SV Partners: Streamlining Insolvency workflows with FYI

From a Boutique Practice to a National Leader

Founded over 25 years ago, SV Partners has grown from a team of 10 to a national powerhouse with nearly 180 staff across Australia and South East Asia. Specialising in insolvency, SV Partners has built a reputation for technical excellence, client care, and embracing innovation.

“We’re probably one of the top two or three insolvency practices in Australia in terms of volume,” says Mel Purcell, Head of Business Operations. “Where we are different, is we have managed to maintain that boutique, family-office feel even as we’ve scaled, which is really important to us as shown in our high rate of long serving employees.”

The Unique Needs of Insolvency Practices

Insolvency differs significantly from standard public accounting. Clients usually only deal with an insolvency practice once with their failing business, there is no ongoing client relationship like in tax practices. Insolvency processes are focused on identifying assets, investigating, reporting and achieving an outcome for creditors..

The work is complex, fast-paced, and heavily document-driven. SV Partners must manage high volumes of case files, communications, and compliance workflows — often under tight regulatory timeframes.

“We’re not a typical practice,” Mel explains. “We’re dealing with corporate and personal insolvency, and each job brings a flood of paperwork and strict timelines. A system that can’t keep up simply won’t work for us.”

Before adopting FYI software, SV Partners faced several operational challenges:

• Clunky collaboration: Without a cloud-based system, collaborating on documents was slow. Files had to be checked in and out, only one person could edit at a time, and the process required too many clicks.
• Rigid workflows: Legacy systems couldn’t handle the flexible workflows SV Partners needed. Manual task tracking introduced the risk of things slipping through the cracks.
• Inefficient onboarding: Every client in insolvency is new, but onboarding was time-consuming — taking around one hour, followed by up to four more hours for mandatory Day 1 tasks.

SV Partners recognised that their operational efficiency needed to evolve as the firm grew. For Mel, who transitioned from an insolvency manager to Head of Business Operations, the trigger was simple:

Why FYI Was the Right Fit

While FYI isn’t built specifically for insolvency work, Mel quickly identified powerful features that could deliver big benefits.

• Cloud-Based Document Management: FYI enables seamless access and collaboration across offices and remote teams. Reports for creditors often involve multiple contributors and can take weeks to prepare. FYI’s co-editing feature makes it easy for half a dozen people to work on a document simultaneously — regardless of their location.
• Automations: FYI’s no-code automation engine allows SV Partners to eliminate tedious, time-consuming tasks without relying on IT or an outsource provider to build and maintain it. Previously they hired professionals to build solutions, but these solutions became costly to maintain.
• Jobs, Tasks and Comments: While SV Partners don’t run traditional accounting jobs, Mel repurposed FYI’s Jobs module to track activities like property sales, voidable transaction recoveries, day 1 documents etc. Tasks make it easy to assign and monitor work, while Comments provide a clear audit trail — such as when a manager asks for a task to be paused and why.

Big Wins from Adopting FYI

Three years after implementing FYI, SV Partners are seeing impressive results.

“FYI helped us consolidate and centralise all our documentation and communications in the cloud,” says Mel. “That’s a game-changer when you’ve got staff and offices spread across the country — and I’m working full-time from Singapore, managing a team based in Manila and assisting directors in Australia.”

Time Savings

SV Partners have created around 250 automations, generating significant efficiency gains.

• Onboarding a client now takes 10 minutes instead of one hour.
• The Day 1 process, including all the document production and lodgments has been reduced from four hours to under an hour — or 90 minutes for complex cases.

When onboarding 20 new clients a week, saving half a day per client adds up fast.

Another huge improvement: for every client, SV Partners must email 70 banks to freeze accounts and track responses. Previously, each response had to be saved and renamed manually. Thanks to FYI’s email autofiling, this task is now entirely automated. All responses are filed instantly against the correct client record — accessible to the entire team.

Job Satisfaction

The time savings are great — but the bigger win has been the impact on staff.

Automation has eliminated tedious, repetitive work that no one enjoyed.

“It’s an easy tool for people to use,” says Mel. “As a manager, it’s simple to assign a task, explain what needs to be done, and use comments to keep everyone updated. FYI makes remote work easy and removes the friction of having multiple people working on a single client from different locations.”

Mel’s advice for others;

Change management is hard — plan for it. But don’t wait for perfect, or you’ll never get started.

1. Start with 1–2 automations ready to go. That helps you win internal buy-in by showing immediate improvements.
2. Invest in training. I recruited some early adopters to run a pilot and test the automations. They were able to suggest tweaks before the full rollout.
3. Solve for friction. Look at timesheets to identify tasks taking too long, then ask why. Our goal is to find all the unspoken, dumb and broken processes.
4. Empower your team. Bottom-up adoption has worked better than top-down. If a senior team member won’t engage, train everyone under them — they’re usually the ones most impacted by broken processes and tedious repetitive work.

A Culture of Innovation—Backed by the Right Tools

SV Partners stands out not just for their insolvency expertise, but for their mindset.

“We’ve always been willing to try new things,” says Mel. “FYI fits into that because it’s not just about doing what we’ve always done — it’s about finding a better way.”

With FYI powering document and workflow management, SV Partners continues to scale with confidence — without losing the culture that made them successful to begin with.