Wheelhouse Advisory ran workflow in separate Excel spreadsheets, with no way to see across the firm or tell whether they had the capacity to take on more work. About 18 months ago, they moved their workflow into AccountKit. The shared overview let the firm run its new advisory and compliance departments, coordinate both teams on the same clients, and see where they needed to hire. Since then, Wheelhouse has taken on three to four more staff and grown its fees.
Key points
- Workflow used to live in separate spreadsheets, one per person, with no view across the firm.
- Weekly Monday workflow meetings kept causing confusion about where jobs were up to.
- Cross-team visibility let Wheelhouse run its advisory and compliance departments and work both sides of shared clients together.
- The firm hired three to four more staff members, using the workflow overview to see where capacity was needed.
- Fees increased over the year, off the back of taking on more work.
- The Inter-Entity Loan Tool is the compliance tool the accountants use most; Division 7A was added recently after training.
- Support replies within the hour, and a requested change (seeing more than seven workflow tabs at once) shipped within a couple of months.
The firm at a glance
- Firm: Wheelhouse Advisory
- Who: Alycia Stanton, Client Services Manager.
- Team: Around 25 staff and growing, split into advisory and compliance teams.
- Stack: Xero, XPM, AccountKit.
- AccountKit tools: Workflow, Inter-Entity Loan Tool, Division 7A.
The situation
Wheelhouse used to run its workflow in Excel. Every person kept their own spreadsheet of what was on their plate, and no one could see across them. That was the problem. "You don't know if person one has capacity compared to person three," Alycia Stanton says. Without that picture, the firm couldn't tell whether it had the room to take on new work, so it held back on calling it in.
Why they went looking
The friction showed up every Monday. The team ran a workflow meeting off the spreadsheets, and it turned into a round of questions and confusion about where each job was actually up to. The firm's practice manager went looking for something built for the job and ran the demos and trials. It helped that the firm's managing director already knew the people who built AccountKit. "It just ticked all the boxes," Alycia says.
Making it their own
What sold the team in the demo was how quickly it fit the way they already worked. "It was very easy to make it ours and make it the way that Wheelhouse runs," Alycia says, because every firm is different. It also gave newer staff a path to follow. "It was very easy for a junior accountant to come on, open up our task list, put in an individual return, and have steps there for them to follow." Before, there was nothing like it: "We never really had a generalised step-by-step process of how we run things here."
Room to run advisory and compliance side by side
The overview mattered more than expected when Wheelhouse split into separate advisory and compliance departments. "Since having AccountKit, we've been able to really accommodate that split," Alycia says. Plenty of clients are served by both teams, and Wheelhouse does a lot of monthly management reporting on the advisory side. Being able to track that work and see it next to the compliance work is what lets the two teams act on the same client together. As Alycia describes it, the compliance team can see that a client getting tax compliance work also gets monthly management accounts, and the two teams can work together for the best outcome. Before, "it would be a lot of back-and-forth emailing between different managers and accountants, and a lot of time wasted."
The work now: one view of the whole firm
The change to the daily work was less about speed and more about being able to see. Instead of a dozen private spreadsheets, the whole firm now works off one overview, their own jobs and everyone else's. Visibility also changed who owns what. "If it's sitting on your workflow, it's your responsibility," Alycia says. It’s a simple line that made accountability plain and let managers pinpoint where the firm was struggling and where it was doing well.
The compliance tools followed the workflow in:
- the Inter-Entity Loan Tool, the one the accountants lean on hardest, because so many of Wheelhouse's client groups run multiple entities; and
- the Division 7A tool, which the team started using more recently after a training session with the AccountKit team.
The results
With a real read on capacity, Wheelhouse could see when it needed more people, and which kind. Sometimes that meant:
- More accountants to clear the work; or
- More managers to review it, when the managers were running low.
"We've been able to hire another three or four employees since having AccountKit, because we can see that workflow overview," Alycia says. And it shows in the numbers: "I've definitely seen an increase of our fees over the last year since we've been using it," off the back of the opportunity to take on more work.
"It has just done a whole 360 on our whole entire firm. Everyone loved the overview of not just their own workflow, but everyone in the firm."
Alycia Stanton, Client Services Manager, Wheelhouse Advisory
Beyond the accounting team
The reach has gone past the accountants. Wheelhouse's admin staff run their own work through it too. As Alycia puts it, "we can have a million tasks on the go." And when the firm asked for a change (being able to see more than seven workflow tabs at once, given the size of the team), it shipped within a couple of months. That responsiveness is part of why the switch stuck. "I could email support and get a response back within an hour," Alycia says. "That's a huge selling point, because that's something that's scary to people when you start a new software."
Where they are now
Eighteen months in, XPM stays where it has always been, as the client database, and AccountKit is where the work gets seen, planned and done. Asked what it would be like to go back to spreadsheets, Alycia doesn't hesitate: "That scares me. It would be very, very hard to adjust back."
See how it fits your firm
If your workflow still lives in separate spreadsheets and you can't see across the firm, it's worth seeing how AccountKit fits the way you already work.
Book a demo and walk through it with the team.
