For over 125 years, William Buck has provided exceptional accounting and advisory services. William Buck believes in 360° degree support for their clients allowing a collaborative work environment and ultimately, achieving the best result for their clients.
William Buck is focused on providing genuine support and help to a wide range of small to medium businesses. From startups to well established businesses, clients have access to all divisions within the firm,
In a bid to understand how William Buck is using Spotlight Reporting, we took a trip to their offices in Sydney’s CBD to discuss how they use the technology to prepare reports and forecasts, and enhance their business advisory services.
Enhancing client relationships
The Spotlight Reporting tools have given the William Buck team the ability to visualise important client data, develop relationships and pave the way for important conversations. In just 18 months, the team says benefits come back in abundance.
William Buck uses Spotlight Reporting to support and guide businesses at any stage in their lifecycle. For instance, for a once tedious task such as preparing monthly management reports, William Buck now simply sets up a template for their client and pulls in financial data on a monthly basis at the click of a button.
In addition to assisting regular practices, delivering reports and forecasting helps to deepen client relationships and offers a more tangible and practical approach to better understanding the business and making decisions. Whether a client is just getting started or is looking to pivot into a new area, visual reports and forecasts form a basis of advisory sessions or updates.
Enabling conversations
Karly Whitehead, Manager at William Buck places an emphasis on the fact that many businesses may not have good visibility over their data and are often using a software tool that over complicates the issue or is difficult to setup and consequently don't realise that they need assistance until it's too late.
To combat these issues, Spotlight Reporting is designed with two things in mind - ease of use, and making data easy to understand. The visual reports and forecasts highlight where a business is at and with trend analysis helps to identify areas for improvement, as well as showing areas which are thriving. This enables progressive conversations to be had, whether at regular meetings or at a yearly tax planning discussion.
As an example of this in action, the William Buck team has been using Spotlight Reporting with one of their key clients for 18 months, and have seen a significant improvement in efficiency and time management. Prior to Spotlight Reporting, the client was using Excel reporting, which was a tedious, time consuming process and produced information that was difficult to interpret.
Without touching the backend data, William Buck moved the formatting to Spotlight Reporting, much to the value of the client. With the clearer and easily understood visual reports and forecasting documents, the client can now catch issues earlier, compare budgets versus actuals, and oversee the last financial year without the need to jump between numerous reports.
Joining up with Spotlight
During the set up of Spotlight Reporting, William Buck was allocated a representative from the company - a team member who was committed to assisting in the transition and who would be there to quickly resolve any queries. This rep helped to train the William Buck team, shared timely updates, and provided constant support.
William Buck’s team have now all been trained in the software, and have their certification to further exemplify their capabilities with the different tools. They are now looking at deploying the recently released Transform in Action course to extend their understanding of advisory services.
Karly Whitehead, Manager at William Buck, says, “I’d highly recommend using Spotlight Reporting if you’re looking for a tool that can help clients with reporting and forecasting. We’ve found that it’s really helped us interpret data for the clients easily, it’s easy to use and their support team has been amazing.”
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