Ad Valorem and Xavier

Ad Valorem is a leading, proactive accountancy business managing clients from startup to 20m turnover. As a family business with family values, they support and understand other family businesses to achieve their goals. The team offer everything from transactional advisory services to VAT and corporation tax estimates, identifying opportunities that might help their clients and allowing businesses to manage their affairs.

Helen and Rachel from Xavier Analytics spoke to Managing Director Nigel Adams, who described Xavier as a ‘game changer’ for his business...

Using Xavier

The Ad Valorem team use Xavier daily across the firm. With an entirely Xero client base, the first port of call for Nigel is the Practice Dashboard, where he can see the performance of the client portfolio, and identify any clients that might need urgent help.

Both internal and outsourced bookkeeping benefits from Xavier quality control; the Xero health score is checked before any files are sent to outsourced bookkeepers, and from management accounts to end of year accounts, nothing can be started if the client has a health score of below 80%. This consistency of data quality across clients has helped Ad Valorem scale up with ease.

Xavier also helps the team have conversations with their clients around debtor days, corporation tax estimates and monthly vat estimates; these are the things that really matter to their clients, helping them to understand their free cash position and how their business is performing.

How have things changed since using Xavier?

Introducing Xavier has created massive changes in Ad Valorem.Before Xavier, management accounts could only be provided for a small focus group because the data had to be high quality, and it was too time-consuming to review all the clients manually. The effectiveness of tools like Futrli have been significantly increased after using Xavier to provide more accurate data.

Xavier has provided the Ad Valorem team members the structure and confidence to talk to clients, which not only gives the clients more value, but it’s made the team more productive too. New clients and acquisitions can be brought into Ad Valorem and up to quality seamlessly.

Finding the Value

One immediate benefit Ad Valorem have found is that now the practice can scale more easily with Xavier, they can expand to take on more clients without losing service quality.

To monetise the use of Xavier, any non-bookkeeping clients with a health score of less than 80% are offered cleanup services for a fee, supported by the Xavier scores which provide evidence so the discussion is not confrontational. Though it is optional, the cleanup service is very popular, which has improved margins for the firm.

Is there anything prospective users should know before using Xavier?

Nigel recommends the best way to integrate Xavier is through team inclusion; to start, select a member of your team who has an interest in using Xavier and focus on that area first, then roll it out more broadly.

“Plan how you’re going to use it… then monetise it”.