Putting Xero At The Heart of A New Accounting Firm How tech has helped Praxis deliver outstanding client service
Christopher Blunn, cofounder and partner, Praxis Christopher Blunn is cofounder of Praxis, a Londonbased cloud accounting practice that opened its doors to clients in October 2020. Christopher is a huge advocate for Xero and the positive impact the ecosystem has on the firm’s client service.
Christopher Blunn, co-founder of Praxis, looks at the challenges of starting a new accounting firm and how the ever-growing Xero ecosystem is at the heart of their service-driven firm.
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Below: The whole Praxis team from their first Welcome Day back in October 2020
ero as the main hub of the new firm
When Alex Shall, Pete Heslington and I set up Praxis back in October 2020, we had a very clear goal for the firm. We’re all driven by providing the best client service, and technology is such a big part of that client service these days. We’d all seen how easy cloud has made it to collaborate with staff and with clients, and as young and techsavvy professionals, we were keen to embrace this. So, with Praxis, we wanted to take those cloud tools and apps and use them
more efficiently – and Xero was always our choice of platform for doing this. When we first set up Praxis as a firm, we knew that Xero had to be the central hub. We’re using a suite of cloud solutions which are all integrated with Xero, and that’s making it easier to work anywhere and to engage with clients. There are so many benefits of being in the cloud, once you get through the initial teething issues. I would say that maybe 90% of our clients are now on Xero, and we’re already a Silver Partner with Xero, which is pretty good for a new
startup firm. Running the practice on the Xero platform When we started looking at practice management solutions, we knew that one must-have was that it must integrate with Xero and the wider ecosystem. As a firm, we use Xero Practice Manager for our work in progress (WIP) and billing, and Accountancy Manager for our practice management, with everything integrated with the main Xero accounts. Accountancy Manager is the best practice management offering out there, in my opinion, and works perfectly with Xero. If we raise a bill in Xero it appears in Accountancy Manager and you have that brilliant integration between both solutions. We had a lot of initial questions and feature requests for the Accountancy Manager team when we first started, but ‘out of the box’ it can do all the things we need as a practice. We use it mainly for holding client data and sending out things like engagement letters. All our engagement letters go out electronically – there’s no paper or printouts of old-school
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