Spotlight Reporting exists to empower accountants, advisors and bookkeepers to do more, be more and proactively contribute more to the outcomes of their clients. Our software tool set – Reporting, Forecasting, Dashboards and Multi – provide a plethora of outputs to stimulate the discussions and debate from which greatness happens.
Deploying advisory services requires a heady mix of courage, self-awareness, art and science. Firstly you need the courage to commit to the journey and get out of your comfort zone and daily grind, you will need to understand your own strengths and weaknesses so that you can offer the right services and get the right tools and training you need, and then you need to set the services and momentum that makes sense for you and your clients. Doing great advisory is in your hands, but it is a commitment of time, energy, and intellect.
Creating your own advisory practice (or firm-within-a-firm) is powerful and rewarding. When I was in practice, Francis Consulting was designed from the get-go to offer solutions and services (advisory) beyond the historic number-crunching. We attracted a lot of clients by ‘being different’ and when we were amongst the first adopters globally of Xero, we really started to fly.
We saw two gaps in the cloud space at this time - so we created and sold Workpapers to Xero in 2012, having founded Spotlight Reporting in 2010. We love software and we love solutions that make complex tasks simple.
Spotlight Reporting allows easy and quick advanced reporting and forecasting for the majority of your client base. The beautiful outputs are designed for you to adopt an advisory footing with minimal investment and hassle.
My 7 tips for deploying advisory are:
1. Trial or subscribe to Spotlight Reporting! (2,000 leading firms can’t be wrong…)
2. Start with 2-3 clients; build a Report or Dashboard using one of our templates for free and share.
3. Structure customer sessions around discussing insights and opportunities, and actively listening to clients sharing their goals, challenges, roadblocks and opportunities.
4. Offer structured, periodic mentoring (anchored by Spotlight) so that you can be their advisor, guide and accountability focal point. Add value every single time.
5. Expand your reach across the client base; every business client deserves a Forecast and Budget - use Spotlight Forecasting to do this quickly and efficiently.
6. Interact with our Training and Customer Success Specialists - we have humans and resources to help you become a better advisor and more proficient with aspects of our software such as scenarios, consolidation, white-labelling and using our powerful data-crunching and visualisation engines. Get certified!
7. Engage the team, train them up, appoint Advisory (and Spotlight) Champions. Show the team that accounting can not only be sexy, but it can and will change lives if done with passion and the support of the leading software solutions!
