Success stories:
Pitcher Partners
Pitcher Partners uses APS for both insights and problem-solving.
Using APS across their daily activities in order to streamline operations, support their clients and better understand the needs of their staff.
Background
Pitcher Partners is an association of independent accounting and business advisory firms located in Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Newcastle and Hunter, Perth and Sydney.
Pitcher Partners specialise in working with high net worth individuals and middle market businesses in Australia, including privately owned, foreign controlled, government owned and not-for-profits. Our clients require high technical standards, matched with a personal understanding and involvement in their affairs.
Challenges
- Find technologies which support the business.
- Gain greater access to data providing analytics and greater insights.
- Streamline operations, better support clients and better understand the needs of staff.
Approach
- Use data throughout the firm to allow people to work on tasks that require client interactions or strategic decision-making.
- Provide adequate training and change management techniques for the new process and systems.
Results
- Data capture and availability which provides insights into how we need to be supporting and serving our clients.
- APS is used across daily activities to improve the performance of the practice.
What were the challenges?
Adam Irwin, Managing Partner at Pitcher Partners Sydney, who knows better than most the value that data can bring to accounting and finance firms. The firm practises data-driven processes every day–for the benefit of their people and clients. Moreover, Adam understands that artificial intelligence and predictive analytics are “technologies that support the business; they don’t replace staff. They allow us to deliver a better product by giving us greater access to data.”
A data-driven supporting cast
These intelligent technologies can be deployed in a variety of ways to support a firm’s specific accounting and finance activities.
“We can run robots across a huge database and get it to look for anomalies in our data sets,” Adam says.
“Using technology for this purpose is quicker and probably more thorough compared to an individual. Equally, we can run analytics around comparing different businesses in the same sector, or different businesses in different regions, and then compare the data."
“There is also value around how technology can help with some of the procedural work. We can use robots to generate standard documents to begin engagement processes, update client records, adding time records or ensuring compliance tasks are completed.”
Solution
More time for what is important
By using data throughout the firm, Pitcher Partners benefits by allowing its people to work on tasks that require client interactions or strategic decision-making.
“If we can free up time on repetitive tasks, then that provides our people with more bandwidth to complete other work. Equally, it gives them some space to turn their mind to helping their clients in other ways, or to look for newfound opportunities”.
Result
Pitcher Partners uses APS for both insights and problem-solving
For some time now, Pitcher Partners Sydney has used APS across their daily activities to streamline operations, support their clients and better understand the needs of their staff.
“Most of the data we are capturing in APS is around how our staff are performing and where they’re allocating their time,” Adam says.
“This data gives us insights into how we need to be supporting and serving our clients.
“It’s most useful for us at the production end more than anything else because it allows us to compare how we served our clients in previous years. So, we’re really using these tools to inform how we’re performing certain tasks for our clients now. That’s the type of data we are using from APS. And then we can use that data to interpret potential issues in supporting clients, or alternatively to work on improving the performance of the practice.”