Hubdoc Partner Success Story

“As the accountant, if we can do less admin, then we get to provide better advice. If the client does less admin, they can spend more time leading their team or spending time with their family. The more we can automate, the better it is for everyone.”

– Steph Hinds, Growthwise

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The problem: inefficient reporting due to missing documents

Growthwise has been on a mission to increase efficiency from the get-go. As much as they worked to find tools to help them create a seamless workflow, they continued to experience inefficiencies in a couple of key areas – namely, document collection and data entry.

“We had some clients who were handing in boxes of receipts and doing manual data entry,” says Steph Hinds, Co-Founder and Head Ninja at Growthwise.

“They were taking a lot of time to get us their information," notes Steph. "Clients are busy people. They're running their small businesses, and they don’t always prioritize getting you the information you need.”

Growthwise employees were constantly chasing after their clients’ bank statements, bills, and invoices, then spending hours manually entering key data in order to complete bank reconciliations and reporting.

Steph recalls the inefficiency and how it impacted their productivity, as well as their client experience.

“We were forever chasing client documents. On average, it took five to six emails or five to six phone calls just to get missing documents.”

The solution: automated document collection & data entry

Steph first met the Hubdoc team at Xerocon Brisbane in 2015. After seeing a short demo of Hubdoc’s automated document collection and data entry capabilities, as well as its integration with Xero, she immediately saw Hubdoc’s value.

“At the time, we were struggling with getting clients to send us documents, so we loved that Hubdoc had auto-fetch. We wanted something that was as automated – something that would allow our clients to do fewer steps and allow us to do our job.”

Growthwise takes pride in being a team of not your average “sit-behind-a-desk” accountants. Embracing technology and automation is part of their culture – in fact, they’ve made it their mission to #BanAdmin. As a result, selling their internal team on Hubdoc wasn’t difficult. The team also quickly saw the value of automated data entry and document collection.

According to Steph: “We told our team: you don’t have to type in stuff, and you don’t have to hound clients for stuff!” Affirming that Hubdoc was able to deliver on all of their outlined criteria and provide value to both their team and their clients, they were ready to introduce it into their tech stack.

The result: better, faster business insights

Implementing Hubdoc has enabled Growthwise to experience a number of benefits. Most importantly, they’ve been able to increase efficiency, centralize their clients’ documents, improve their client experience, and gather better financial data.

Having the ability to automate document collection and data entry has massively increased Growthwise’s efficiency. A process that once involved boxes of receipts, five to six client phone calls and emails, and hours spent manually entering data has become almost entirely automated. Resolving these inefficiencies in their workflow has enabled them to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time providing helpful advice to their clients.

“With Hubdoc, we can literally take care of the whole entire audit process by logging in and doing a date search,” says Steph. “Our clients aren’t scrambling and trying to find their documents or having to spend days searching for them. From that perspective, it’s a massive difference to clients, especially if they’re doing their own bookkeeping – they’ve got all of their bank statements, bills, and invoices in one central hub.”

Just as the Growthwise team has experienced massive time savings from not having to chase down client documents and do manual data entry, their clients have also experienced these time-saving benefits.

“As the accountant, if we can do less admin, then we get to provide better advice. If the client does less admin, they can spend more time leading their team or spending time with their family. The more we can automate, the better it is for everyone,” says Steph.

One step closer to real-time financials

Adopting a new tool will inevitably involve process changes. Justifying these types of changes can be challenging, but Steph explains that it should all tie back to your business goals and how you can better serve your clients: “Understand what you want to be able to do for your clients. Work hard on the things that are going to allow your business to do what you want to do.”

Growthwise was built on the mentality that “there has to be a better way”, and they’re unafraid to explore the routes that lead to that “better way”. They want to be able to move with their clients and provide impactful advice. In order to do that, they prioritize finding the technology and tools that will help them provide the best, most actionable advice.

As a result of implementing Hubdoc in their tech stack, they’re one step closer to providing their clients with real-time financial advice.

“We have access to that information much quicker with Hubdoc than we would have previously. We can then get our clients that information quicker, we can sit down with them and help them to make those decisions quicker, and they get to implement those changes six months before they would have been able to previously.”

Generate better financial insights, faster

How Growthwise leverages Hubdoc to provide near-real-time advisory