Case Study
ApprovalMax and Xero implement paperless accounting and finance decision control
@HelmutHeptner
Helmut Heptner, COO, ApprovalMax Helmut masters not only theoretical knowledge about effective organisations, but has helped many businesses to transform their daily operations and make them more efficient.
Learn how digital transformation is a people change process A cloud-based productivity enhancement story by a financial service outsourcing company that went through complete eradication of paper-led inefficiencies and legacy business processes for their clients...
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alanced is a business advisory firm providing financial services, guidance and education for small and medium organisations as well as start-ups. Located in Auckland and Wanaka, New Zealand, it provides a full set of services tailored to SMB’s specific business needs, from accounting and taxes to paperless office and virtual CFO (vCFO). Balanced focuses on using modern technology and extensive expertise to help business owners focus on their business. Using Balanced services and expert advice, business owners can rest at ease knowing they’re paying less tax and save the most precious resource of all, time. It also allows them to have better insight into their business, for example, by identifying the most profitable customers, understanding cash flow, proactively controlling spending, and helping to prepare business for launch or for sale. “Paper slows down business” One of the recurring challenges that Balanced would face as they engaged with new clients were the legacy paper-based ways of running 32 / Issue 14
business, including accounting. For example, paper-based invoices would be used to process payments and paper-based signatures would be the way to obtain business approvals – with the finance information being stored in filing cabinets for reporting and taxation purposes.
Balanced. “If a company was locked into a paper system, it was pretty much impossible to make the numbers work for us to provide services to such a client because of the inefficiency of collating information,” Paul continues. “By the time we located the information and put it in a format that we could reliably review with our client, I found that the costs were far too high.”
“Paper slows down business – and makes it expensive to find the information needed,” says Paul Struckman, Director “Paper slows at Balanced. “It takes business down Yes, we can help you! forever to find pieces – and makes it of information. expensive to find An even greater And when you do the information challenge in find it, it’s not in needed” overcoming the legacy the format that you technology barrier can make decisions came in handling change, on.” As a result, in paperespecially the mind-set change. based accounting, collating and finding information has become One of Paul’s prospective clients a significant part of a person’s learnt that the hard way. Two working day. of their key accounting people, a finance manager and an While that is a bad problem to accountant, left the company within have in a business of any size, a couple of weeks one after the inefficiencies imposed by clutterother. full processes became critical when trying to move beyond basic in-house bookkeeping, for example, In an effort to help the company during their transition period, Paul by onboarding accounting and conducted a discovery of their virtual CFO services provided by
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