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Give your clients cash flow visibility, control and advice

30th Sep 2021
Brought to you by
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Award winning CRM & practice management software

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Satago was originally created to help accountants and bookkeepers manage their own cash flow. Now, firms are using Satago to package up cash flow management as a chargeable advisory service. We spoke to Ben Smith to find out more.

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Ben Smith, Satago’s Partnerships Enablement Manager, has a particular passion for this recent shift towards cash flow as a service. He’s working closely with many firms that are using Satago to provide more value to clients and generate ongoing revenue.

In a nutshell, Satago is a three-in-one cashflow management system, providing automated credit control, risk insight and invoice finance. It takes care of chasing invoices, gives you insights on a clients’ ability to pay and provides unprecedented visibility and control over your debtor book. Importantly, an accountant can use it for credit control in their own practice, and to provide a credit control service to clients

Bring visibility and automation into your own cash flow

Ben starts by summarising how Satago works internally, at your practice. “You can use Satago to carry out credit control for your practice AND collect owed revenue from your clients. Some accountants and bookkeepers may not invoice a new client for 12 months for example, so it can be quite difficult to keep track of who owes you what.”

“With Satago, you have receivables and debtor visibility aligned to key additional data points. You're making sure credit searches are done on new customers, making sure existing customers can actually pay for any new services you offer them. And you're making sure they know what they owe you, with automated reminders helping you get paid quickly”

Your credit control process can enhance your client relationships, whether it's ‘thank you emails’ or ‘calls to action’ to review and refer your business.”

As well as all the data, risk management and automated reminders, Satago can release working capital, as invoice finance. “There can come a time, for whatever reason, that a business needs a bump in cash flow,” says Ben. “Maybe your VAT bills come around a little bit quicker than you thought it would. Maybe you've got an investment opportunity, but you don't have the liquid cash available. And that's where Satago's other core capability, invoice finance, comes in. So we can release working capital quickly and efficiently so you can make positive cash flow decisions.”

Provide your clients with cash flow, risk and invoice management

Now imagine that your clients could achieve this same cash flow visibility. Implement the same due diligence, automation and customer relationship management for their businesses. And release working capital if they need to. It’s not hard to see why many practices are now bringing their clients onto Satago as a new value-add service. 

“These accountants have SME clients that find it difficult to keep track of their invoices,” explains Ben. “And because they might have clients who use QuickBooks, Xero, Sage, FreeAgent (and so on), it can be a challenge to standardise how you help a client get on top of their debtor book.”

What we found is that accountants wanted to offer all of this to their clients.”

“So what Satago has been working on is giving you really good, solid visibility on the core credit control KPIs you, as a practice, need in order to advise your clients on credit control. With a specific view to helping your clients create and maintain a healthy cash flow position.”

“There's a suite of data that will give your client a really solid view of what their credit control performance is. But also what they should do about it. Having the data at your fingertips so that you can give them not just the state of play, but answer that 'So what?' question.”

Offering cash flow as a chargeable advisory service

Like many in the accounting industry, from practice owners to software vendors, Ben laments the statement ‘compliance is dead’. In fact, as everyone (not least, HMRC) seems to agree - compliance is still really important and any ‘advice’ you offer will likely come from your compliance services in some way. 

A problem, as Ben suggests, is that ‘advisory’ doesn’t come with the schedules and routine of compliance work. And so, accountants and bookkeepers are left to figure out whether a certain type of advice is a viable business idea and how to deliver it – at scale. 

Luckily, Ben has a nifty trick to work it out.

Three questions to test your advisory idea

“With your offering of bookkeeping, accounts production, tax returns, VAT returns, payroll and what have you, you’re following or innovating on an existing blueprint. If you want to move into that more advisory world, you're not following such a well trodden path.”

“So in this model, you've got to be able to answer ‘yes’ to three questions: 

  1. Is the service solving a problem perceived as ‘big’ by your client? If not, then they won't want to pay for it. 
  2. Do enough of your clients have that problem? Because otherwise you're not actually delivering a service. You're delivering a consultancy that you do once and you don't do again. Or you have to do it in a very different way for different clients. 
  3. Can you solve that problem in a scalable, efficient way? Because it doesn't matter how important that problem is and how many clients have that problem, if you can't solve it quickly and efficiently, you're not going to be able to do it profitably.” 

A big problem, widely experienced by SMEs and scalable? That’ll be cash flow.

“The problem that Satago solves is around cash flow position and cash flow management and particularly the credit control aspect to that. So to put it to our test:

  1. Is cash flow a big problem? I mean, you can't shake a stick on SMEs news without hitting three surveys that talk about how late payments cause SME owners sleepless nights. It's a business problem and it's a stress problem and yes, it's a big, tangible problem.
  2. Do enough of your clients have a cash flow problem? Pretty much. It's a fairly universal problem. Obviously, some business models are more prone to credit control issues than others. Particularly if you trade in invoices, it’s more of an issue than it would be for an e-commerce vendor where you go next to instant payouts. 
  3. Can you solve the problem in a scalable way? Now, historically it's been quite difficult to answer yes to this question. You might be able to solve it by being really active in the accounting ledger and putting a lot of human intervention into it… exporting reports, making suggestions... But it's difficult to do that in a scalable way across different systems and the whole client base. 

And that's what Satago has been doing, making a platform through which, as a practice, bookkeeper or accountant, you can provide that service in a standardised way to all of your clients, regardless of the accounting platform that they're using. 

How to package your cash flow services

Here, Ben is careful to echo our own approach at AccountancyManager. “We're really careful to not dictate exactly what you should do.” He clarifies. “We're just trying to provide a framework for what you could do, that you can adjust as you see fit.”

Implementation: Setting up Satago for your clients

“We tend to see three models. We see implementation services. So in the same way that you might carry out a software conversion on behalf of a client who's been on a desktop product, there's a service that you, as expert advisors in the accounting or bookkeeping firm, can provide to make sure that it's configured in an accurate way. This is a one-off service where you're providing the arm around the shoulder. It's about setting up a credit control process for the client, not onboarding them to Satago.”

Quarterly advice: Explaining data and the ‘so what?’

“The other thing that we see is a slightly more recurring, like a quarterly advisory service whereby you're essentially examining credit control and KPIs, like:

- How many new customers have you had, what's their credit score? 

- What's the debtor days variable change been over the last 90 days?

- Which are the invoices you definitely need to go and pick up a phone and actually call them to chase'?

“We see accountants tend to merge that in with submitting VAT returns or doing the quarterly management accounts type update or quarterly review. This is where you can delve into the data and provide that crucial ‘so what?’ element I mentioned before.”

Accountants and bookkeepers as outsourced finance controllers

“And the third one we see is variations on a full outsourcing model. So you, as the accountant, take on the task of managing accounts receivable on behalf of your clients. The way the technology is these days, you get a trigger to say that there's a new client. You make sure that they’ve got the appropriate reminder schedules set up and when to escalate things.”

“Essentially what you're doing is providing an outsourced service that might cost your client a couple hundred pounds a month, but it's giving them peace of mind. It's giving them much better cash balance outcomes. Because we're seeing that the automated credit control service does reduce debtor days and it does bring in cash balances much quicker and from the perspective of the clients, they don't have to pay somebody in the business to do that. So either they can save on headcount or they can get that financial controller to spend half their time doing something more useful.”

If you’d like to find out more about Satago for accountants and bookkeepers, please visit here.