60+ staff, 2 states, 1 system: How Aintree Group retain visibility and control

Andrea McKenna and her husband Shane started Aintree Group at their kitchen table over 21 years ago when Shane left his partnership at a larger firm.

There are now more than 60 people across accounting, legal, and wealth management, with offices in Melbourne and Sydney, and a standing objection to one word in particular. “Practice is one of those terms professional services firms use all the time,” says Andrea. “But we say we’re not practicing anymore. We’ve had enough experience.”

What Aintree Group is known for is proximity to clients. Their philosophy from the start was that clients shouldn’t travel to the firm, the firm should travel to them, which has produced two decades of photographs of Shane in hard hats on factory floors and, most recently, in a hair net and coat touring a biscuit manufacturer to watch how the biscuits are made. 

“It’s understanding what their businesses are all about, rather than them just being numbers on a page,” Andrea says. 

For a firm that is hands-on, the harder problem is seeing inside its own operation.

Shane & Joseph from Aintree Group, visiting a client's biscuit manufacturing facility

The challenge: Every answer required interrupting someone

The Aintree Group team struggled with fractured work and information. Email was in one system, chat messages in another, and client information, again, was somewhere else.

"You don’t want 10 different systems, with emails going that way and messages going here, and then you don’t really know where all the client information is," Andrea says.

The biggest frustration of this disparate information was for anyone who needed a status update. 

Managers who needed to know where and why a job had stalled, or whether a client had supplied the information that was requested, had one option: get up and ask the accountant.

« As a non-accountant, before we started using Karbon, I did not have any visibility. I’d have to go to someone and say, can you please prepare me a report that tells me where things are up to. »

The solution: One system the whole firm can see into

Accounting practice management software can be a firm’s biggest software investment. And rightly so—it’s the backbone of the business’ operations. So the decision to choose the right tool was something Andrea and her team took their time to work through.

Choosing Karbon came down to Andrea’s team of accountants and what they really needed. Context-switching between tools meant lost time, distractions, and interruptions, so the platform needed to centralize the firm’s email, workflows, and client information.

« We finally saw the ability to bring all of that into one system. We sat back and looked at Karbon and said, ‘this is going to really change what we do’ »

The impact: Visibility, control, and centralized information

Unprecedented visibility over bottlenecks

For Andrea, the biggest impact Karbon had was on the firm’s workflows:

"The ability for our managers to see where work is sitting without having to walk up to an accountant and ask where the job is or if we’ve received the information we need from the client is hugely impactful."

With Karbon’s Kanban board view, Andrea can see how many jobs are sitting in a given stage or status, which tells her exactly where the bottleneck is and what to push on. 

The operations and client experience teams have this visibility too, and their roles have changed as a result. Instead of asking the accountants for an update, they ask how they can help move the work along.

Some of the team at Aintree Group

A month of leave and an empty inbox

One of the Karbon features that Andrea and her team find the most valuable is Triage, Karbon’s integrated email management system.

When a team member returned from a four-week break, Andrea was concerned about her emails. “I asked her if her inbox was out of control,” Andrea says. “And she said ‘No, I delegated my email to someone else while I was away and they cleared out all the things that weren’t for me to do’.”

In Karbon, you can grant colleagues access to your Triage so they can manage emails, tasks, and client requests on your behalf. Access is fully customizable, allowing you to switch or remove delegates at any time to match your schedule and priorities.

For Andrea, the power of delegated Triage is that her team member returned from leave and wasn’t bombarded with an Outlook folder full of irrelevant information. Instead, her Triage was a clear action plan of the work that matters.

Client conversations are available to everyone

Because emails automatically attach to the client and the work item, the client’s history is available to whoever needs it, not just whoever received it. 

This means an accountant can see if there are outstanding documents before taking a client call, and the accounts team no longer needs to keep its own separate notes on which client has paid or not.

This visibility helps protect Aintree Group’s point of difference. After all, a firm that promises to turn up in person is a firm that has their figurative fingerprints over all client communications, interactions, and work.

The Accounting Managers at Aintree Group

Advice for firms considering Karbon

Asked to describe Karbon in one word, Andrea picked "phenomenal," which extends to the Karbon team as well, not just the platform.

“I can send an email to anyone at Karbon and ask for support,” she explains, “and it’ll be less than three hours before I get a response. That’s not the way software works generally."

Andrea also values the distance between feedback and movement. Where other vendors have told her a product idea is several years away, her experience with Karbon is that the development energy shows up behind good suggestions, and that the people making the product will have actual conversations with customers making the suggestions.

Key Karbon features that made the difference

• Triage: Delegable during leave, so email keeps moving when its owner isn’t there.

• Work items and work dashboards: Work statuses are visible to managers, operations, and the CEO without a report request.

• @mentions on email: Questions get answered by tagging the right person instead of forwarding a thread.

• Client records: Email history and work items are attached to the client, and are available to accountants, client managers, and reception.

• My Week: A management action plan that organizes work, tasks, and email.

Key results

• 60+ team members across accounting, legal, and wealth management, in Melbourne and Sydney, working in one system.

• Firm-wide visibility into client records, communications, and work status.

• Total visibility over work bottlenecks.

• Elimination of context-switching between disparate tools.