A practice that has partnered with Advancetrack over the long-term, looks to evolve its direction of travel – using Advancetrack’s latest service offering.
Describe your practice to us:
We’re an independent, multi-partner, practice providing a broad range of services – with specialisms in farming clients and academies.
How long have you worked with Advancetrack, and what issue/s were you looking to solve?
It’s been around ten years working with Advancetrack – and our partnership has evolved over time.
At first the main reason, and something that’s still relevant, is dealing with capacity overflow. Initially it was about dealing with peaks and troughs where we couldn’t justify hiring another member of staff.
But it’s also freed us up to support trainees, as well as provide backup if there is any illness in the team. Originally, it was solely for accounts production, but then our tax team wanted to try out what we were doing. The Advancetrack team were able to turn around work fast, and this particularly helped during tax season.
This continued for a while. We then thought it would be good practice to work with another provider too, so not all our eggs were in one basket. However, the service wasn’t as good and promises weren’t kept. At this point we began using Advancetrack’s offshoring support as well.
Offshored staff are dedicated to your firm; they join meetings and they are someone you get to know as one of your team. It also helped with consistency and communication. Due to time differences, it also means that work can be passed on and is completed when you’re back at your desk the next day.
Advancetrack are in the office earlier than us, meaning we can send things to them and half of its already completed, so work is constantly on rotation, which massively helps.
Why did Podsourcing® fit your practice's plans?
We felt that work was good and on time, but for us we wanted a dedicated team that we could always talk to. With outsourcing you have the portal that jobs get uploaded to and then sent back to us. Having offshored, where you often have an individual far away on their own, we realised that it was better to get a dedicated team that could be a part of us.
Podsourcing® is more personal – we can speak to someone preparing the job in real-time and they understand what we expect from them. They also have other members within the pod there to support them.
We know that the accountancy world is changing - we want our people working on the files but, once they’ve learned the way of doing things, then we can upskill them and ultimately deepen our offering, and then move the file-work into the pod. We can have high-level conversations with clients having reviewed the work - it frees our time up to look at higher value offerings such as MBOs, funding and IHT.
Where do you see the future for your practice, and with Advancetrack?
We believe there’s as much work out there as you want – so a benefit of having a pod is we can look at our service delivery and find ways to provide deeper and more specialist advice to our clients. We expect to continue having a pod, grow it, and use it to help us scale. Then look at the big changes on the horizon, such as the impact of MTD upon sole traders - what are their accountants going to do? We’re trying to be ahead of the game; we’re willing to take on more work!
