Firm at the vanguard of cloud revolution brings it all together with FYI.
All In Advisory was established with a vision to use technology to take practice efficiency to new heights. “We realised that there were better ways of doing things, and we do that by utilising technology,” says Aly Garrett, Founder of All in Advisory, Partner of the Year at the Australian Accounting Awards in 2021 and one of the Top 50 Women in Accounting.
Founded in October, 2018, in just three years the firm has already made its mark. All In Advisory was named Xero Cloud Champion of the Year 2022 and has also won many other awards, including Boutique Firm of the Year 2021 and Start-Up Firm of the Year 2020 at the Australian Accounting Awards.
Working with clients to help them future-proof their businesses is a vital part of what makes All In Advisory stand out. From the beginning, they’ve built their practice on a cloud-based foundation with a robust app stack and use of tech to make them more efficient and productive. All In Advisory’s core app stack consists of XPM, Xero Workpapers, Xero Tax, AccountKit, Practice Ignition, FuseSign and BGL SimpleFund360 – all tied together through FYI.
For All In Advisory, two factors drove the impetus to adopt FYI. The first was a desire for complete visibility on all jobs and tasks across the firm.
Total visibility of all jobs and tasks
“XPM does jobs, but it doesn’t do tasks,” says Aly, “We were really struggling with that ad hoc stuff.” For All in Advisory, FYI was a natural choice given its capacity to integrate so well with Xero and other solutions in the Xero ecosystem.
“We wanted to lay that rock-solid foundation,” says Aly. “The implementation of FYI has certainly helped”. FYI has completely transformed the way the firm manages workflow, giving partners complete visibility of all tasks happening across the business. They can drill down by individual client, client group, or staff member. “Just being able to see one person and all their work and priorities has been such a release of stress, knowing from a workflow perspective it’s all good.”
Sharing documents securely with clients
The second factor driving All In Advisory’s adoption of FYI was the desire to share documents securely with clients. “That was a major component for us,” says Aly, “but we needed something easy that clients could use and understand. We do have some older clients that aren’t tech-savvy.”
With FYI, you can simplify processes and enhance the client experience by integrating with popular digital signing apps, including Annature, FuseSign, DocuSign, Adobe Sign and myprosperity.
“We’ve just implemented FuseSign for digital signing, which just made sense because it integrated with all of our core tech. Being able to do our document paths through FYI using FuseSign takes out so many steps and client take-up was fantastic.“
One source of truth for All In Advisory.
With FYI, client data is automatically synced with your practice management software. Clients, client groups, jobs and team info from XPM is imported into FYI and continuously synchronised. You have instant access to up-to-date information. Tax returns from Xero Tax, reports from your client’s Xero Ledger and other client documents, emails, recent interactions, and outstanding tasks are all at your fingertips. And you access it all inside FYI.
For Aly, this means everyone is on the same page, easing collaboration and boosting productivity. “I want people to just be in FYI and use all of the FYI capability … just log in and be able to have that one source of truth.”
Locating whatever the practice needs in an instant.
In the past, All in Advisory had no easy way to file and locate emails – until FYI came along. FYI automates document capture and consistent filing. Which makes it easier – in Aly’s words – to “find stuff really quickly.”
“That really helped…easily searching for something and being able to find it and being able to file emails because that was something that we were lacking as well.”
FYI is deeply integrated with Microsoft products such as Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. This integration provides the backbone to FYI’s intelligent auto-filing features, the ability to edit documents inside FYI using the richness of Microsoft’s desktop applications, and an additional layer of security.
Automating everyday processes for efficiency gains.
With FYI, you can save countless hours by automating documentation, filing, communication and other repetitive tasks and schedule recurring work to repeat automatically. These newfound abilities free up time to concentrate on higher-value services. “All those little steps, all those little tasks and automations provide the greatest productivity in the long run. We’ve seen a lot of success through that,” says Aly.
FYI provides sample processes a practice can use to get started. Teams also have the power to create and run processes their way, saving hours of routine work every week.
Aly plans to take full advantage of the FYI’s process automation to deliver a host of productivity gains. “We implemented FYI for a specific purpose, and it’s solved those problems, but now what else is available? What else can I get from this? I honestly feel there’s so much of FYI that we still aren’t using or don’t know about. Our task at the moment is to lean into that automation side and find out exactly what we can do.”
Ease of implementation
All in Advisory took advantage of FYIs comprehensive onboarding process, implementing FYI with zero downtime. “Implementing FYI for us was the easy bit,” says Aly. “They just took all our data from Box and shoved it in FYI, and we started going.”
Best-of-Breed Integrations & Future Proofing
An efficiency revolution is underway, and firms like All in Advisory are in the vanguard. Aly has clear views on where the industry is heading. “What I’m hoping is that a lot of that rote processing work that we’re still doing will be taken over by AI so that we can focus on advisory.”
As accountancy practices plan for tomorrow, the platform they choose today is a critical business decision. As new apps and technologies emerge, it must be able to integrate them all. For All in Advisory, FYI is that platform on which to build that future.
Would Aly recommend FYI to other firms? “One hundred percent.”
Want to see FYI in action? Register for a live platform tour to see how you could be using FYI in your firm.
PS Check out the podcast Aly does with Andrew Van de Beek from Illumin8, Aly & Andrew’s All Aussie Accounting Adventures. FYI is proud to be a founding sponsor of these ongoing conversations.