Accountant’s firm transformed by practice management software

All set for St. Patrick’s Day? Rushing to Penneys to grab your favourite shamrock shirt for the parade? While it’s exciting anticipating the bank holiday weekend, it can feel like a rush trying to get all your ducks in a row work-wise beforehand. So, we thought it’d be a great opportunity to put a spotlight on one of our Irish users, Paddy Quinn, and how he used practice management software to take his firm to the next level.

How this Irish accountant transformed their firm with practice management software

Before starting his own practice, Paddy spent 10 years working as a chartered accountant in industry. After six years as a Finance Director at a law firm, he decided it was the right time to step out on his own. So, in 2016, he launched his practice from home, Paddy Quinn & Co Chartered Accounting. He now oversees a team of eight in north Dublin, close to the National Botanical Gardens.

As he was building his firm from the ground up, Paddy wanted to make sure he used intelligent, efficient and reputable cloud technology from the get-go. This has since become one of the firm’s core values, allowing him to attract and retain the talent he needs.

I always wanted to go down the route of having people be able to work from home, to employ qualified accountants who want to get out of the corporate environment.

While he had adopted the likes of Xero and ReceiptBank, he needed to invest in an efficient internal system to help manage his team’s workload, deadlines, and run his remote firm smoothly. He took a look at Bright’s cloud practice management solution, AccountancyManager.

Our CRO integration

How could practice management software help? Well firstly, our integration with the CRO means you don’t need to manually enter all your clients’ compliance deadlines from the CRO and into your internal filing system. Instead, AccountancyManager acts as an all-in-one filing system for your clients’ details and deadlines. Our little leprechauns pull any essential client info and deadlines from the CRO straight into our system, and can create task lists based on these dates. This can save your firm so much time onboarding new clients and since everything is pulled directly from the source, you can rest assured that everything is up-to-date and accurate.

Plus, when you’ve created your task lists, you can see all their progress and due dates at a glance. This way, nothing slips through the cracks. If you want to get further information about a task, just click on it and boom all its relevant details are right in front of you.

“Life before AccountancyManager was very manual and very chaotic, with no real structure. Since we’ve got AccountancyManager, we’ve been able to put more structure around things. It’s a crucial part of our practice now.”

See how your firm spends its time

Paddy keeps a consistently close eye on how his firm spends time by using the time tracker feature in AccountancyManager.

I’ll sit down with the Office Manager and look over the time posted on AccountancyManager each week. What time has been recorded, which clients etc. And that forms the basis for us to have a discussion with the team at the weekly team meetings… Before using AccountancyManager to track time, we wouldn’t have realised we were spending three or four hours a month with a client when we’re charging for one or two hours. Now we can change the proposal for the following year and charge the new fee.

How can your team use it? Just press the clock icon in a task and the timer starts ticking. When they finish a task, they exit, and the timer stops. This syncs to your time sheets in the system too, letting you weigh up between chargeable and non-chargeable hours. It has an incredibly intuitive and easy-to-use interface, so it can be used from the get-go, holding your team accountable for the work they do while boosting productivity.

Oh, and since Paddy mentioned proposals, we’ve got another trick up our sleeve. You can generate proposals in just minutes through AccountancyManager too. Just add your relevant services, fees, etc. and we’ll fill in the proposal for you. All you need to do is send it out. Once the client accepts it, they can sign it there and then through the system and receive their letter of engagement too. Practice management software really makes your onboarding easy as pie, saving you more than your fair share of gold in the long run.

Here at Bright, we’re proud to be an Irish-born company, committed to helping firms across the nation save time, run smoother and boost productivity. Interested in how practice management software can streamline your firm to a whole new level? Book a quick free demo of it today to see it in action.

Related articles:

This content may have been developed with the assistance of AI tools. Content is reviewed by a member of the Bright team before publication. Guidance on legislation can be obtained from your industry body.