Fresh Accounting is a dynamic management accounting practice and consultancy with offices in Hong Kong & Singapore, who believes accountants should not just report on how a business is doing but also identify opportunities and strategies to improve its performance and profitability.
Fresh Accounting turned to cloud accounting because they were sure that it would help them save the most critical resources: money and time. With all data digitised and in the cloud, processes become traceable – and with the right tools, it is easy to set up well-defined transparent workflows for accounts payable.
For transitioning a client’s accounts payable to the cloud, they consider the following as essential:
- Build your trusted cloud-based app stack
- Establish seamless client collaboration
- Enable work on the go
- Eliminate manual interactions for authorisations, review and coding
Fresh Accounting’s trusted app stack includes Xero, Receipt Bank for digital data capture and ApprovalMax for approval automation. According to them, eliminating paper- and email-based invoice approval routing is key to true end-to-end automation. The app stack enables capturing expenses anytime and anywhere, provides instant updates as well as an open API for the communication of information between systems, and fulfils the requirements of remote working.
Transformation project for a global architecture firm: from a legacy ERP system to the cloud
One of Fresh Accounting’s clients, a global architecture firm with 16 entities across 11 regions, wanted to give its performance a real boost by moving away from the legacy system they had been using for a long time. It had lots of drawbacks as it was expensive, complex to use and also lacked automation. In terms of accounts payable approvals, their different offices had various methods in place; some of them used emails and some even relied on handwritten approvals.
Approval automation for efficiency and transparency
The first step was implementing Xero for their accounting. But Xero cannot handle multiple levels of complex approvals or provide authorised approvers with the option to override the predefined approval workflow in urgent cases. This is where ApprovalMax comes in and saves the client a lot of time and effort with approval automation. They can now view the approval decisions of their different entities at a glance – thanks to the relevant data being in the cloud and, therefore, readily available at all times and from any device. Thanks to ApprovalMax, they have achieved a high level of transparency across their 16 entities and benefit from a most efficient approval process – saving both money and time.
