Once they’d settled on moving to Xero – Practice and Document management were the next steps to take. They recently took the time out to talk about the change, the challenges they’ve faced, and how it’s impacted their business in light of Covid-19.

What prompted the change for Withers Tsang?

We had been using a hybrid of MYOB AO & AE for our practice for quite some time, and we were looking to reduce the complexity of our systems and in the process ensure we had greater compliance. We chose Xero as our start point and looked at how we could move all of our systems across in the Xero suite of products. It wasn’t a “must have” back at the start of 2019 to have everything in the cloud, but with the power of hindsight, it’s proven invaluable. SuiteFiles & XPM are known to integrate really well with each other, which made the decision that much easier.

How did you implement Xero & SuiteFiles into your practice?

We started with the conversion and migration of our MYOB general ledgers about 4 months before we moved our practice & document management data across. In both instances there wasn’t a lot that we had to do manually. XPM and SuiteFiles work so well together, all we really needed to do was decide on our folder structure and SuiteFiles took care of the rest, a piece of cake. Our documents were all migrated over a weekend, so there was minimal business interruption. The team went through training online, and it’s not a complex system to learn.

What has been the biggest impact of implementing SuiteFiles & XPM?

Having all of our data in the cloud, We were very lucky we did that back at the start of 2019. At the time of course, we couldn’t have known that we’d be working remotely for long stretches of 2020. It has made all of the difference in keeping our practice running as close to normal as is possible in this environment. It means we haven’t had to maintain a server, try to arrange access from remote locations, and has minimized downtime in what is already an incredibly stressful time for businesses. We’ve been able to better support our clients because we’re not scrambling for information, we have regular and continuous access from wherever we are. It has ended up being a definite time and money saver.

What are your favourite SuiteFiles Features?

Cloud access, obviously during Covid-19 this has been a source of incredible relief, we are so thankful to be completely cloud based. Having security settings on every folder so that we can set up specific users per folder for access has also been great. The common login with Office365 saves another set of credentials and makes it easier to get up and running each morning.

The integration with Outlook has been a must for us, just the ability to save emails easily and then quickly find them alongside other client information, as well as being able to see our documents from within the Outlook app.

The integration with Xero is also fantastic, and a big part of why we chose SuiteFiles. Being able to see a single view of the client and their documents in XPM, as well as the effortless creation of new clients in both systems whenever a new client to XPM saves time, especially when you can just choose which templated folder structure you’d like underneath and then implement it in a click.

What else would you say to firms who are not yet using Xero & other cloud technology?

We originally implemented SuiteFiles as we wanted to move away from our server based MYOB solutions. We were happy with our decision before Covid-19, but after Covid-19 we are just so relieved and thankful that we made the move away from server solutions. Moving across was a relatively simple process, and the time we’ve saved given the current state of the world has been so important to our practice. If you’re not yet working in the cloud, now is the time to switch, it’s never been more of a “must have”

Thank you to Nick at the team at Withers Tsang for taking the time to talk through their changes with us. If you want to know more about SuiteFiles & XPM, get in touch with us via our website.