Today, Syft Analytics is an international app used by accountants, bookkeepers, franchises, universities, business owners, and financial institutions all around the world. Syft has won numerous awards, from Xero to the Accounting Excellence awards, and been nominated for many more from the Luca Awards to the International Accountancy Awards. But Syft's beginnings were humble. In 2016, Vangelis Kyriazis (our current CEO and Co-founder of Syft) was running his own accounting practice and found that his clients lacked the kind of data and reporting that bigger businesses had access to, and which could help them make much better business decisions.

How did he go from practice to product? I sat down with Vangelis to find out how he moved from a small firm to an indispensable application in just a few short years, and the role that he sees Syft fulfilling for accountants and SMEs.

Vangelis Kyriazis studied to be a chartered accountant at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Following this, he completed his articles at Investec, a South African and UK listed investment bank, where he worked in two different divisions.

The second division that Vangelis worked in consisted of 500 people. The division's accounting was centralized into a finance team, and within that team, there were different sub-divisions, each with its own departmental reporting across revenue and expenses (where teams generated revenue).

One of the tasks that Vangelis was responsible for in that team was preparing reports for approximately 30 different teams. Having to generate this many reports was incredibly time consuming. So, he tried to build a workaround to make his life easier.

“One thing that I did that was the highlight for me was that I tried to automate that process. So, previously it would take a week for someone to do this kind of work but through working with Excel and VBA, I managed to extract the data with the click of a button and it would produce the report a few seconds later. It was more visual and could easily be re-run if changes had been made.” - Vangelis Kyriazis, Co-founder and CEO of Syft Analytics

This was similar to what Syft would later do for SMEs but at a corporate level and in Excel.

As he says, this means that “you can get an end product by clicking one button.” Now that he had figured out a workaround, he would no longer “have to spend a week of [his] time generating these reports”, but could instead, “just click the button, get the end report pack and then rather add some value on top of it - a few insights and commentary on the performance.” However, it took Vangelis roughly two months to automate the process.

After completing his articles, Vangelis started his own accounting practice and began to think about reporting for smaller companies.

“When I started my accounting practice in 2016 and we started looking at reporting, I thought back a lot to that time when I was automating reporting in Excel.” - Vangelis Kyriazis, Co-founder and CEO of Syft Analytics

With his experience working in a bigger corporation, Vangelis knew the world of possibilities that could be opened by tapping into financial data and building detailed reports. Now, he wanted to find a way to bring this wealth of information to smaller businesses to help them grow. So, he turned to Microsoft Excel once more.

“I think Excel is an accountant’s best friend. Most accountants become Excel gurus; they know shortcuts in absolutely everything. And Excel is great because it gives you unlimited flexibility. But things do change: you add new accounts, you add new customers… So the data is always dynamic and changing. In order to automate it fully in Excel you have to be really good at accommodating the changes in dates, in the number of rows, and in the number of accounts.” - Vangelis Kyriazis, Co-founder and CEO of Syft Analytics

Excel is a powerful tool - no question about it - but it takes a long time to automate processes in Excel and it’s a pain when you need to make changes.

“In the accounting practice, we started to export data into Excel and we tried to produce graphs and visualizations and automate that reporting process. And then the founding of Syft was our way of replacing those Excel models with something easier and quicker to use.” - Vangelis Kyriazis, Co-founder and CEO of Syft Analytics

Many accountants have very sophisticated Excel models that they input data into and generate graphs from, but, as Vangelis says, “you always know what an Excel graph looks like.” He wanted to create a platform that could not only speed up the process of generating graphs and reports, but make them look better and different from the standard Excel graphs.

In addition to this, Syft’s reports would give you the capacity to offer additional value to both smaller and larger clients.

“If you can click one button and get a report for your clients, why not run a very basic report for all of your clients and then give it to them and see if that triggers a reaction? Maybe they’ll say ‘I want more of this, I want more detail, I want this more often’. Maybe you can give them a very basic report once a quarter, and then if they want it monthly or if they want it to be more detailed, you can upsell that service to them. So Syft would allow you to give all 100 clients something very basic, quarterly, as well as something more in depth for the 20 clients that want something deeper and more often.” - Vangelis Kyriazis, Co-founder and CEO of Syft Analytics

Syft’s reports can be used as part of the process of delivering business advice to clients, a service that many growing companies can benefit from.

Over time, Syft’s reports have adapted to meet changing needs. Some of the most useful aspects of Syft reports according to Vangelis include:

Preview links are undoubtedly the way of the future as accountants begin to move away from the standard of the PDF and email attachments and “more towards things being hosted online, more towards video, more towards links that are cloud-based” as Vangelis says.

To return to good old Excel, why would you use Syft instead of Excel? According to Vangelis, there are a few reasons. For one, Syft is plug and play. Everything is automated and you have single-click downloads. As he says:

“You’re not building graphs. If something changes, you don’t have to re-export to Excel and start again from scratch… It saves a lot of time, and the graphs look a lot better than the Microsoft suite graphs.”

The Syft design team are constantly creating themes and updating the look and feel of the Syft platform and our reports. Furthermore, Syft’s reports and graphs are tailored to “what we know clients can understand and what makes sense to their business”. Syft’s reports focus on areas that are typically important to most businesses, as well as things that they can easily look at and understand.

After all, one of the most important parts of Syft is our dedication to comprehension. Syft reports are intended to be easy to understand and interpret: making financial data simple. To quote Christian Koch in his interview with Vangelis for The Guardian:

"[Syft will] turn your company’s datasets into graphs and reports that are so beautifully presented and easy to digest that even your granny could probably figure out what’s going on."

And if your granny could figure it out, your clients will undoubtedly have a good idea of what's going on in their reports.