From 4 Hours to 4 Minutes: Spire Accounting Streamlines Year-End Compliance
Spire Accounting slashed year-end compliance time from 4 hours to 4 minutes with QuickBooks Tax. See how automated reminders and effortless integrations improved the client experience.
Nerang, Queensland-based Spire Accounting was first established in 2016, when then-sports marketer Ken Bensley and his accountant Joel Gurciullo decided to go into business together.
Fast-forward eight years, and they’ve built a thriving six-person firm known for its personable, laid-back approach. Spire specialises in small and medium-sized construction businesses and their owners, helping them stay compliant, grow the business, or manage their SMSFs so they can save for retirement.
However, Spire’s journey wasn't always easy. The firm originally used MYOB Accounting Office (AO) to handle its clients’ tax work—but this caused endless headaches.
Spire needed a new solution. That’s when it came across QuickBooks Tax, powered by LodgeiT.
“The software was too complex for our clients’ needs, and the team wasted countless hours on manual data entry and other administrative tasks like chasing signatures.”
– Ken Bensley
A Time-Consuming Tax Nightmare
Despite their fast-moving ethos, Spire’s tax software and subsequent processes were anything but. According to Joel, “The MYOB portal was slow, complex, and unintuitive”. Worse still, it caused the team and its clients to waste countless hours each month on admin.
One specific pain point was MYOB AO required clients to log in with a password to provide digital signatures. Unfortunately, clients kept on forgetting their passwords or thinking they needed to create a MYOB account themselves to access their files. There was constant confusion.
What’s more, there was no way to automate approval reminders within the MYOB AO platform—meaning the team had to spend a significant portion of each week manually chasing client approvals. As Joel describes, "We were constantly hounding clients for signatures. It was a nightmare".
The team often waited weeks to get all-important sign-offs to complete reports. Spire quickly realised it couldn’t continue working this way and needed to think differently. So, it decided to look for another alternative solution—one that could help it save precious time.
“The Best In The Market”: Embracing QuickBooks Tax
Ken and Joel decided to give QuickBooks Tax a trial run after hearing about its evolution over the years. Ken was immediately impressed. “It was absolutely remarkable”
Eager to see if others felt the same, he asked the rest of his team to test it out themselves. They were just as enthusiastic as he was. “MYOB AO was archaic compared to QuickBooks Tax”, says Kieran Dingley, one of Spire’s accountants. “It was generations behind”.
QuickBooks Tax, powered by LodgeiT, uses two-factor authentication (2FA). This means increased security, no more lost passwords, and enhanced security for both Spire and its clients. What’s more, it integrates directly with QuickBooks’ Prep for Taxes tool, saving hours on creating financial statements.
Bearing these features and the team’s feedback in mind, Spire decided to pivot to QuickBooks Tax.
“Once people see the integration of Prep for Taxes into QuickBooks, I think it’ll blow their minds. It’s seriously the best in the market.”
– Ken Bensley
How QuickBooks Tax Helps Spire Effortlessly Create Financial Statements
Unlike other reporting systems, QuickBooks Tax uses a single import and classification exercise to automatically populate Working Papers, Tax Forms, and Financial Statements.
With features like automated reminders, instant data-sharing, and a user-friendly interface, QuickBooks Tax eliminates the headaches associated with generating financial statements. “It’s an absolute game-changer” explains Ken.
Automated Reminders
Spire has reduced its return approval wait times, improved the client experience, and lightened the administrative burden on their team thanks to QuickBooks Tax’s automated reminders.
What’s more, QuickBooks Tax automatically populates follow-up emails—all the team needs to do is send them off. Then, clients can approve with one click. No more pesky passwords they need to remember. “It’s made life just so much easier on our end”, says Joel.
QuickBooks Tax users receive unlimited e-signatures included, as one of the benefits in the ProAdvisor Program. Helping accelerate client approvals, you can see at a glance which clients have approved returns, and who you’re waiting on. You can even automate or send reminders to sign in bulk.
Having switched over to QuickBooks Tax, Spire only has to follow up manually with 5% of its clients. This is a far cry from the 30 - 40% that was the norm when the firm used MYOB AO.
“Getting client approvals used to take weeks. Now, we often get signatures back overnight. It’s worlds apart.”
– Joel Gurciullo
Instant Data-Sharing
QuickBooks Tax automatically prefills tax forms and creates corresponding financial statements using data imported directly from QuickBooks’ Prep for Taxes tool. This virtually eliminates the need for the team to rekey data, meaning financial statements that used to take half a day to prepare now only take a couple of minutes.
“You can build a set of financial statements in three or four minutes, as opposed to three or four hours” explains Ken.
And while QuickBooks Tax streamlines the process for importing client data from QuickBooks Online, it also lets you import client-side financials from clients using Xero, MYOB, Reckon and many other platforms—even Microsoft Excel.
User-Friendly Interface
The Spire team find QuickBooks Tax’s dashboard feature particularly useful when it comes to maintaining an up-to-date view of all live tasks. The dashboard view means the team can see immediately if any clients have paperwork outstanding, or need an automated reminder to submit their data.
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