did a huge amount of pre-planning around that and we thought we’d anticipated everything. But some part of the transition didn’t go according to plan and as a result some customers experienced latency issues and performance issues. We’ve thrown everything at that and we’ve now stabilised that platform.

Digital First: Okay.

Russell Evans: And look, we’ve been very open with our customers. We’ve understood the frustration that’s caused to them. We’re past that now.

Digital First: Why did you move to Azure?

Daniel Wyner: It’s as much about scalability as different times of the year. In peak tax periods we have to scale the service up and down. We needed to have more of that flexibility Azure can give us. There are global Azure support teams that now manage “around the sun” everything that goes on on that platform. The relationships we have with Microsoft and to leverage that platform enables us to do some really great things for the client.

Power BI and Deeper Reporting

Digital First: Like what?

Daniel Wyner: One of the things that we’re focusing on for the back half of this year would be really tight integration with Microsoft Power BI over practice management data. Now that we’re in the Azure environment we can leverage off their technology stack. Microsoft is spending millions of dollars on making that a great tool that allows you to plan utilisation. Why would we waste our time trying to compete with that?

The biggest reason why bigger firms hold back (from moving to iFirm) is that they’re used to having the flexibility of slicing and dicing the data.

If you look at the legacy platforms they’ve got that ability to pull their own reports. We haven’t gone down that path until now. We give firms the ability to export data as and when required, but with (Power BI they can) work out how they want to build their own dashboard.

Digital First: When will this Power BI integration be ready?

Russell Evans: In Q4.

Daniel Wyner: Yes – that’s Power BI connecting to the practice management dataset, not to build it out for their clients’ data.

Digital First: What can you do with it?

Daniel Wyner: I can dig in to see the types of jobs that make me more profit, and the ability to manage workflow. The bigger firms are wanting to manage their staff more around KPI management. Power BI can give them a custom report about how they want to run their businesses.

Digital First: What’s the largest firm on iFirm?

Daniel Wyner: I think it’s about 160 users.

Digital First: Okay. Would you go bigger than that?

Daniel Wyner: At the moment, probably not.

Digital First: Why?

Daniel Wyner: The main reason would be that reporting.

Russell Evans: The more complex firms need to slice and dice their performance by partner, by director, by manager, by team member across different lines of business. At the moment iFirm isn’t designed to do that. By Q4 we’ll be able to support that.

Digital First: Will you launch a marketing campaign to sell iFirm to larger firms?

Russell Evans: Yeah, and look, I think we’ll be very successful demonstrating tangible business benefits in the connection with Xero. Then if we see the opportunity to roll out the Microsoft BI platform with a really strong offering for those firms with 100 to 300 staff, there’s nothing to stop us moving to that space.

MYOB, CCH iQ and Document Management in the Cloud

Digital First: What other integrations are you working on with competitors?

Daniel Wyner: Firms are saying to us CCH iQ’s great but to change their tax product is not a small undertaking, in particular for some of these bigger firms. So we’ve rolled out integration of the iQ functionality into the MYOB Accountants Enterprise database. Every time you lodge a tax return it is populated into the iQ database. We’re seeing some really nice results. Firms can move into compliance advisory without having to lift up their entire tax process onto a new platform.

Another thing we rolled out right at the beginning of this year which has taken off better than we initially thought is a cloud-based document management solution on Office 365, tightly integrated into iFirm as well.

Digital First: Has it done well?

Russell Evans: Can’t give you customer numbers, but I will tell you it’s going gangbusters. It has really exceeded our expectations.

Digital First: Why do you think that is?

Daniel Wyner: I don’t believe there has been a credible, fully functional cloud solution. MYOB document management solution had the full Sequel type functionality that depended on the way that you viewed it, it’s got folder structure and so forth. That functionality has not been available in the cloud until more recently. And there is the adoption of Office 365 by more and more firms. You have tight integration with email management and link all your emails to the relevant clients, with filtering and full mail merge functionality so that your engagement letters are automatically captured and sent out the right way.

Digital First: Would you say you have reached feature parity with MYOB Accountants Enterprise or Reckon APS yet? If not now, when?

Daniel Wyner: I don’t know that we’ll ever have feature parity because just replacing what is currently there on desktop is not the smart way of doing it. We want to look at what’s available and what the user needs and how we can facilitate a quicker outcome.

We can say, “You may be used to clicking these three times to get this type of report, but why do you need that report? You can make the same decision with a dashboard.”

Digital First: It is more use-case parity, isn’t it?

Daniel Wyner: Yes, that’s right.

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