Cloud accounting case study: Journey Ltd

When and why did you make the move to cloud accounting?

We were quite an early adopter of cloud accounting having moved from Sage to Xero in 2014. It wasn’t a difficult choice to be honest, we were already pretty good at producing monthly reports, but they would invariably be available a good few weeks after month end and the debtors and creditors list would be out of date almost immediately meaning quite often we’d end up chasing money which had already been paid, or more importantly allowing debtors to go way overdue.

Xero accounting’s appeal was pretty low level, just the ability to have live bank feeds and up to date reconciled accounts showing our cash position, debtors and creditors at our fingertips made it a no-brainer. It also helped that it was the preferred solution recommended by our advisors. What I didn’t realise was the level of detail we could go to in drilling down on information.  This made it easy for us to get answers to questions we might have, which otherwise we’d have to ask our bookkeeper.

Are you happy with it?

Absolutely! As I said before, the information we can get from it is hugely beneficial to our business. Apart from having a customised dashboard that gives us a live view of our financial position, we use a number of plugins which allow us to manage expenses, cash flow forecasting and debtor management.  We also have a lot of freelance service providers who are integral to delivering great work for our clients – keeping on top of our cash flow and paying them on time makes for a great working relationship – which is paramount when we need to deliver work, often at the last-minute.

Tell us more about the forecasting?

Because everything’s at our fingertips we can plugin Float, which takes a direct feed from Xero.  Having an up to date position of payables/receivables means we’re not starting a cash flow forecast from scratch each time allowing us to create scenarios quickly and from accurate data.

What else does it do?

Well we’re a small business, so we get plenty out of it for our requirements already, but we’re also planning to fully integrate it with our project management software and CRM system allowing us an even broader and fully integrated data set for managing our business.  The fact it is cloud based also means we can collaborate easily with our advisers – no more sending back-ups back and forth!  One view, real time data is much more powerful.

Will it help you grow your business?

There’s no panacea solution to growing a business beyond hard work and a great strategy, but what it does do is provide us the peace of mind that we know where we are thus giving us more time to focus ON our business rather than being caught up in it, chasing money, managing payments etc. We’re working with Wilson Partners using their ON.TRAC platform and advisory service to help us develop our strategy and move our business forward – having up to the minute data is imperative to achieve the best results.

What about Making Tax Digital?
As far as I can tell we don’t need to do much to be compliant as Xero is making it happen, and I’m sure that as further tax revenue streams become digital then I’m pleased to know we’ve already got a solution in place.

Overall what would you say about Xero

Well, I think for any small to medium sized business, cloud accounting is a must. To put yourselves in the best position to run and grow your business and to be able to seize opportunities, then the data available makes it an absolute no-brainer.