10th April, 2022
Connecting a practice with MYOB Client Accounting helps automate compliance workflows, and Mead Partners shows how.
A traditional workflow for accountants to complete a business clients’ tax would include up to 14 different steps*, but this situation is fast being relegated to the history books.
Over two decades old, Mead Partners is more than familiar with all the work that goes into delivering compliance services for clients. With two partners and five staff in its accounting practice, Mead also supports a thriving bookkeeping arm, too.
That means, for Mead Partners, efficiency is everything when it comes to servicing a growing client base, especially at a business-critical time like end of financial year.
READ: Bookkeeping basics: Guide for business owners
Partner at Mead, John Pititto said the practice had run into issues when trying to use traditional work papers to deliver compliance services for clients.
Traditionally a collection of documents collated by an accountant, work papers have undergone significant changes as business and financial data has moved online.
Today, ‘Workpapers’ is available as a feature in the MYOB Client Accounting module, and replaces the need for accountants to create and maintain their own work papers.
“The biggest issue that we had was our manual work papers sometimes not marrying up to the ledgers,” said Pititto.
“Well, Workpapers solves all that. They red flag it so that the employee or the accountant see those red flags, so they know they have got to go back and make sure everything ticks the boxes before it comes to us to review. So, it forces them to do their own review of the file before it comes to us.”
MYOB’s Workpapers feature adds over 80 industry standard templates and approval workflows to create consistency and reduce risk as accountants work between different client files.
Moreover, it’s designed with a sophisticated permissions system so that approved Workpapers can’t be changed without permission.
And the fact that Workpapers and MYOB Client Accounting are all online frees up practices to work in a more modern, flexible way.
“Initially we brought it in for myself and the other senior team members to be able to work from home a day or two a week, just to give everybody a bit of work life balance and family time. So, we thought well, online workpapers allows us to do that,” said Pititto.
“If I look back pre-Workpapers, effectively the efficiencies we have gained is two staff members, because we haven’t had to replace them, and our revenue has grown.”
Pititto and the team at Mead Partners are therefore not only gaining more time in their day to do the work that’s most important to them and their clients, it’s also allowing them to bring in more work with the same number of staff even during a busier-than-usual end of financial year.
“Our growth in our business has been from new clients coming on board and us having time to be able to service those new clients and secondly, it’s opened up a new avenue for us to be able to do a lot of strategic planning work with our clients.
“We gained capacity in our own practice, grew our fee base, brought on more clients. We were able to service them better and grow our fee base without having to take on additional staff.”
Want to know more about how adding MYOB’s Client Accounting can help you save time and deliver more value this end of financial year? Click here to discover how you can get good busy in 2022.
*This information was reported in ‘How Client Accounting benefits your practice’ — click to download.