Northern Accountants and Xavier

Northern Accountants are an innovative and forward thinking, award-winning accountancy set up in 2008 by Phil Ellerby, and if that wasn’t enough, they’re also a Xavier early adopter, joining us back in February 2019.

At Northern Accountants the team’s focus is on improving the business and lives of all their clients, helping them to be more successful through year round support, advice and expertise.

Helen and Rachel from Xavier met with Sally Claxton and Robyn Jones from Northern Accountants to learn more about how Xavier has transformed their processes.

Using Xavier

Northern Accountants have three offices, with both internal and external bookkeeping clients. The team are on Xavier almost every day checking the client and creating monthly reports. Xavier is the first place they turn to to generate their monthly summaries, the client overview is a really quick way to get the metrics for the month.

Xavier doesn’t just help the team save time creating their reports. Using Xavier metrics, the monthly report also helps the clients understand where they might need additional help. The team will look at Xavier to see who needs assistance with other services; the health score helps clients to understand the value of bookkeeping services, and stats like Debtor Days can indicate which clients might need credit control services to manage their debtors. This all contributes to educating clients to run a better business, making more money with less stress.

How have things changed since using Xavier?

Xavier has replaced manual checking of accounts in a big way; checks were time consuming and infrequent, now with Xavier it’s really easy for the team to stay on top of their clients. For internal bookkeeping clients, the average Xavier health score has gone from 60 to 90!

Things got missed before, but Xavier picks them up before they become a problem later. The knock on effects from better quality data mean Xavier has made the VAT process & end of month significantly faster.

Health scores are checked every monday which creates a friendly rivalry between the 3 Northern Accountants offices. Each of the offices have a lot of internal pride about their internal clients’ health scores so it’s really motivating for the team.

Finding the Value

For the Northern Accountants team, Xavier pays for itself with time saved in end of month and year end processes. In terms of bringing in additional revenue, Xavier is used to demonstrate the value of internal bookkeeping services; for those that use an external bookkeeper, the Xavier health scores are often much lower.

Finally, Xavier helps Northern Accountants with pricing and onboarding new clients. The health score and transaction information lets the team price accurately for the work they will need to do for that client.

Is there anything prospective users should know before using Xavier?

“Why aren’t you using it?!” Xavier is a reviewing tool - you weren’t reviewing before, but you should be.