Business Times Feature
Digital consultancy helps humble heartland cafe thrive
With the numerous digital solutions available today, some companies might find it challenging to decide what works best for their business. This is especially so for small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME) owners who already have their hands full from running their daily operations.
Yet, keeping abreast of these new solutions is critical to helping SMEs save time and money, and improving employee job satisfaction, notes Ms Angie Koh, managing director of Advante Consulting, a one-stop shop that provides secretarial, book-keeping, accounting, taxation, payroll processing, and human resource services to SMEs.
Humble heartland cafe 2Six was one such business mired in their day-to-day operations. In 2020, the cafe was still using desktop accounting software. As the business grew and supplier invoices piled up, 2Six found it increasingly difficult to keep up with the data entry for their payments and reconciling the different sales collections.
Additionally, as all of its data was stored on one computer, the business owners did not have ready access to their financial information when they were not at the office, which became a significant challenge during the pandemic lockdowns.
Upon an associate’s recommendation, they reached out to Advante Consulting for help.
Ms Koh assessed 2Six’s business needs and worked with the cafe to implement cloud-based accounting platform Xero. Getting onto the cloud gave 2Six with ready access to its financial information anywhere, anytime. Xero’s automations, such as bank rules and bank feeds, also helped to streamline and simplify sales reconciliations.
Gone too are the stacks of physical bills and receipts that previously plagued 2Six. With Xero, staff can simply take pictures of these documents with their mobile phones, and scan and email the photos directly to Hubdoc, a free Optical Character Recognition tool integrated with Xero. As soon as Hubdoc receives a document, it extracts key data like contact details, transaction dates, and amounts. Xero then creates the invoice, bill, or credit note, with a copy of the document attached.
“With Hubdoc, data is automatically captured and populated. This helps clients to keep track of their expenditure and solves the problem of losing physical receipts.” Ms Koh explains.
In addition to spending less time on manual accounting processes, the owners of 2Six also gained a better understanding of their finances through Xero’s automated financial and accounting and budgeting reports, which are updated on the fly.
Says Ms Koh: “Real-time cash flow information is essential for business owners to make informed decisions. With important information at their fingertips, clients can chase their customers for outstanding payments or generate their own customised reports, instead of waiting for their inhouse or outsourced accountants to retrieve them.”
Thanks to Xero, the cafe has since expanded to three outlets over the past two years. This was all in spite of the Covid-19 pandemic, which largely had a negative impact on many other F&B businesses.
Accelerated growth
2Six is just one of Ms Koh’s many SME clients who took advantage of the downtime during the pandemic to improve their business processes and seek new growth opportunities. In fact, Ms Koh says her company has thrived in the past two years as many new clients have sought them out to implement Xero and migrate their accounting processes to the cloud.
Ms Koh notes that even though Singapore has moved to an endemic phase, SMEs must continue to transform their businesses through digitalisation. She adds: “To keep themselves competitive, SMEs need to be efficient and productive. Processes must be streamlined and automated.”
“For instance, working remotely is now the new norm for many SMEs. Employees today prioritise work-life balance and flexible work arrangements. To cater to their preferences, companies need to digitalise and implement solutions that enable work to be done faster and at any location.”
With an eye on the future, Advante Consulting had already begun looking into cloud accounting solutions seven years ago. It tested many different cloud accounting platforms available on the market but found Xero to be the most comprehensive and easiest to use, even for a lay person who is not trained in accounts.
Ms Koh loves that Xero has an office in Singapore and that its staff are very approachable and helpful. “Xero always listens to users’ needs and suggestions, and regularly adds new features to address pain points and make the accounting process more seamless,” she quips.
Since Advante Consulting began using Xero’s cloud accounting platform and its ecosystem of connected apps, its clients have reaped significant benefits, chief of which are the reduction of time spent on accounting processes and having ready access to timely and accurate financial reporting. Clients have also enjoyed a reduction in their expenditure on accounting fees. Many of the processes - such as the submission of claims and supplier invoices or invoicing - can now be done by their employees via Xero’s app for iOS and Android mobile devices, which are easy for anyone to learn and use.
Ms Koh adds that this new development is good for accountants, even though it decreases the time they spend on clients and, consequently, their fees. “This frees us up as their outsourced accountants to focus on more value-added work, such as consultancy. We are also able to grow into new markets and reach out to new clientele. Our staff spend less time on mundane data entry, and this has boosted our employee satisfaction,” she says.
As more business owners seek to digitalise their administrative processes, Advante Consulting plans to expand its App Advisory service offerings. Ms Koh is especially excited about the latest digital payment solutions hitting the market, such as Aspire and Spenmo. These apps can be synced to Xero, enabling data such as employee expense claims and scheduled bulk payments to flow seamlessly into the cloud platform and saving business owners even more time on data entry.
“There are so many solutions out there that can help our clients streamline their business processes, so that they and their staff can focus on more value-added work. Consulting SMEs on how to grow their businesses and implement the best digital tools for them is where we feel we can add the most value,” she says.
For more information about Xero, click here.