We are very excited to announce that we’ve recently acquired Calculate Balance, a Silver Xero Partner firm based in Sydney and have employed it’s principal Jeri Murphy.
We would like to welcome all of Calculate Balance’s clients with open arms to the Interactive Family and are excited to continue to push forward with Jeri at the helm of our (soon to be updated) “support” services.
In our continuing quest to give our clients a more engaging, streamlined and interactive service, Jeri has come on board to head up bookkeeping, client training and support for our new and existing clients.
We are proud of the fact that our team is full of drivers and not drones at Interactive Accounting.
Jeri’s background, like the team at Interactive Accounting is from the bigger end of town. In Jeri’s case, one of the biggest, KPMG. In 2007 to launch Hawkeye Business Services, a bookkeeping and administration firm and after the firm’s second year they then established Calculate Balance.
As a tax agent, keen Polo enthusiast and an accountant with personality and flair. Jeri will fit right in with our clients and our team.
With the move towards online engagements for the service industry, there has been a recent influx of new applications to cater to this demand and help provide additional means to streamline the sales and on-boarding processes for service businesses.
The online applications allow you to engage with your existing clients and current prospects to iron out the nature, scope and size of an engagement. Once the client is satisfied with the engagement, they can then confirm service and it be accepted and agreed upon online confirming the scope of the engagement and “sealing the deal”.
Although the setup processes for these tools is not a simple as "turn it on and go”, the ability to customise the engagements is essential and thus it can't be the same for everyone.
Here's a couple of the quoting tools available at the moment that are now connected with Xero:
Quoteroller is designed to provide beautiful quotes for your clients and prospects with easy to use platform, drag and drop interface making specialising individual quotes and building templates easy.
Quotient focuses on using the dashboard as the “heartbeat of your business” for it’s quoting application. Allowing a central place for all activity on the quotes issued by your business.
Notable features:
One click customer acceptance
One step quote creation
Central place to organise and search quotes
Status of the quote and it’s # of views
And the following, SocketApp, is not currently available as a Xero add on but fingers crossed, we hope it will be soon.
SocketApp provides a similar feature set to the others mentioned above, but, it has a few additional features listed below, which, is why we use it in house at Interactive Accounting:
The ability to embed quotes on your website (HTML + iframe)
Direct linkages to our chosen merchant facility, which allows the order to be completed and paid in multiple currencies
Linkage to mail chimp enabling you to add new prospects to an appropriate list.
The product is only in it's infancy and has been added to the Rackspace's startup program and acquired 100s of clients within a year of launch.
We're working with the team at Deversus Inc to bring this into the Xero Add On Partner network ASAP.
Positive effect (using Socketapp)
We love metrics (we are bean counters), so we'd thought we'd share the effects of our new methods of automated quoting for our clients and prospects and the leads that we are generating via our new focus towards online enablement. This snapshot was taken from Socketapp on the 28th of January, we expect that there will be a few more proposals out before January 31st, giving us a constant trend upwards even over the Christmas period.
We are committed to our goal of being the place to go for your end to end online accounting needs and connecting your back end business flows to streamlines your business and investment. We even have events that help you suss out the potential opportunities for your business. See #xerocoffee and #startupbeers below to find out more.
Sticking with our theme of "focus"
We are focused on bringing our clients an Interactive Accounting service in name and nature and continually improving how we communicate as this is usually the source of many problems in the provision of accounting services. You will notice that we are actively creating more campaigns, more points of contact and working on ensuring that you have acess to the knowledge and service you need when you need it.
How do you get started with online quoting?
All of the products offer free trials and have different use case scenarios.
I already have quotes in word, why do I need this?
At Interactive Accounting we are all about streamlining your back end processes and connecting your systems so that you can focus on building your business and re-purpose any repetitive administration team members to deliver value for your business (perhaps in customer support or even sales as they have intrinsic knowledge on your business) Don't undervalue these staff members!
Having a copy and paste Word system is not scalable and it’s timely, you should really be focusing on reducing time to engagement and impressing your new customers.
Need a helping hand?
If you need advice surrounding which tools are best suited for your business and how they all connect with one another, we are able to assist you in connecting your systems and streamlining your online client engagement, sales and packaging.
Contact us about providing a professional systems assessment for your business and engage both our accounting, developers and design team to get your sales channel growing today and generate new business whilst you sleep.
Xero’s Acquisition Mantra:
Xero has maintained it’s speciality is delivering a Small-Medium accounting tool focusing on the single ledger since it’s inception. Looking to open up it’s platform through it’s API to other developers.
Workflow Max is widely used by Accountants in the Modern Practice as the preferred Workflow tool featuring document storage, Tax (in New Zealand) and the ability to track leads and communication with clients.
Xero & Workflow Max History
Xero openly acquired 15.9% of WorkflowMax in December, 2010 in order to assist in facilitation of building out the tax modules for New Zealand.
The acquisition of the remainder of WorkflowMax has been undertaken to tighten up the links between WorkflowMax’s practice Management and Xero’s Practice Management suite. With all accountants with >20 Xero subscriptions now getting WorkflowMax gratis.
From Left to Right: Chris Spence
(co-founder), Guy Pearson (Interactive Accounting), Gavin George (co-founder).
Xerocon 2012 (NZ)
Xero’s intentions for WorkflowMax
Xero will leave WorkflowMax as an application in it’s eco system as a standalone and will not close it’s integration points in the open market with the view that other firms and clients that use it will continue to build up Xero’s accounting partner acquisition.
Personally, I can’t wait for Xero’s design and UX/UI team to have a field day with this application!
There is an ever increasing move for Accounting firms to move online, this acquisition will no doubt speed up the process. With Hubone’s sync engine (Microsoft, WorkflowMax and Xero sync tool) and Practice Ignition (client facing modern practice) coming in to production shortly, our industry is set to speed up it’s move towards a connected way of doing business.
Congratulations
A huge congratulations to Gavin and Chris, WorkflowMax’s Co-Founders, their lean, mean and green application has come a long way since I first laid eyes on it in 2009 and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank them both for providing kick ass service, a great sounding board and a beer or two from time to time.
We are very excited to announce that we’ve recently acquired Calculate Balance, a Silver Xero Partner firm based in Sydney and have employed it’s principal Jeri Murphy. 
