Stan Pilkadaris runs Pilkadaris Advisory, a boutique firm that acts as an outsourced CFO, producing monthly management reports for clients rather than once-a-year accounts. AccountKit's amortisation schedules are his most-used tool: what used to be manual journals in Xero, or hours in Excel, now takes a couple of minutes to set up and posts itself every month. He also uses the equipment finance, Division 7A, franking and inter-entity tools, and turns AccountKit's client maps into a way to explain and sell restructures.
Key points
- Pilkadaris Advisory is a boutique, fully cloud virtual-CFO firm, with team members in the Philippines, reporting monthly for clients.
- Amortisation schedules are the biggest feature; setup "takes a couple of minutes" and posts entries automatically each month.
- Amortising large annual bills keeps the monthly profit and loss accurate, for example a $50,000 to $60,000 rates bill, or $480,000 of insurance, spread across the year.
- Equipment finance handles the current and non-current split properly, which the firm previously did not.
- Client maps help him explain complex structures and win restructure and estate-planning work.
- The monthly check now takes minutes, cross-checking balances rather than building schedules by hand.
- He rates the support as some of the best he has come across.
The firm at a glance
- Firm: Pilkadaris Advisory
- Who: Stan Pilkadaris, founder (30 years in the industry)
- Size: Boutique firm, fully cloud, with team members in the Philippines
- Clients: Virtual-CFO clients on monthly management reporting
- Stack: Xero, AccountKit
- AccountKit tools: Amortisation schedules, Equipment Finance, Division 7A, Franking Account calculator, Inter-Entity Tool, Client Maps
Before AccountKit
Stan has been in the cloud a long time, largely because he employs staff in the Philippines and needed everything accessible from anywhere. Before AccountKit, the schedule work was done in a mix of spreadsheets and "some other software" that was "a little bit clunky, and it was desktop based." That meant it had to live on one person's machine, which made it hard to delegate. The tools he uses now, he says, have taken that work "to another level that we probably never used to do before."
Amortisation, done properly
Stan is emphatic about accuracy: "we're pretty big on every one of our clients having everything amortised correctly." The amortisation schedules are how he gets there. Rather than a big one-off hit distorting a month, large annual bills get spread across the year:
- a rates and taxes bill of $50,000 to $60,000 becomes roughly a $5,000 monthly expense, split across the rental properties, and
- one client's $480,000 insurance premium is amortised across the full 12 months instead of landing in July.
Setting a schedule up "takes a couple of minutes," he says, and AccountKit then posts the entries every month automatically, work he "would have had to do manually by journal entry in Xero years ago." Each month is now "a very quick check," cross-checking the balances against the financials to see nothing looks wrong.
The compliance tools
Equipment finance he calls "a no brainer." The schedules are "beautiful," he says, and calculating the current and non-current portions is "something we're doing really well now," where before AccountKit the firm "just had it as a liability and an unexpired amount." He also uses the Division 7A calculator, the franking credit calculator, and, because many clients have multiple entities, the inter-entity tool to keep balances aligned between them.
Client maps that help win the work
Where Stan gets most animated is the client mapping. Every time he picks up a new client, he builds a map to get his head around the structure, and when he is proposing a restructure, the map becomes a way to bring the client along. Most people, he says, "get lost in the numbers and just tune out," so he starts on a whiteboard and then turns it into something clearer.
"I take a photo of the whiteboard and convert that into nice little pretty maps. Clients get it when they see it beautifully laid out and coloured; they can see exactly what the flow is."
Stan Pilkadaris, Pilkadaris Advisory
With a few arrows showing how a licence fee or a franchise fee flows from one entity to another, the asset-protection and estate-planning logic lands, and it helps "win over a client a little bit easier."
A personal touch that runs itself
Even the small things get used. Stan keeps an eye on client birthdays in AccountKit; a click on a client's name opens Outlook ready for a quick message. Being boutique, he does it for everyone. Clients appreciate it because "they know you're thinking of them," he says, and "little do they know you have a system in the background doing the thinking for you."
Support, and no going back to Excel
Stan is candid that he has not fully adopted the workflow yet, partly because "every accounting firm works really differently" and he wants to get it right. But what he does use, he uses heavily, and he does most of his client work in AccountKit rather than Xero "because it's all integrated." He has no interest in returning to spreadsheets for the schedule work: "as soon as it goes into Excel, we're just going to have rows and columns and errors." The support, he adds, has been "superb, probably some of the best support I've come across."
See how it fits your firm
If you produce monthly numbers for clients and want your schedules accurate without the manual hours, it's worth seeing how AccountKit fits the way you already work. Book a demo and walk through it with the team.
