Success stories:
Peak Chartered Accountants
Peak Chartered Accountants take a tech positive approach.
For Anne Topham, Director at Peak Chartered Accountants. She has always been extremely conscious of the power of technology for accountants. It’s why she’s so committed to adopting new tech that adds value for her team.
Background
Based in Taumarunui but working with clients around the country (with a focus on the Ruapehu District and Bay of Plenty) has a simple premise – we want to provide you with piece of mind. What does piece of mind mean? It means that we provide you with a service that leaves you to worry about what you do best while we do what we do best. That means different things to different people, which is why we take a partnership approach, customising our service to suit your needs.
Challenges
- Find a fit-for-purpose solution.
- Get the benefits of a hosted server but still be able to work with web applications.
- Minimise performance decay from poor performing tech or process.
Approach
- Keep an open and continuous improvement mindset towards new tech and the cloud.
- Provide adequate training and change management techniques for the new process and systems.
Results
- We now have a solution that brings together all correspondence, documents and streams our apps, for seamless team and client collaboration.
- APS Accountants’ Workspace enables us to scale as required and gives us easy access to powerful reporting and analytics – all within a fully managed and secure environment.
What were the challenges?
Making the decisions for her firm
Having been familiar with APS for decades, Anne says adopting the APS Accountants’ Workspace was just a natural progression of choosing the right technology for the job – although it happened at arguably the worst possible time, during the onset of COVID-19.
“We found we were accumulating more and more programs that were cloud-based, and we were just using up so much RAM on our hosted server solution that the system would begin to grind as the day went on. Then during lockdown last year in April, I recognised we were in a hybrid situation where we didn’t need to be working through a centralised service. We just needed to be able to talk directly to the outside world.
I thought to myself: wouldn’t it great to have the benefits of a hosted server, but still be able to work with web applications and talk between the two of them – to have it all controlled so it was an integrated experience for users?”
“We made the decision to do that in August 2020. One of the big challenges was how we ran our document management system, because of course you need the bridges between your desktop and the server. So we not only required a change in platform, but our document management system as well.”
Solution
The smooth transition
For accountants in a small town, it’s safe to assume they have spent at least a portion of their careers working with more traditional tools, whether it’s a paper ledger or an Excel spreadsheet, and they are usually very familiar working with legacy systems. For Anne and her team, however, technology is a core part of everything they do. So when the time came to roll out the APS digital workspace, Anne knew the best way to guide everyone through the transition.
“We were fortunate in New Zealand that we were all back in the office at that stage. I actually timed it deliberately because we had a retiring team member, so she wasn’t affected by it but the incoming staff were trained that way from day one. That way we didn’t have the new team members learning two systems.
Everyone took to it well. They’re used to me changing things on them, which always helps. We are a team of 12 to 13, depending on what’s going on with the business and team members, and they’re used to us saying, ‘We’ve got to move forward to the next step.’ They understood the frustrations we’d been having with the performance decay, so they knew the reasons we were doing it. “
Result
Continual improvement is key
For other practices considering the value of adopting a cloud-based accounting solution like APS Accountants’ Workspace, Anne advises to go into any major change with the right mindset.
“You should always have a mindset of continuous improvement. Get your mind and your team’s minds focused on that – whatever they’re doing. It really makes these transitions a heck of a lot easier. You also want to make sure you’ve got one or two people who can help you drive it. That may take a little bit of time to develop. For some of them, change will never be a problem. But you do find that younger people are usually less scared of change than those who’ve been doing the same thing for the past 15 years.
Approach it as being evolutionary rather than revolutionary. You don’t want to leave yourself so far behind the eight ball that when you suddenly do need to keep up, it’s revolutionary and much harder to change.”