Seeking great performance in New Zealand

Viv Brownrigg is a New Zealand accounting industry leader who spends her time helping accountants work more effectively with their clients. At Xerocon in February, she spoke about there being too many poor performing firms, who are stagnating or have declining revenues.

Conversely though, the accounting firms at the top end of these KPIs are doing extremely well. They’re growing, attracting new clients like you wouldn’t believe and exploding their business advisory revenues to boot. So the opportunity is there to not just overcome poor performance but to turn it into great performance.

Viv specialises in turning firms into great firms and she starts by asking accountants one key question: What would your clients say if you asked them to summarise your job description? Would they say that you do their accounts and keep the IRD away? Or would they say that you’re a key part of their business, advising them of opportunities and warning them of pitfalls on a regular basis? More importantly, what would you rather hear them say?

By making it so more clients give the second answer rather than the first, accountants can really change the way they do business. That’s what Viv and her organisation The Accountants’ RePublic specialise in doing. They help accountants get the most out of available technology and move on to more collaborative relationships with their clients.

Right now they’re putting together RePublic 2013, a series of one-day events where they’ll show accountants how to break free of the misconception that their only purpose is to take client numbers.

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UK Accountants : Connect with Paul Dunn

Last November at the inaugural Accountex exhibition in London, I was pleased to finally bump into a bit of hero of mine, Paul Dunn.

Paul has been banging the drum for change and innovation in the global accountancy profession for decades and so therefore it’s no surprise that Xero and Paul quickly formed a mutual appreciation society and many of the concepts and ideas that Paul shared in his 2003 book, “The Firm of The Future” are being adopted by forward thinking firms today.

After the amazing reception Paul received from his audience of a couple of hundred accountants at his keynote in November, I got chatting with Paul about the prospect of Xero sponsoring some extra events in the UK.

And so we did.

Later this month (April 23rd, 24th & 25th) Xero is hosting three half-day Paul Dunn keynotes in London, Birmingham and Manchester. I should say that while Xero is sponsoring these free events, aside from a brief intro from us these are not Xero brainwashing events per se.

Here’s what Paul has to say about them.

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Profiling partners in the Cloud

Many accountants will be familiar with Dennis Howlett, the UK IT finance commentator who describes himself as “never knowingly underopinionated.” He recently popped into our Melbourne office to meet some Australian Partners and talk about how they’re using Xero in their practices.

What’s really interesting is how they’re using Xero in such different ways.  One partner is offering clients benchmarking services, another is using Xero to let accounting grads spend more time with clients and another still is targeting American clients from Australia.  Take a look at the video to see what they had to say:

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Ready to rock with 2013 tax return forms

If you’re a New Zealand accountant you can start preparing your 2013 tax returns today, because we have again released the new year tax return forms on the first day of the financial year. This past weekend we rolled out all 2013 tax return forms ready for e-file. With close to 300 New Zealand accounting practices using the Practice Manager (WorkflowMax) Tax management solution we are getting an even deeper insight into the efficiencies that Xero and the cloud can bring.

The single ledger has revolutionised the accounting practice, in this specific instance around the completion of the year-end process. Throughout the year accountants can access and adjust client ledger data, resulting in a cleaner, less time consuming, year-end finalisation process.

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Adrenaline accounting

What do accountants, adrenaline sports, a monk, an Olympic gold medalist, and some of the most beautiful scenery in the world have in common?

They were all part of the annual Proactive Accountants Network conference (PAN) held last week in Queenstown, New Zealand. With ‘Revolution’ as the conference theme, it was certainly that and more.

PAN is an industry-leading coaching network that helps Australian & New Zealand accountants and their clients improve organisation and financial performance through coaching content and technology.

When Hindu priest and former monk Dandapani took to the stage, it became obvious this was not your average accounting conference. Years of spiritual learnings were condensed, translated and applied to business practices.

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