We caught up with Matthew Kendall from Kendall Accountancy Services, based in Hull, UK. Matthew started his practice in 2013 and has grown to a team of almost 10 since. The practice services just under 500 clients, including small family businesses and sole traders across a host of industries. Having started with Sage 50c's desktop product, the practice has evolved to support a variety of cloud accounting software. These include predominantly Xero and QuickBooks Online but also FreeAgent and Sage Accounting.
We asked Matthew a host of questions to see how his onboarding with Syft progressed and why he chose Syft as the solution for his reporting requirements:
How many months have you been using Syft Analytics?
"About 5 months now."
What was your reporting process before Syft?
"We had a variety of different Excel spreadsheets and customized reports within the accounting software packages. All of these were different for every client and so very time consuming to use and to coordinate across the team."
Did you look at other apps to solve your problem, and why did you choose Syft Analytics?
"Yes we looked at a couple of other options which Xero recommended but these wouldn't have worked with Quickbooks, we also looked at the report designer for both Xero & Quickbooks but decided that Syft saved us a lot of time as we could achieve a standard format across our client base."
What problem or pain point were you trying to solve with Syft?
"We wanted to standardize our reports and to reduce time in producing reports for clients. We also wanted to provide clients with more information but we were restricted in this as everything had to be made to suit the clients needs in Excel."
How long did it take you to get it set up and familiar with the feature set?
"About 1 week. Really easy to get going initially."
Which features do you like the most and why?
"My favorite feature is the graphs within the report pack, these make understanding the reports so much easier for our clients which is now helping them improve their businesses. I also like the multi-period profit & loss as this has a trend column so the client can see the pattern over the last few periods. I like the scheduled reports feature but we want to ramp up our usage of this in the coming months."
Which feature do you believe your clients get the most value from?
"The graphs and the automated commentary."
How do you use Syft, and what benefits have you seen for your clients and your practice?
"We use the online accounting software to process the month end, then Syft to produce the reports. The main benefit for clients is that they are now getting reports that they understand and for us there is a time saving in producing the reports."
Anything else about Syft you would like to share?
"It's really easy to use!"
We are so grateful to have had the opportunity to talk to Matthew Kendall from Kendall Accountancy Services and look forward to working with him and his team more in the future.