SuiteFiles: Helping accountants migrate their files to the cloud during COVID

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Xero connects with over 1,000 apps that help small businesses and their advisors succeed, with most available in our app marketplace. Each month we celebrate an app partner who stands out for helping small businesses thrive. Find out more about becoming a Xero app partner here.

Congratulations to our July app partner of the month, SuiteFiles – a cloud-based document management tool that integrates with Xero to give advisors on-the-go access to their files, from anywhere.

Instead of storing client information across several applications, SuiteFiles provides you with one source of truth for all your client data. SuiteFiles connects with your Xero Practice Manager (XPM) account to auto-create folders for each of your listed clients. From there, you can see all of your client information, emails and SuiteFiles documents in a single place using the XPM documents tab.

While SuiteFiles makes it easy to manage client data, protecting that data is a top priority. In addition to Xero’s security features, SuiteFiles comes equipped with extensive audit trails and activity logging, enterprise level encryption and data backups, and more. This ensures that only the right people have access to the right information.

Getting more accountants into the cloud

??SuiteFiles kicked off in 2012 to help small businesses, particularly small accountancy firms, become fully cloud based. Moving to the cloud meant getting rid of old IT infrastructure, reducing costs and saving the firms money, while also freeing up more time to look after their clients.

“We believe that working in the cloud is a real game-changer for accountants,” says SuiteFiles CEO, Andrew Sims.

“SuiteFiles is all about removing steps from time consuming processes that eat away at the limited hours accountants have in a day. SuiteFiles customers enjoy two-second email filing, document and email templates, as well as the ability to attach relevant documents to jobs via our XPM integration. If you have a vexing task that’s reducing your productivity, it’s likely we’ve found a way to automate it,” Andrew explains.

Being on the cloud also means practice staff members can work on the go.

“Why should you be restricted to the office or a desktop? SuiteFiles makes accountants more mobile by allowing them to access their files whether they’re in the office, working from home or meeting with a client,” adds Andrew.

Better business outcomes

In his search for a document management system that would complement XPM, Craig Bruce, Director at Resource Accounting, decided SuiteFiles would be the app for the job. Since joining, he claims it saves him five hours of work per staff member, per week.

“Using SuiteFiles and Xero was a game-changer for our practice, streamlining so many processes. A big part of the equation is the strong two-way relationship between SuiteFiles and XPM. We are able to create templates for our annual work papers and have them filed automatically into XPM’s client folder,” he says.

Overcoming testing times

Being cloud and mobility-focussed proved to be invaluable during COVID-19, when advisors were unable to visit the office, socialise, or see their clients in person. Andrew explains:

“While the world was sent into lockdown, SuiteFiles was met with the challenge of scaling up for customers who suddenly wanted, or urgently needed, to get onto the cloud. Plus, we also had to adapt to not being in the same office together too.”

The sudden growth in SuiteFiles’ customer base meant they had to adapt and pivot as they were scaling up quickly.

“We had to create a server’s worth of files for each new customer, which put our small team to the test,” says Andrew.

“Throughout this hectic time, we relied on our start-up mentality to provide for new customers in need of immediate support. These days, we’ve added more friendly faces to the SuiteFiles team.”

SuiteFiles will soon be launching new features, such as PDF annotation which will allow customers to add notes, make comments and highlight text on their PDFs before sending them to clients to make their own comments and sign. With SuiteFiles’ focus on document management and cloud-based accounting, PDF annotations and signed versions will be automatically saved in the same folder as the original was.

Find out what SuiteFiles can do for your Xero workflow on the Xero App Marketplace.

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