Scaling for offshore success with Xero and Receipt Bank

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Our app marketplace has over 700 apps to help small businesses and their advisors reach their goals. Each month we celebrate an app partner who really stands out for helping small businesses thrive, by taking a look at a recent success story.

Our app partner of the month for August goes to Receipt Bank

Receipt Bank was the first software company to automatically process information from uploaded images of receipts and invoices, and it’s one of the most popular apps in our marketplace. With Receipt Bank, it’s easy for accountants and bookkeepers to get the information they need from their clients, without chasing paperwork. Over 6,000 accounting and bookkeeping firms and 120,000 of their small business clients use Receipt Bank.

We talked to the team at Hammerjack, an Australian outsourcing solutions provider for small and medium-sized business, about how its managed to leverage the power of Receipt Bank and Xero to help scale, while providing a great client experience.

Ensuring success with the right technology

“Traditionally, small and medium-sized businesses in Australia have had limited options when it comes to moving their services offshore,” said Hammerjack’s Managing Director, Andrew Mault. “We’ve developed a set of solutions to allow these businesses to leverage outsourcing for a range of services, from accounting and finance to marketing and technology. We help them get more out of their investment by establishing offshore capability in the Philippines.”

Launching in 2016, Hammerjack’s finance and accounting arm grew by 300% in its first year. And a big part of that growth was driven by its ‘lite’ solution, a subscription-based service, bringing clients a lower cost end-to-end bookkeeping solution.

According to Josh Tuohy, Hammerjack’s Finance Channel Support Lead, using the right mix of technology has been crucial to its success.

“All of our clients on this service use Xero for their bookkeeping and Receipt Bank for invoices and receipts, which has given us huge efficiency gains. In fact, it would be impossible to offer our lite accounting and finance service without Xero and Receipt Bank. Through leveraging the capability of those two products, we are more productive and profitable. We can provide more value to our customers because we deliver a consistent service at a lower cost,” Josh said.

Delivering greater efficiencies and a better customer experience

In the early days, some clients were submitting bills and invoices to Hammerjack, via email and Dropbox.

“This process created time delays, because each document had to be manually reviewed. With Receipt Bank, that entire process happens automatically. For example, one of our clients operates a large produce business with multiple stores. Using Receipt Bank, we’ve been able to automate thousands of invoices a month.

“It’s not only saved our practice and customers massive amounts of time, but it also means there is no room for error from manual data entry. We can save our customers money while delivering a reliable service. And because we’re so efficient, we can deliver a better customer experience,” Josh said.

With Xero and Receipt Bank, Hammerjack has also been able to deliver clients with an easy onboarding experience.

“We’ve created our own operating manuals, leveraging online guides from Receipt Bank and Xero. Because we’ve been able to create a smooth standardised onboarding process for our clients, we’ve reduced the time it takes from four to six weeks down to three to five days. That’s another way we’ve been able to provide a better experience for our clients,” Josh said.

Hammerjack also uses Xero and Receipt Bank to streamline their own internal operations.

“We’re a start up, so getting expense and approval processes in place usually comes last. But with Receipt Bank and Xero we could get those processes in place straight away. Our team can easily submit their expenses, our books are more up-to-date and we always have a real-time view of our cost of sales,” Andrew said.

Where to next for Hammerjack

“We want to be the one-stop shop for all outsourcing services, for small and mid-sized business in Australia. Using the right technology is at the heart of everything we do. And Xero and Receipt Bank are an important part of that journey. If we can implement technology that’s going to make a process smarter, more effective, better quality, or provide more value at lower cost to our customers, we will.

“Moving offshore can be challenging for small businesses, but combining our expertise, plus using Xero as a platform we’re able to create an easier transition for our clients, because we are working to defined logic and processes. We are developing a wider range of products and services, as we move closer towards our goal of becoming ‘the go-to’ for small and medium-sized business wanting to outsource managing their people, processes and technology,” Andrew concluded.

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