Being seen as truly proactive and partnering with our clients is a long held goal that simply makes good business sense. For many years, we have worked with clunky solutions that are not easy to use, or cost efficient to us as a firm or to our clients.
Often we resorted to developing our own spreadsheets to provide business advisory services to our clients.
Adding to the pressure of providing a highly valued advisory experience to our clients is that the traditional accounting model is being challenged due to the commoditisation of the industry.
We can no longer expect to solely rely upon compliance income streams as our major revenue source. This shift in change and rapid adoption of cloud technologies is causing a disruption in the accounting industry and leading this disruption is Xero; the online accounting solution that is bringing accountants and their clients together on what is known as the “Single Ledger”.
It is a beautiful place where adviser and client view and work on the same data in real time in the cloud. The single ledger platform has changed the game for accountants when it comes to providing real solutions for business clients and becoming what is termed the “trusted adviser”.
We now have access to our clients live data. Time is not wasted re-keying data from our clients accounting program into our own general ledger software.
It is this paradigm shift that has enabled us to provide advisory services in an efficient and cost effective manner to our clients, especially those that were using legacy solutions.
The tools that provide these value add services are available through Xero’s Add-On Partner network. The Xero ecosystem has over 150 solutions that all talk to Xero and extract the financial data of a business seamlessly and effortlessly into their own programs.
This is done through Xero’s Open API which allows other cloud solution providers access to Xero’s backend. Over the past month Xero has been on the road on its February roadshow, promoting its latest plans for the accounting profession and releasing details of its Practice Studio, its cloud based practice management solution.
Practice Studio is a combination of products that will come together over the coming 18 months comprising Xero Practice Manager, Tax, Workpapers and Report Packs, for free. Xero doesn’t believe in monetising the accountant side when it comes to these practice management tools.
This is unlike the incumbents who are happy to charge fees into the tens of thousands of dollars per year for these same tools, as well as charge our clients for their desktop based accounting products.
Seems like a bit of double dipping to me. As stated earlier, we are now able to provide advisory services to our clients for the same or similar fees as they used to pay for compliance only services.
Some may say that this could be de-valuing our advisory services, but in today’s general market, clients are demanding better value for money. By using Xero’s Practice Studio, as well as the range of Add On partners in the cloud ecosystem, we are able to meet market demand.
As we have embarked on this journey to the cloud, we have disrupted our own business in an effort to provide a true advisory service to our clients as well as benefit internally from increased efficiencies.
Ultimately, Xero was our driver for change to embrace new technologies to ensure that we can better service our clients. In order for us to remain competitive and profitable in this modern accounting profession we need to constantly evolve and find better ways of connecting with our clients. Xero provides us with the tools to do this.
James Solomons is a director of EFS Strategic. He is a Chartered Accountant, Xero Certified Adviser and a full adopter of Xero’s Practice Studio. Contact him on 02 8083 1500 or at james@efsstrategic.com.au
