Kat Abrahams owns Keystone Advisory & Tax, a boutique Sydney firm that puts the client relationship ahead of automation for automation's sake. She spent two years testing AccountKit before moving the firm's stack across in May, drawn in by the Division 7A calculator. It has since taken the rework out of compliance, given the team a flexible way to allocate and track jobs after a restructure, and cut the number of times anyone has to jump back into XPM. What she likes most is that it made the work easier without getting between the firm and its clients.
Key points
- Keystone Advisory & Tax is a client-focused firm in Sydney, with a team of 12, with many clients in the creative space.
- Kat tested AccountKit for about two years before switching the firm's app stack over in May.
- The Division 7A calculator drew her in; it removes the rework the ATO calculator forced, which she puts at "an hour at least" every time a review comes back with a change.
- The inter-company loan tool made a big difference for a large group she manages.
- After a team restructure, AccountKit gave the firm a flexible way to allocate and track jobs for review.
- The two-way sync with XPM means the team spends far less time bouncing between systems.
- She values that AccountKit does not try to automate away the client relationship.
The firm at a glance
- Firm: Keystone Advisory & Tax
- Who: Kat Abrahams, owner (20 years in accounting)
- Size: Boutique firm, team of 12, Surry Hills;
- Clients: Small to medium sized businesses, with a focus on the creative space
- Stack: Xero, XPM, AccountKit, SharePoint, FuseSign
- AccountKit tools: Division 7A, Inter-Company Loan Tool, Workflow, Document Management, Client Maps
A two-year trial
Kat did not rush. "It actually took us about two years to use AccountKit," she says. She kept an account running, using it quietly on a single client "just to see it, so I could sell it to the team." The firm was reaching the point where parts of its existing stack "no longer met what we needed, or was actually creating bottlenecks," so in May, at the busiest time of the year (with the input of the whole team), she moved the whole app stack across. One sticking point was documents: her previous system worked on a database model, which Kat personally liked, but the rest of the team preferred a folder structure.
There was a spreadsheet habit to break, too, finding the point where a proper tool should take over from a spreadsheet that she had previously always just been able to build herself.
The tool that drew her in
Division 7A was the reason she came. "I wanted the Div7A calculator, basically. That's all I wanted," she says. The difference against the ATO calculator is the rework it removes. With the ATO tool, "you don't get to save it. As soon as it goes in for review and it comes back with a change, you have to go and redo all your calculations. There's an hour of your time, at least." AccountKit keeps the data, pushes the result through to Xero, and lets her re-run scenarios without starting over. Her word for the time saved: "insane."
The inter-company loan tool earned its place too, especially on a large group she looks after with multiple intercompany transactions. It was less relevant to the rest of the team, she notes, simply because of the mix of clients they each handle.
Workflow after a restructure
A recent team restructure changed how jobs get reviewed and allocated, and the workflow flexed to match. The firm now runs two different treatments side by side:
- Sole traders and individuals sit in an unallocated bucket that a set review group can pick up as they have capacity.
- Larger jobs are routed to the specific person who should review them.
Either way, Kat can see where every job is "without having to take them off our list, or give it to someone and it disappears into the ether." She builds her own views for different purposes, a review page and a work-in-progress list filtered by team member, so she can see what is on each person's plate "in a snapshot."
She is honest that it has not replaced everything yet. She still runs a separate spreadsheet that combines ATO lodgements with team capacity, and is waiting on AccountKit's lodgement tracker to bring those together. Even so, being able to pull workflow and lodgement reports out of AccountKit has already reduced a significant amount of manual input that was required from the whole team to main our old lodgement tracker
Efficiency without losing the client
For a firm that describes itself as an "advocate for the little guy," how a tool treats the client relationship matters as much as what it saves. That is exactly why AccountKit's approach to automation suits her.
"It's not about automating all your emails and those trigger-type things, because that loses the connection with your clients. It's about making it easy to find all that information, so having that connection with your clients is still as easy to do."
Kat Abrahams, Keystone Advisory & Tax
Easy to pick up
Nine months in, XPM is still "our Bible," as Kat puts it, and AccountKit is "this umbrella that sits over everything." New team members get up to speed fast: "We had someone start last week and she's already using it super proficiently." And her main message to anyone who looked at it a while ago and moved on: "It's not what you probably thought it was when you first saw it. When I looked at it two years ago, it's not what it is now."
See how it fits your firm
If you want your compliance tools, workflow and documents in one place over XPM, without automating away the client relationship, it's worth seeing how AccountKit fits the way you already work. Book a demo and walk through it with the team.
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