accounting practices | AdvanceTrack Outsourcing

Posted on 22nd December 202311th January 2024 by Vipul Sheth

A demanding and challenging year – but a rewarding one for both AdvanceTrack and its accountancy partners.

In a stuttering economy, one held back by high inflation and interest rates, AdvanceTrack celebrated its 20th year in business; a highlight was our annual conference at the British Museum.

Despite the tough conditions, we have seen outsourcing and offshoring appreciated as a key plank of the operational and strategic direction for accountancy practices. And not just in the UK, but across the world.

Practices’ services have been in demand, and we have worked more closely than ever with them to work through resourcing bottlenecks or, more often the case, as the backbone of their core services. In doing so we’re very proud to have maintained compound growth of 60%… Can we do that again in 2024? Well, that’s a tough ask – but not too shabby for a 20-year-old business!

Opportunity and investment

Keeping such a level of growth requires investment, opportunity and ambition. Seasoned accountancy tech pro Dermot Hamblin joined the team in the spring as sales director, and our longest-serving team members were awarded with a five-day trip to Dubai.

Staff numbers have increased, as have our office locations. We expect numbers of both to rise again in the next 12 months.

Speaking of our team – it seems a great opportunity to announce that former EY partner Craig McKell has joined AdvanceTrack. Based in Sydney, Australia, the chartered accountant will support our growth in the Asia-Pacific region. Craig has run a tech business for more than ten years and understands the steps to scale an organisation. AdvanceTrack has a core of experienced professionals managing at both strategic and operational levels. As important, we’re ready to take things to the next stage.

Our conduct and service

What we don’t expect to change at AdvanceTrack is our commitment to both service and our conduct. We consider ourselves as values-based, and we like to think that our accountancy firm partners would vouch for us as living to our principles.

The practice market

It’s been spoken about in recent blogs, but we will say it again: the inner workings of practices must be streamlined, efficient and provide insight to the clientele. Without these things in place then everything becomes much harder for the practice to operate day-to-day or to make a good profit. And, inevitably, margins erode.

Even though the working world is tough, practitioners are in a great position to support their end clients through the sharing of important and timely financial or business information – whether it’s cashflow advice, debt restructuring, credit control or more. My biggest concern is practices not grasping the nettle of automation, process improvement and tech investment to streamline and make efficient their core compliance services. Perhaps more will come out in the wash during 2024.

We see audit as a huge area of growth for practices and, therefore, us too. Our audit services offering will grow in the next 12 months as firms look to manage resources. Management accounts and bookkeeping will also be critical. We will make another big round of investment in our tech – and no doubt there will be more chatter and developments in the AI space too.

The next 12 months will be transformative in the way we deliver services to clients, and perhaps your firm is looking to achieve the same thing too. Let’s see what we can do together.

Vipul Sheth is founder and MD of AdvanceTrack Outsourcing

Posted on 22nd November 202328th November 2023 by Vipul Sheth

Another tranche of practitioners is considering the cloud, but are they doing it for the right reasons? asks AdvanceTrack MD Vipul Sheth.

We all know and appreciate that once you’ve ‘been around the block’, you usually come back to the same point but at a different time.

For us experienced in practice, tax and/or technology, hearing similar conversations or seeing similar things happen is the norm. Sometimes these situations happen over many years – sometimes, for example, we get new chancellors saying the same thing every year.

There is now a sizeable tranche of accounting practices that made large, sometimes wholesale, moves to operate in the cloud over the past five-to-ten years. These early adopters could see the value of flexibility and security afforded by running their business in the cloud.

But there is a very sizeable tranche of practices that haven’t made that move – or are only now considering it (and often through their old tech becoming obsolete – or upon request of their clients). Certainly, at numerous events this year, I’ve heard conversations about ‘tell me about the cloud’ that wouldn’t have been out of place ten years ago.

Practitioners that feel they’re being ‘dragged into’ updating their tech stack are, in my opinion, unlikely to make the most of the change. I’d envisage they would try and replicate out exactly how they worked before any fundamental IT or operational switch-up.

While I have concerns about their approach, it is at least positive to see them attending events in the first instance – there is certainly a wealth of information that they can receive.

Full circle

The early cloud adopters, generally, understand where they’re heading – and also have a mature approach to IT investment and management. They will need advice and support from their tech providers, but this will often be strategic support as opposed to hand-holding.

There is certainly a concern that a wave of late adopters may eat up the time and energies of the major tech platform providers in the coming months and years. This may even see support costs rise across the board – which, after recent tech licence increases, would certainly be unpopular.

Ultimately, we need these late adopters to build a plan. This should start with the basic question: What are they going to deliver and to whom. Even if there is no alteration in that plan, asking the question should precede any major tech change, because those answers must be clear before asking: ‘how am I going to deliver?’

Certainly, a poorly planned update to platforms and systems will end up failing – clients will simply walk. As mentioned earlier, there’s tons of good content out there – whether at Accountex, trade shows or the ACCA and Xero roadshows that AdvanceTrack has partaken in.

Invest your time, and your thoughts, into making your practice future-proof.

Vipul Sheth is MD and founder of AdvanceTrack

We’d love to hear from you if considering your strategy. Maybe we can help. Get in contact by clicking here

Posted on 2nd November 20205th March 2021 by Vipul Sheth

Growing practices need support to drive efficiencies, improve processes and create value. AdvanceTrack has been integral in helping firms achieve their goals for nearly 20 years. Here’s our story, and where we (and you) are heading.

While technology is integral to what we do, outsourcing on behalf of accounting practices requires so much more than that. It requires a commitment to collaborative working, absolute prudence and rigour in terms of IT security, and a focus on client service. These criteria are borne of a mindset that comes from our own experiences working as part of – and with – the accounting profession.

MD Vipul Sheth: About myself, AdvanceTrack and Inside Outsourcing

AdvanceTrack provides critical outsourced accounting and bookkeeping services to many UK accounting practices. Working with the accounting technology you know so well, we offer the best combination of IT and qualified people to free practices up to provide a better and more valuable service to clients.

As for me? Well, I trained with a great firm as an auditor and business adviser, and understand the challenges and rewards of being an accountant.

I eventually ended up in what is now EY. I remember thinking that, with my smaller firm training, it would be difficult to cope in a ‘big firm’ environment. However, I quickly discovered that my work to date prepared me better than I could imagine. I already knew how to deal with everything from a technical perspective, but now I focused on the value-added service of tax.

Understanding the ‘process deficiency’ in accounting practices

Going back to practices and workflow. My biggest lesson was realising that EY didn’t have 400 ways to produce a file (I’m guessing the numbers of partners in the firm then), but just one way.

This was the lightbulb moment in understanding what differentiated the firm I trained with and the Big Four firm where I now sat. And when I left, I then realised that a client is transitioned very quickly from yourself to another very capable colleague with almost no difference in client service.

A few years later I put this learning into what we all now know as AdvanceTrack.

Finally, Inside Outsourcing is AdvanceTrack’s monthly publication where we share insights on practice management, usually with a tech focus, and highlight the work we’re undertaking. A print version is available or you can view it online at www.AdvanceTrack.com.

AdvanceTrack and founder Vipul Sheth – the journey so far

2002 I left practice with the ambition to start up an outsourcing business. I spent several weeks in India meeting people and concluded that it could be done, and successfully. Having met people in the accounting industry, I knew the technical capability was there – but I wondered if the technology was as well.

2003 Formally set the company up and sought to build an online platform immediately. Being someone who used IT rather than creating it taught me many lessons. Most importantly, it taught me that staff need careful management, and I needed to build the technology to run the business.

2005/2006 I found some developers who demonstrated incredible focus and enthusiasm for the project. I told them what I wanted was to build something accessible on the internet (they hadn’t called it ‘cloud’ at that point).

2013 Security and quality accreditations were achieved. This was without making any material change to any of our processes. The security accreditation just demonstrated how the whole process was designed to deliver higher quality in a secure way.

2016/2017 Despite many improvements over the years, we ripped up the platform we had spent over a decade building and refining. It’s hard to do, to take something that has helped deliver great service and growth for the business and consign it to history. We bit the bullet and put a team together to deliver a brand new platform for the business.

2018 There were good reasons to rebuild the platform, particularly the need to comply with new and exacting data protection legislation (GDPR) that was brought in across Europe. Our early planning helped ensure that with plenty of time to spare, the platform was ready for GDPR and the challenges that would be undoubtedly coming, particularly as technology in the industry was changing so quickly. We can be sure that we’ll need to continue making changes.

2020 While other outsourcers are beginning their cloud journey, we’re proud that we started our journey more than 15 years ago. We’ve reimagined it time and again but sticking to our core values. With the pace of change increasing in the sector, we know we have to constantly re-invent ourselves to keep relevant to the customers we work with.

Beyond 2020 We won’t be making big announcements until they have happened. We don’t make our commercial strategy a public manifesto. It’s fair to say though that we’ll drive technological advancements faster and more thoughtfully than ever. Our clients expect us to help them lead the change.