Published to AccountingWeb here
“You have got to be ready or you will be left behind,” Ali Jaw, FMAAT ACCA, Associate Director, AM Accounting
Michael Beech and Ali Jaw run AM-Accounting & Business Advisors Ltd together and have offices in Worcester City Centre. Their approach is very much one of mutual support pooling their knowledge and one of ultimate trust. Their success story on why it is so important to find the right business partner was recently featured on the AAT website.
In this interview with Michael Beech FMAAT CIMA Dip MA, Erin-Elise Shakespeare, Customer Success Manager, Onkho, finds out more about the challenges the practice faced and how they were drawn to Onkho.
What problem were you looking to solve?
Michael explains: “We had been on AccountingWEB and had read many rave reviews about Onkho. We figured how it could be a real boon to our business in our Accountancy Practice as a way of keeping on top of compliance deadlines.
“We have so many different tracking dates, deadlines and tasks and keeping on top of them is very important to us. They are the run of the mill things all Accounting Practices have to juggle….Annual Confirmation Statement deadlines, Annual Statutory Ltd Company Account filing deadlines, CT600 deadlines, PAYE dates & timelines, VAT filing schedules and so forth.”
How does AM Accounting use Onkho to keep on top of compliance deadlines?
“We had already set up an Excel cloud compliance tracker, but it was very manual and was a bit difficult to manipulate. Onkho provided different configurations for compliance sections and we easily then mapped everything across. Everything is now a click of a button in Onkho rather than changing cell values in Excel – which obviously is a bit yesteryear to say the least!
“We used the team functionality within Onkho to allocate tasks to certain members of our team and now have a scheduler for the rest of the year at hand. It’s extremely powerful for us as an Accounting Practice to keep up to date and never miss compliance deadlines.”
What are the main strengths of the Onkho system?
“The user interface of the software is easy on the eye, and I think one of the great benefits and strengths of Onkho is the ability to link directly from Companies House data. You also get the opportunity to pull in Directors personal information (useful for their Self-Assessment compliance planning), so this is a very quickfire method when you first set up the system initially. We think the hardest part is the initial configuration of putting all your clients into Onkho after that it really is child’s play. The interface is very intuitive, our IT Operations Manager said that he rarely had to look for help anywhere when using the software. It really was that user-friendly!
“We have found the success portal to be of the highest calibre and it is always a first route to getting knowledge about the power of Onkho and is more like a vast library of resources that is easily accessible in the system.
“The actual customer services team of Onkho are always on hand to help and very encouraging in guiding us along the way. Anything that we needed guidance on was not a problem and we found it quite easily to migrate from our manual compliance tracker we had set up on the Cloud in Excel. Setting up our team in the portal was very useful for us for Project and Time Management. It’s a real power of the system.”
What made you choose Onkho above others?
“We chose Onkho based on its reputation within the marketplace. We have read a lot about it and also saw their stand at Accountex in London, which impressed us. The professional offering and customer service liaison has been second to none. Onkho was very understanding of our needs for our Practice. It was a simple decision for us.”
Why did you choose the PLAN that you did?
“We chose the free plan initially … that said, we are looking at the subscription options as we progress. Simply because they add a lot more power to the free offering. We can heartily recommend even the free option as a way of getting started. It’s an excellent piece of software and as we get to grips with it more in future, we are certain it will play a core part of our IT infrastructure along with Sage, Quickbooks, Receipt Bank and Taxfiler.”
