@spotlightrep
Richard Francis, CEO, Spotlight Reporting Richard Francis is CEO of Spotlight Reporting, a Xero award winning company providing business intelligence tools. Richard trained and practised as a Chartered Accountant for much of his earlier career, focusing on advisory and strategic services with a penchant for technology clients.
Going Deep as Virtual CFO The most obvious ’low-hanging fruit’ offering that Accountants can provide is Virtual CFO assistance. A Virtual CFO is an outsourced provider offering accounting plus advisory assistance to a business, much like a Chief Financial Officer does for corporate entities...
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any progressive accountants offer this service as do some of the best bookkeepers. At Spotlight Reporting, we empower our ‘super’ users (i.e. consumers of Spotlight Reporting, Forecasting, and Dashboards) to be VCFO’s for clients, with our software doing much of the heavy lifting. Providing useful numbers and analysis is not that far removed from the existing work that accountants do. The approach and processes are not dissimilar to compliance workflows, even if the mindset required (insight, not hindsight) and usefulness of the outputs is a quantum leap from the status quo. Be Your Own VCFO For the Virtual CFO opportunity to 36 / Issue 13
be credible, I recommend that you start close to home. Be your own advisor by adopting KPI’s, reporting regularly, and having better decision-making conversations. I was chatting with Tim Munro, CEO and Founder of the ChangeGPS network and a big Spotlight Reporting user, and he hit the nail on the head: “If you aren’t doing Virtual CFO work for yourself, what right do you have to do it for your clients?”
We want accountants to advise; to move from being a recorder of past events to being an architect of future events. Multi award-winner Steph Hinds of Growthwise explains how to get started:
Starting with Spotlight
“It’s actually not that hard…get started with 2 of your best clients, prepare a Spotlight Report - and make it happen! Identify 3 things that are positive and 3 areas for constructive improvement…and start the conversation.”
Spotlight Reporting is the most popular door-opener to advisory services in the Xero eco-system, as more than 1,000 progressive Xero firms can attest. Our outputs are designed from years of experience in practice by me and my team, to easily enable client conversations.
Sharing a sample Spotlight Report has also been a successful method for firms to seed a Virtual CFO relationship. Talking through the Spotlight Report, Forecast or Dashboard leads to an exploration of client goals and aspirations, allowing a service profile match to
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