Customer story · Scope Accounting
Scope Accounting stopped jobs stalling and caught up on its lodgements.
Chris Wheatley’s workflow used to be “just Excel”, so jobs could reach 80% and quietly stall. With AccountKit workflow and four years of lodgement statistics, the team can see where every job is, when it’s due and how the firm is tracking.
“It’s all interactive and it’s in one spot. We’re not looking at various Excel spreadsheets. It’s honestly all about visibility.”
- Who
- Chris Wheatley, founder
- Firm
- Suburban firm in Bayside Brisbane, started in 2014, now a team of 14
- Clients
- Small business and suburban accounting
- Stack
- Xero, XPM, OneDrive and SharePoint, AccountKit
The starting point
Before AccountKit, near enough had to be good enough.
Compliance work was a patchwork of Excel and the ATO’s own calculators, and workflow was a spreadsheet Chris only looked at when something came back to him. “You use the ATO calculator for Div7A, or you just hope that near enough is good enough and no one ever checks your work,” he says.
The firm’s week, before and after
Every job
Before80%Workflow lived in Excel. Work reached 80% and stalled because nobody was watching a colleague’s spreadsheet.
NowRecurring jobs for activity statements, BAS, TPAR and STP, with the dates held in AccountKit and expectations set early.
One $3,000 job
Before6 months“We were taking six months to do a three grand job.”
Now1 weekWith the visibility, Chris says the firm “could have just done that in a week”.
Checking a job
BeforeA reactive question: “have we done it or not?”
NowThe dates live in AccountKit. “Beforehand it was nothing. Now it’s something.”
Division 7A, each year
BeforeThe ATO calculator: no scenarios, no payout modelling, and a saved PDF nobody went back to.
NowScenarios run on the data already in AccountKit, so “the next year we go in, bang, it’s done.”
What they switched on
The tools Scope Accounting runs in AccountKit.
Alongside Xero, XPM, OneDrive, SharePoint. Each tool links to how it works.
- ComplianceDivision 7AThe first tool the firm adopted. The team models scenarios, clicks the payout button and re-uses the stored data the following year.
- AdministrationWorkflowAll in from July, with recurring jobs for activity statements, BAS and annual lodgements like TPAR and STP.
- ComplianceLodgement statisticsThe firm imports its lodgement list and gets a progress chart against previous years. Used solidly for over four years.
- ComplianceEquipment financePart of the patchwork AccountKit replaced, along with amortisation schedules and borrowing costs.
- AdvisoryClient mapsClient structures sit with the rest of the compliance work instead of in a separate tool.
The result
What changed at Scope Accounting, in their numbers.
- years on the lodgement statistics dashboard
- 4+
- of this year’s work already done, in Chris’s words
- 80%
- people on the team now, grown from a two-person operation
- 14
This year the firm was well behind at the end of August and had caught up by the end of September.
Figures and quotes from the Scope Accounting case study, first published on the AccountKit blog.
See how it fits your firm
Try the tools behind this story on your own clients.
Start a 14-day trial, or book a demo and walk through the setup Scope Accounting uses with the team.
