Turning write-up pain into prosperity

Any accounting professional will be familiar with write-up clients – small business owners who only ask for basic financial reporting so they can do their taxes. And any accounting professional will be familiar with the frustration that comes from wading through client data that hasn’t been seen or touched by an accountant in months or more.

Trevor Smith, Director of Technology Services for Xero Gold Partners Harshman Phillips and Company was no exception. He found write-ups frustratingly inefficient – until he started using Xero.

Trevor Smith, Harshman Phillips and Company

From re-keying to matching

Here’s how it used to work: every month clients would email PDFs of their bank statements. He’d print them out, then his staff would enter them into accounting systems for analysis and reporting. It was a time-consuming process, rife with data entry and human error.

Then they started using Xero and the pain of write-ups all but disappeared. Rather than download and re-key a PDF, Xero’s bank feeds connect client ledgers directly to their bank accounts. Bank transactions automatically come through each day, and all staff need to do is code them. According to Trevor, this makes the process “far more effective, far more efficient and far less prone to errors”.

Trevor uses staff capacity as an efficiency metric. Prior to Xero, one of his staff members was spending all of her time on one client. Now, she’s working on 3.5 clients, and Trevor has plans to bump her up to four clients.

Of course, Trevor’s staff member isn’t working four times as hard.  She’s working smarter because Xero has eliminated “at least six steps” from the write-up process. What’s more, the output is more reliable. Since the transaction information comes straight from the bank, without any intermediate steps, Trevor can always vouch for its accuracy.

More than more capacity

The direct result of this efficiency is more capacity. Harshman Phillips & Company can take on more write-up clients without increasing the amount of time they spend on those clients.

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Global attitudes & trends in accounting

It’s no secret that the way we’re using technology is changing, and no more so than in the field of accounting and bookkeeping.

So, as we head into 2013 we thought it would be cool to take a snapshot of attitudes and trends by running a survey in conjunction with AccountingWEB, the leading UK/US accounting news site, in order to find out what accountants and bookkeepers around the world think about online accounting.

Who should complete the survey?

• Practicing accountants or bookkeepers with or without experience of working online, located anywhere in the world (remember to select your country!)

You can complete the survey at the accountingweb website, where answering the six questions should take no more than three minutes to complete.

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What’s going on in accounting firms?

I have been concerned for a while now that the 2008 global financial crisis has hurt accounting firms. Recently reading the Good, Bad and Ugly report (a survey of 272 NZ accounting firms) has confirmed to me that accounting firms are indeed hurting – but it’s not because of the financial crisis. It’s because costs are on the rise, and firms are struggling to control them.

Here are four key differences between firms of 2008 and firms of 2012:

1. The average fee per client has only dropped $45 per client or 2%.
2. Total number of clients per firm is almost the same.
3. Total employees per partner has actually dropped 8.3%.
4. In spite of this, profit per partner is down. At the median level the profit is down $23K or 10.5%.

So what’s going on? Accounting firms still have the same amount of clients as they did in 2008, they’re charging roughly the same amount per client, and they’re doing it with slightly fewer staff.  But profits are still down. Here are a few things that are causing costs to march upwards: Continue reading ›

Promoting our Partners

At Xero, we believe the secret to increasing productivity for small businesses is to have them connect with accountants and bookkeepers. That’s why we try to help our bookkeeping and accounting partners land new clients by providing resources like joint marketing campaigns, the Xero Advisors Directory and the Xero Community forum.

Now, we’ve added another tool to the Partners marketing toolbox: Partner banners, which let you advertise your practice for free on every page of www.xero.com. This means that partners don’t have to keep updating their websites as we add new features. Simply pass your customers to us, we keep you at the top of every page, and then we pass them back to you.

Here’s how it works:

Those accounting partners who have reached Bronze status or above have each been assigned a special hyperlink to www.xero.com. Users who click through to xero.com from this link will see a banner ad for that partner at the top of every page. Clicking the banner opens an enquiry form which is then emailed to the partner to follow up.

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