The founder of Soaring Falcon Accountancy, Alex Falcon Huerta FCCA is a Xero MVP and former member of ACCA's international assembly. With a background as an accountant working with some of the most agile and progressive small businesses in the UK, Alex is an early technology adopter who set up her practice to accelerate change both for her clients and her profession.
Yes correct - I dont do the audits myself - I partner with a firm to carry these out. In some of my explanations above on the 'admin side', Zapier removes quite a lot of the mundane tasks I used to do manually. This frees up my time as well as my Ops Managers time so we can focus on more fee based work. Even now with 'Twiso', my Ops Manager used to manually update video meetings with a summary and action points for the client or the team...Twiso has this build in with AI. So its areas such as this where I look to save time - I compare how long it would take my team do action manually and see if its worth implementing or not.
I outsource Audit work. Software does most automatically. I can confirm I don't work long hours. I have specialist contractors outsource and offshore. Changes are since 2015.
Ive mentioned some examples above. We all run our practices in different ways. Im just sharing mine. But you're right - a more in-depth version would be better - could be on the next article :)
I do have other investments/businesses - you're also correct on that one!
I will implement tech / people where and when needed if it is a pain point for me.
8% is quite high but some softwares are required to meet client delivery. Around 14 of my clients are in audit threshold - out of the 50. Also, in late 2022 / early 2023 a lot of softwares companies put their prices up .We could only capture some of this in the following months after the year end. Im hoping software companies will start to recognise some of the challenges we face. This is why I constantly review and check other products .T/o is considerably more than the above mentioned. I have high value clients, but few of them. This is my ideal and preferred model.
Yes this is great and ideal. Especially if you want to stay small. I have quite a niche business where the majority are SaaS and Creative with multi entities globally. I look after the UK entity only. Although it sounds complex and especially with the softwares, most of it is connected via Zapier. An example - I use Ignition to do my proposals, payments and engagement letters - Zapier sends this to google drive and slack. Ignition takes the payments and creates the sales invoice in Xero. Before this, I was manually creating repeating invoices in Xero and using GoCardless for payments . The team are notified of the new services signed up for to commence the work. - Another is DialPad. This is connected to slack via Zapier. - this notifies me of calls answered, a recording of the call and any missed calls. - Another is ChatGPT - connected via Zapier to create draft emails in Gmail ... I would say Im passionate about tech and love to test things out - basically to avoid any manual work .
20% is 'client software ' - these are products which are recharged to the client. As they have scaled, the software increases. Internal software this year was 8% but 4% previous years. The increase this year is due to a number of softwares increasing their prices all at the same time and I added a couple more to help with some further automation .
My answers
Just and FYI. The start up practice is now run via a what’s app group. Please dm me for more info. Thanks !
Yes correct - I dont do the audits myself - I partner with a firm to carry these out. In some of my explanations above on the 'admin side', Zapier removes quite a lot of the mundane tasks I used to do manually. This frees up my time as well as my Ops Managers time so we can focus on more fee based work. Even now with 'Twiso', my Ops Manager used to manually update video meetings with a summary and action points for the client or the team...Twiso has this build in with AI. So its areas such as this where I look to save time - I compare how long it would take my team do action manually and see if its worth implementing or not.
Yes sure - please DM me
Yes potentially .. although Ive also heard some horror stories on that subject!
I outsource Audit work. Software does most automatically. I can confirm I don't work long hours. I have specialist contractors outsource and offshore. Changes are since 2015.
Ive mentioned some examples above. We all run our practices in different ways. Im just sharing mine. But you're right - a more in-depth version would be better - could be on the next article :)
I do have other investments/businesses - you're also correct on that one!
I will implement tech / people where and when needed if it is a pain point for me.
8% is quite high but some softwares are required to meet client delivery. Around 14 of my clients are in audit threshold - out of the 50. Also, in late 2022 / early 2023 a lot of softwares companies put their prices up .We could only capture some of this in the following months after the year end. Im hoping software companies will start to recognise some of the challenges we face. This is why I constantly review and check other products .T/o is considerably more than the above mentioned. I have high value clients, but few of them. This is my ideal and preferred model.
Yes this is great and ideal. Especially if you want to stay small. I have quite a niche business where the majority are SaaS and Creative with multi entities globally. I look after the UK entity only. Although it sounds complex and especially with the softwares, most of it is connected via Zapier. An example - I use Ignition to do my proposals, payments and engagement letters - Zapier sends this to google drive and slack. Ignition takes the payments and creates the sales invoice in Xero. Before this, I was manually creating repeating invoices in Xero and using GoCardless for payments . The team are notified of the new services signed up for to commence the work. - Another is DialPad. This is connected to slack via Zapier. - this notifies me of calls answered, a recording of the call and any missed calls. - Another is ChatGPT - connected via Zapier to create draft emails in Gmail ... I would say Im passionate about tech and love to test things out - basically to avoid any manual work .
20% is 'client software ' - these are products which are recharged to the client. As they have scaled, the software increases. Internal software this year was 8% but 4% previous years. The increase this year is due to a number of softwares increasing their prices all at the same time and I added a couple more to help with some further automation .
We currently use Hubstaff