How Eqeight Accounting swapped compliance spreadsheets for a second pair of eyes

Hi everyone. I'm Ernst Botha. My firm's name is Eqeight Accounting and we've been on Fintura for 8 months.

Let's start a bit about your firm and the clients that you serve.

So, at Eqeight Accounting, we service mostly SMEs. Uh we provide bookkeeping services. This includes accounting, bookkeeping, financial statements, payroll taxes, as well as annual compliance with CIPC and other regulatory um compliance matters, yeah.

How big a part of your week is compliance work? Like AR filings and

Yeah, so as one of our services is compliance, I think it's quite a big thing to actually every company was incorporated different time. So, keeping track of all the deadlines is quite a big thing initially and then secondly, actually doing the services. Luckily, we have staff members that do that, but part of their week is obviously checking up that we have all the compliance documents and then checking that it's actually right and up-to-date. Um and I think that takes quite a bit of time um on the admin side.

Before Fintura, how did you make sure that your compliance deadlines didn't fall through the cracks or did they?

I think like any other accounting firm, we were um using spreadsheets. I think that's the biggest thing that accountants do well is we actually work on spreadsheets quite well, but I think um finding the most up-to-date version, constantly updating it between each other, finding out who's actually updated what, that caused a lot of headaches and a lot of problems for us, regardless of how good we are with the actual spreadsheets themselves.

Resolutions, uh client reports, getting clients to sign, what did that process look like previously?

A lot of admin work, a lot of um staff manually drafting, changing registration names, making sure it's the right one, a lot of errors in the drafting. Um I think that took up a lot of time that was just unnecessary. Luckily, we have things like AR these days, which helps cross-check, but at the same time you had to check those things repeatedly over and over again, chase the clients, which took forever cuz it's a phone call, then it's an email, then it's another phone call. And it's always empty promises, so

You're glad things have changed then.

Very glad things have changed. I think the nice thing about Fintura specifically is the email reminders go out quite frequently and we can actually see live if a client has signed. There's a lot of signing tools out there, but a lot of the times you don't get that added support that you have with Fintura where there's someone that actually tells you you know that the task is now done. We filed it, so it's almost a second team member watching your team member and I think that's that's kind of helped quite a lot with not necessarily having the directors do that all the time, but also having that additional little oversight.

But what is the risk of doing it the way you previously did? Like what could happen if you continued to do it like that?

Okay, so I think the biggest thing that happened there is that you missed deadlines. Specifically with something like the CIPC which we use quite a lot on Fintura, you would have penalties that is then a constant fight between you and the client for who was actually late. Whereas now we have a clear dashboard of of what's happening. Other risks are just looking as if we're not prepared, as if we're not providing the services that we promised to the clients. So I think that risk is mitigated in a very large sense by Fintura in doing automatic updates, having everything ready, and making sure that it is streamlined. We get reminders from you guys. We don't actually have to get the reminders from our spreadsheet.

So what made you decide to give Fintura a go?

Okay, so there's a few reasons why we decided that. Firstly, I was very irritated and fed up with the admin. And we were looking at actually migrating at that stage to uh, like a What's the word? I'm going to practice management software as well as something that can track a bit more. And I think what stood out with Fintura is the South African perspective of it. So, I think the fact that we had a South African base software that understands our compliance helped a lot in motivating me and my business partner to actually sign up. And then also Reece and um, Bernice, both of them very lovely people. Um, I actually followed you guys on LinkedIn a while before we joined. And it just seemed like such a good South African culture. Bernice coming from a South African accounting background, understanding the actual problems of a tax firm in South Africa or accounting firm in South Africa. I think that was the biggest appeal. And then obviously uh, we also have blue and purple branding. So, that was just a coincidental um, match that we found we would like.

You've previously mentioned that um, the compliance and the e-signing has saved you time. So, what does that look like in your practice now? Like what does it do for your staff that that saves them time?

So, I think the biggest time saver from what we've heard in the feedback from the staff is that they don't have to sit with the the chasing up with clients and the admin around clients anymore. So, um, saving that time of another 5-minute call or saving that time of sending another email or then looking around in your emails for the actual signed version that they said they sent but never did. Um, so I think from an efficiency point of view it helps them to actually know that that is handled by someone else and um, that they can trust and we have a trusted source that does that and they can continue with more technical um, more hands-on work on the clients.

Have your clients noticed a difference since you've moved to Fintura?

So, a big question that we got from our clients is um, firstly who is Fintura? Um, but we always joke with Reece and Bernice that as a company grows that will change. But they've definitely noticed that there's now a new way of signing, a new way of the way the document looks. They have a actual compliance checklist which we can share with them, which is something that we actually love giving our clients is like a a scorecard of where are you now, what do we need, what else what is the outstanding. And I think Fintura has given that to us we can actually by the click of a button pull that and actually give that to the client without having to spend our time on doing that. And it actually gives them the emails to go back on by themselves and actually upload and sign electronically instead of us having to send a physical document or anything like that. So definitely noticed that between them and us.

You have previously mentioned when we've spoken that you are excited to move to practice management and to tax. What out of those two modules excites you the most?

So I'm a bit of a tax freak. I love tax compliance. I think having a clear dashboard on taxes for me is something that's very exciting. Between the two I'm actually excited to join both the compliance and the tax side because it will be a full service suite where we have compliance, tax and then managing our staff. I think the part about the tax module that really excites me is the fact that you actually integrate with Xero, Zoho, the big softwares, the smaller softwares in South Africa, the payroll data and we can actually then use all the softwares that we are currently using and file directly to SARS instead of having that additional admin step to actually go through the approval process again manually, file again manually on SARS and submit again, send the increase to the client to pay. So I think in that tax module specifically it's going to save us a lot of time.

Mhm. Have you seen AI correspondence yet?

Yes, we have seen AI correspondence. That is actually one of my partner's biggest things that we were for practice management software as well as like the compliance side is like but does whatever we go with does it have AI?

Yeah.

And I think that was one of the questions we've posed to Fintura so many times and now that you're finally rolling it out we're like golden ticket.

What would you say to a firm who's still using manual processes that is thinking about moving to Fintura?

To a firm that's currently still on manual processing I would say join Fintura today. Schedule your onboarding call. It's going to save you a lot of time if you're still wondering if you should at least get the demo call. It will become very clear from there that all the time that will be saved is going to allow you to focus on bigger things, focus on growing your firm, focus on developing your staff. So yeah, definitely do it today.

If you could describe Fintura in one sentence.

So Fintura in one sentence um the compliance best friend I never had.

I think um yeah, it's just that that trusted source that you know you can go back to to actually do the things and and have your back. Um so it feels like a friend.

Beautiful.