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An Accountant’s Journey: From costly manual operations to collect cash faster, using the cloud, to bring in invoices more efficiently while working remotely.
Automatically Collect Your Invoice Cash 24x7 Working from Anywhere!
20 May 2020
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2 minute read
Alexander Laureti, Partner at LMS Advisory, a three-partner Practice in Parramatta, tells the story of how LMS transformed the business side of the Practice and ‘never looked back’.
Here is his story.
‘LMS has been a long-standing user of MYOB systems for the Practice, but we became frustrated that our MYOB AE Practice Management system is like an island and not connected to a business system.
Our system to run the LMS business side, including Creditors and General Ledger, is MYOB AccountRight (ARL). For accounting reports, there is MYOB’s MAS system.
MYOB AE, ARL, and MAS mean double handling data between two or in some cases three of these systems to do what is needed for the Practice. Duplicated effort means more labour cost as well as delays in producing real time financial reports in the same manner that we can produce them for our clients who benefit from automation in the cloud.
I went looking for a solution.
My search for a business app that connects to MYOB AE led me to Cerebiz. They have an ‘Integrator’ that provides seamless two-way transaction data synchronisation between MYOB’s AE and ARL as well as Essentials and now also Xero Accounts.
We signed on with Cerebiz and proved to ourselves that the hourly and overnight synchronisation between our systems worked seamlessly and reliably.
We then looked into their debtor management system which provides a systematic and automated way to track and monitor the status of each and every debtor transaction across the MYOB AE desktop, ARL (cloud), and Cerebiz (cloud) systems.
Cerebiz had put a lot of thought into the debtors and cash collection; their other clients were seeing success with it and we decided to implement it.
The first step we were able to take was to invoice completed work progressively. We could do this as invoice sending is automated. It also means it was now possible to monitor invoice terms as we go rather than waiting until the end of the month.
We configured our invoices to have a Pay Now button with help from Cerebiz. We can turn on and off automated reminders as we need to. This move has not only brought payment of invoices forward but also improved communication with clients and in some cases has even led to more business.
Adding a payment facility to our web site became the next successful step in making it easy for clients to pay us at any time. They can pay us as it suits them whether it be after hours or on weekends using a secure portal.
Direct Debits are now automated in ARL and transactions allocated to the right account automatically. This has saved us the time and cost of manual receipting.
As I noted, Cerebiz tracks each and every transaction across AE, ARL, and Cerebiz. That includes regular reconciliations and crosschecks.
Cerebiz also has a ‘Promise to Pay’ facility that sends reminders to client when they reach agreements with us to pay in instalments. All the information about our data base is visible to our accounts team all in one place to save them jumping between a number of different manual reports. The daily ‘Promise to Pay’ list highlights those who need to be followed up.
All of our data is shown by Cerebiz in one easy to use portal without any need to recreate or replicate any client details. We now have one source of truth for our financial data.
In summary we save our admin team two to three days per month on not having to do manual repetitive tasks. We now have those same staff doing value add activities, such as payroll for our clients, that is interesting for them and fee earning for us.
