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Abundant Accounting worked with local café establishment to go digital and enhanced their business productivity.
When Mr Kang Yi Yang, the owner of popular Populus café, opened his latest establishment Apricus Coffee & Food Co., he knew it was high time for him to get his financial processes in order.
It was then that he hired accounting and consultancy firm, Abundant Accounting, to help him streamline his invoicing, payment and reporting processes.
“With rising costs and labour market shortage, business owners continue to face a difficult operating environment, even as they emerge from the pandemic. There is enormous value in adopting digital solutions that enable businesses to become more cost effective and increase their profitability in the long run,” shares Ms Ong Bee Lian, director of Abundant Accounting.
Ms Ong’s team introduced and implemented cloud accounting platform Xero for Mr Kang, which turned out to be the secret to keeping his cafes brewing perfectly. The result was instant access to a real-time financial overview of his growing business. His integrated front and back of house solutions seamlessly connected to the Xero platform, enabled Abundant Accounting to generate financial and operational reports at the click of a button, giving Mr Kang and his advisors the data they needed to help his business grow.
Transforming businesses
To date, Abundant Accounting has successfully helped more than 300 businesses migrate to the cloud and implement solutions like Xero. As cloud natives, the accounting practice is passionate about the power of the cloud. The team hosts monthly seminars to educate SMEs on the benefits of digitalisation while addressing any concerns or fears regarding shifting to the cloud. In 2019, the practice became one of the first pre-approved vendors under IMDA’s SMEs Go Digital programme, giving SMEs up to 70 per cent of funding support when they adopt digital tools like Xero.
“We’ve seen it all, from SMEs manually generating sale invoices, storing client databases in paper documents and doing their accounts on spreadsheets. They would work into the wee hours preparing GST reports and many of them had no idea how their businesses were performing until their year-end reports came out,” says Ms. Ong.
Information at fingertips
Apart from eliminating tedious and laborious bookkeeping processes, Mrs Ong says another huge benefit of implementing cloud solutions is the ability to leverage business data to provide informed financial advice.
Ms Ong explains: “We can provide deep analysis of a client’s financial performance that help them to control costs and monitor the performance of their various services. Clients can immediately see which business lines are doing well and decide which ones they might decide to get rid of.
“Up to date sales reports also help the management team monitor the performance of individual members of their sales team and region. They can then use the data to motivate top performers while identifying which team members might need more support.”
Ms Ong shares that Xero also helps their clients get paid faster with InvoiceNow. Automated reminders facilitate timely payments, while the Xero dashboard shows at a glance, which invoices are overdue.
Ms Ong points out that Xero is the firm’s partner of choice because the platform continuously works towards enhancing its features, customer experience and education. It can also be scaled into an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system with plug-in applications from the Xero ecosystem. “It is accessible anywhere and anytime, and so user-friendly and scalable. Its features have made accountants’ and business owners’ lives so much easier,” she adds.
For more information about Xero: click here.
Click here to read the article at Business Times.