Success stories:
SPV Accounting

SPV Accounting are a family-run business based in the Noosa hinterlands, the Sunshine Coast and beyond.

Their philosophy is to provide personalised business, accounting, and taxation services to their clients.

Navigating through uncertain times

SPV Accounting’s journey with ChangeGPS’ software for compliance advisory started around 2014.

Accountant Seb Vecchio was looking to start another accounting business in the Noosa hinterlands and merged with a practice that had not yet gone through a period of digital transformation.

“The business owner was somebody about to retire who had 14 filing cabinets full of work papers and a storeroom that was full of documents from four years ago,” Seb says.

“We merged the two businesses together and slowly made everything electronic with the new business. When a business expo in 2017 came along, we ran into the ChangeGPS guys for the first time. That’s when we found out that even though we thought we were clever and got everything merged and electronic we were five years behind.”

Seb says that the practice assumed that ChangeGPS was for smaller firms and therefore not appropriate for their needs. This all changed, however, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020.

“ChangeGPS came to the fore during COVID because we had lockdown, everything was in panic mode. We had clients ringing up every two seconds to find out what was going on. We were watching sidewalk conferences that the Prime Minister would have, and reading legislation you hadn’t touched since university days. We thought: how are we going to cope?”

Using ChangeGPS to steer through the chaos

Luckily ChangeGPS was at hand to help Seb and the team make sense of the uncertainty.

“I was listening to the from the trenches podcast at that stage and they suggested joining their Facebook page and then ChangeGPS decided to do web events and they were a godsend.”

“Without those I don't know how we would have got through the COVID bit. As far as an accountant is concerned it was just overwhelming and at that stage you had staff working from home that weren't quite work from home ready, we were operating from home on three camp tables with cords everywhere and listening to David and Tim just helped us to slow down and take a breath. COVID truly was when ChangeGPS came to the fore for us.”

Starting off with CORE, Seb was able to slowly roll ChangeGPS out and get things in order.

“When we joined, we made the commitment to implementing all the tools. Firstly, just something as basic as doing the same worksheets, the same work papers for everybody in the practice. If you were a bookkeeper, you had the bookkeeping and could just run with it. So that was the first foray into ChangeGPS: using it to standardise everything,” Seb explains.

Added confidence in business advisory services

Seb highlighted the changes that he and the team at SPV experienced after implementing ChangeGPS, particularly in the way that they were communicating with their clients.

“The first thing you notice in transitioning to ChangeGPS is the different way you talk to people. You have more value to give and more confidence in those tough conversations with either your staff or clients.”

“You’re moving from low-level thinking to an entirely different mindset shift. We now focus on less clients but more profit, because with ChangeGPS we can charge for what we are worth, giving businesses more efficiencies and applying ourselves in a more efficient way.”