How Change Accountants & Advisors achieved full visibility and control
Change Accountants & Advisors was formed in 2011 by Timothy Munro, borne out of a highly successful firm Munro co-founded and ran for the prior 20 years. Their purpose is to help their clients make smart financial decisions so they can have a beautiful future.
“We don’t only focus on tax or BAS to help them achieve this. We focus on how we can make our clients better off so they can have more time with their families, more holidays, buy nice cars, drink nice wine, pay off their homes, and do everything that people want to do, but never get the advice to achieve this,” says Munro.
Change Accountants has always been a cloud-only business, which has meant that they have always been prepared to innovate and explore new cloud solutions that will help them be more efficient and profitable, and allow them to provide better service to their clients.
Battling with a lack of transparency
Despite having complete confidence in his staff, Munro was always concerned about his lack of visibility.
“When our team leaves every night, their knowledge leaves too. So the big frustration for me was that if I ever needed to know what they were saying in an email or where things were at with a client, I could rarely find it,” he says.
With client communication stuck in their individual inboxes, it was impossible for staff to know what others were saying or the progress of jobs that they were working on.
And the lack of transparency extended beyond email—without one single place where they could work and collaborate, staff had difficulty knowing what others were working on and where their bottlenecks were occurring.
“We needed a solution that no one had developed. Until Karbon came along.”
Discovering the answer
Karbon’s centralized workstream collaboration platform allowed Change to combine their email, discussions, tasks, and workflows, uniting their team with a single place to work together.
Karbon’s deep integration with Office 365 brought their email out of silos and into a shared team workflow, giving unforeseen visibility to discuss, assign and action.
Rather than relying on scattered systems and incomplete information, Karbon transforms email into actionable tasks, providing context to work and communication.
Karbon is also flexible enough to adapt to different workflows and roles—an essential factor for a business like Change, which includes multiple teams and staff who deliver vastly different work.
“Karbon gave us the power to look at any email address, any response from a client, any piece of work, basically anything anywhere, and instantly see what is going on.”
Change began using Karbon in 2016. Karbon’s onboarding team worked closely with them to migrate their data, provide one-on-one champion training and ongoing team sessions, which ensured the entire team transitioned quickly.
But the number one factor which ensured a smooth implementation was how quickly the team saw the potential in Karbon to transform the way they work.
“My team instantly understood how Karbon could help us plan better, deliver work better, communicate better, see where anything is at, and collaborate to get things done. Because my team grasped that, they were on board from day one,” Munro says.
A solution for everyone
Karbon has been widely embraced by the entire Change team in a variety of ways.
The Client Services Coordinator keeps one screen open on Karbon all day to schedule jobs, shift things around, and see who is working on what.
Accountants manage every individual job in Karbon, working through checklists that outline each step that needs to be completed. And when they need something from a client they schedule Client Tasks and use auto-reminders to ensure the client sends back what is required.
Templates have been created for all of the common processes carried out by the team which allows anyone to complete the same fine-tuned process, carry out every necessary step, and maintain complete consistency.
And the entire team benefits from the way Karbon brings their Office 365 email out of siloed inboxes into a shared workflow. An audit trail is automatically created for every client or job, which shares how they are communicating with clients.
“If a client rings up and wants to know where something is, we can instantly tell them. We've got full transparency and can see the last email with the client or notes from a phone conversation.”
Peace of mind
Karbon has brought big productivity and efficiency gains across the business, which has directly impacted top line growth.
In the last six months revenue has grown by 15%, which Munro attributes to time savings gained from Karbon and the fact that he now has complete confidence in what his team is doing,
Karbon has also improved the team’s focus on the outcomes they are delivering and how they can improve it each time. “If there is an issue, or if I just want to see where something is at, I can instantly find it. This has lead to big time-savings,” he says.
But above all, peace of mind is perhaps the most important benefit that Karbon provides.
“I can go in and see what happened today, what didn't happen, and fix something if it wasn't done. Before Karbon, this would have taken me half a day if I was lucky. Now I can find this in two minutes. It has really changed the game with how we do things,” Munro says.
“Karbon lets me see what's going on anywhere within my business. It allows me to sleep well knowing that what we’ve promised as an accounting business, we’re delivering.”
Key results
15% revenue growth attributed to time savings gained from Karbon
Productivity and efficiency gains across the entire team
Full visibility across all client communication
