Strettons Accountants

Firm Name	Strettons
Name	Wayne Morris
Title	Director & Chief Executive
Location	Taupo, New Zealand

Key Comment: "APS are very proactive. They come and visit us regularly and they talk to us about where they are heading with the software. They listen to us and I find them, personally, good to deal with. They care about us and they really want their software to help improve our practice."

Wayne Morris.

General

When did your firm implement its APS Advance Practice Management system ?
We moved across to APS and the Advance suite in May 2006.

How many users do you have?
In total we have 63 users.

Which APS products have you taken out licences to use?
Since the start we have been using Advance PM, PIQ (Business Intelligence) and Advance Tax.

We are now looking closely at XPA (Xcede Professional Accounting) - we had originally stayed with MYOB on client accounting and were afraid to take the step in 2006 but compliance is ever more important and the XPA standard sheets seem to make more and more sense to us.

We're also considering iManage as a document management system – up to this point we have not taken on a document management system and iManage looks like it will do a good job for us.

Who was you previous supplier and how long were you using that supplier's software for?
We were with MYOB Accountants Office – and I think we must have been using AO for 15 to 20 years.

From start to finish, how long did the meeting, testing and decision-making process take that saw you move over to APS?

We spent about 3 months looking at options available – there were only two – APS and also the upgraded MYOB model, Viztopia. We analysed both and visited two or three firms using each one before coming to a final decision – ultimately, we chose APS.

Was your decision to move over to APS made on gut-feel, or was it more scientific than that? Please explain how you went about making your decision....
It was very scientific – we wanted to have a relational database which covered everything and we wanted it to have a Windows front end. We felt it was time to move away from the proprietary software systems we had been using and move to a true MS SQL Server platform. APS had all of this and so, on a scientific basis, this was the major driver along with the Windows environment.

I have to say also that PIQ (Business Intelligence) also spun our wheel – and it has worked as we hoped in practice, with great reports that give us important information to assist in managing our firm.

Installation / Implementation:

Conversion of practice data from your old system to your new one was of course going to be one of the major issues in your implementation – can you tell me how the APS consultant performed in this regard?
This was relatively smooth. We tidied up our old database as best we could and the APS team wove their magic from there, transferring all our historical data across to Advance.

From where I sat, the data was transferred successfully. Lots of hard work went on behind the scenes from both our team and their team – but all our data, our WIP and debtors came across and nothing was lost!

A new system means that 'change' is forced upon team members – how did your team react to the new system and how quickly did they pick up the new system?
There were a couple of issues early on getting to know the APS Tax package because it was a different system – so some re-education was required - but Tax is a lot easier under APS.

Everybody really embraced the change-over and the reasons for doing it. They knew and understood the business case – so it was all pretty positive.

Product Functionality

How does the Advance suite compare to you previous product in terms of functionality?
It's superior. To be fair, we probably weren't using MYOB as well as we could have been – but when we moved to APS we took on board all the opportunities for business improvement and the functionality is certainly broader. Importantly, though, we've taken time to learn how to use it for best effect.

Future Development

What would you like to see APS add to its product set in its next releases of Advance that will assist your business? What does it need to do to stay ahead of its competitors?
There are lots of APS products out there which we are not using, such as CRM – and that would need to be on our radar at some stage.

Looking at some nice-to-haves, we'd like to see an APS Trust Management system as we're currently on CCH, that would be really helpful.

I'd also like to see an NZ version of the APS Australian Company Secretarial application – that would be very useful to have in-house and within the overall suite. All in all APS has a damn good offering.

With their Roadmap easily available to clients, the good thing is you can really see where APS is going – and while there are quite a number of applications we'd like to have, it's one step at a time for us.

Many of the firms I know have gone in boots and all with XPA, PM, TAX, PIQ and so on – we've simply elected to take a more measured approach.

Future Products

You mentioned earlier that you are considering a move over to XPA (Professional Accounting) and iManage (Document Management) - what benefits do you expect XPA and iManage will bring to the firm?
Currently only one or two people in the office can drive the AO client accounting reports function. So we are reliant on those people. With XPA everyone will be able to use it because it's Windows based and Excel driven – the standard sheets, and the upgrades will automatically feed through to us each year and we'll be able to integrate the Tax Return data from APS Tax into XPA. So moving to XPA will really help us in terms of managing our processes and will provide far more impressive looking financial statements.

From a document management viewpoint, we believe iManage will save us time searching for documents and files – we'll be able to find things quickly and easily. We also hope we'll save a lot of paper as we'll move to a scan and file process.

The other main reason for considering iManage is the risk factor – having a complete record of everything is very important from a risk management perspective.

Summing up

Do you have any final words that sum up how you feel about APS, its team and its software?
APS are very proactive. They come and visit us regularly and they talk to us about where they are heading with the software. They listen to us and I find them, personally, good to deal with. They care about us and they really want their software to help improve our practice.