Success stories:
Accru Rawsons

Accru Rawsons offers financial services with personalised service and easy-to-understand advice across all areas of tax, accounting, and business management. Their practical, hands-on support is designed to help clients achieve their financial goals.

Their friendly team delivers personalised service with the capabilities of a much larger firm. They offer a full range of services including tax and accounting, audit and assurance, business management, superannuation, and business valuations.

Workflow software for accountants without the complexity

In a fast-changing world, how does an established financial services firm evolve its workflow processes to improve communication, keep clients happy, and create more business opportunities?

That was the challenge facing Accru Rawsons when they began their journey of finding a new workflow tool to implement for their team.

For 20 years Accru Rawsons had been using spreadsheets for their workflow process. It’s not an uncommon workflow method in the accounting sector, but the lack of a ready-made tool, purpose-built for accountants, meant the practice had limitations to visibility over internal workflow.

As a result, internal and client communication was at times insufficient, capacity planning and delivery were affected, and most importantly Accru Rawsons weren’t maximising their quality, service, and productivity to attract new business.

“We decided we wanted to adopt a real solution, we didn’t feel spreadsheets were appropriate anymore,”  says Accru Rawsons Director, Melissa McCrystal.

Time to adopt a new tool

When Accru Rawsons took the step of finding a new tool to manage their accounting firm’s workflow, they found a lot of the systems were over the top and too complex.

“We didn’t want extra steps involved in a new workflow process, if it lacked the key elements like budgets and security,” says McCrystal.

Accru Rawsons settled on Workflow+ as it ticked all the key boxes now and adds immediate value.

Developed with input from accounting firms across Australia and New Zealand, Workflow+ breaks down the silos, and importantly, is integrated to APS Practice Management via the Contacts+ module (which manages the client contact details, entity relationships, roles and responsibilities and integrates back to the APS database in the + solution).

Workflow+ is simple. It’s integrated with the client and relevant team, and the data from our APS database connected effortlessly,” says Accru Rawsons Practice Manager Morgan Garrett-Sampson.

The ease of use is what's important

To get the team onboard with Workflow+ and resolve their processes, Accru Rawsons’s senior management held a workshop prior to trialing the tool. This ensured everyone was on the same page and everything was streamlined before management rolled it out to the wider team.

A half-an-hour Workflow+ introductory presentation was held for the team, preparing them for a pivotal change to their processes. Each team member was then given one-on-one training primarily to explain the concept of a job and task in Workflow+ before going live.

In just four short weeks from the start of the project, Workflow+ was rolled out to the practice and ‘the spreadsheet’ was terminated immediately.

“The team took to Workflow+ really quickly, they love it,” says Garrett-Sampson. “Has there been much tweaking since go-live? Not at all! It just works for Accru Rawsons.

“We like that Workflow+ doesn’t bombard us with email notifications. We supplement the system with an email notification that has a hyperlink to the job.

This means that the reviewer knows that the job is changing status and once the fee is raised, we then sign-off on the job.”