How MMP Limited switched to Wolters Kluwer’s accounting suite


Accountancy practice management software has come a long way. Today, features like automated billing and reconciliations are easily integrated into the day-to-day practice workflow of Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting UK customers.

Our employees work side by side with our customers to create and manage these solutions – driven by a deep understanding of their needs and addressing the rapid changes in their environment.

However, it’s often hard to look beyond improving performance in day-to-day operations. Amid Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic and other disruptions, accountancy practices and their clients are dealing with an unpredictable economic landscape. Future business planning can appear daunting.

However, technology can support accountancy practices (and their clients) in making informed business decisions, and planning for the future. In the first part of our Accountancy Practice Management for Future-Fit Growth series, we’ll explore how they can use technology to define and easily track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Doing so gives practices closer control of performance tracking, and deeper insights that will inform strategic growth plans.

Saving Time

For several decades, business technology platforms have enabled practices to track performance metrics that they have customised. This highlights areas that qualify for improvement and underpins strategic planning.

Contemporary technology, such as CCH KPI Monitoring, makes setting up KPIs faster and easier for accountancy practices than ever before. This is vital today. The current business landscape demands that firms assess and amend KPIs more frequently, based on fresh market variables. KPIs such as client retention rate and business time-to-recovery have become increasingly prominent performance indicators in the past year. If clunky technology makes KPI management difficult, practices have less time and insight to plan future growth.

Reducing Risk
CCH KPI Monitoring makes it far easier to track KPIs and report on them. This is fundamental in minimising risk. For example, if a KPI is set to track and escalate debt filtered by overdue dates, the ability to easily set alerts and automatically generate reports is critical to practice performance management.

Some practices are manually running monthly reports to measure KPIs. Others are running real-time reporting engines, a key feature of CCH KPI Monitoring. This latter solution allows practices to review essential data at any time – covering both performance management and compliance requirements. They can do so remotely or on-premise.

This means that firms can assess issues before they become problems, and thus act proactively. Real-time reporting is a true asset in building a future-fit practice.

The Proof is in the Practice
A number of Wolters Kluwer customers have been using CCH KPI Monitoring for several years now. Our customers look to us when they need to be right. Ryecroft Glenton has successfully integrated CCH KPI Monitoring with its own system. This consolidates information from several sources, including CCH Central and CCH Practice Management.

“We can use the year end date to trigger a sequence of reminders. Have we asked for the books? Have they been received? If a request to a client has been outstanding for a certain period, the partner will receive an alert via email. For limited companies, we can monitor the corporation tax and Companies House filing deadlines – as well as the different deadlines for pension schemes”

– Ian Smith, partner at Ryecroft Glenton

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”

Michael Martin Partnership (MMP) Limited is an accountancy practice of around fifteen employees based in Kent.

Introducing MMP Limited
MMP prides itself on its speed of service and consistently growing client base. The practice became a Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting UK customer in 2020. Director Paul Cobb spoke to us about why his practice made the switch to our CCH solutions, and shared feedback about the experience of using them.

Why MMP’s accounting software had to change
MMP had faced cumulative problems with its incumbent accounting software provider, with whom they had had a longstanding association. From around 2016, users within the practice were experiencing slowness with the software, while licensing costs were simultaneously rising. The standard of customer service had also declined in MMP’s estimations.

“It started getting painfully slow,” MMP director Paul Cobb remarked.

“You start to wonder whether it is the software or the hardware that’s causing the problem. In actual fact though, we’ve always been on top of our hardware. With the software, we just found that we were having more and more problems. We put up with it for a number of years. Then we decided that we had to look around for alternatives.”

That decision brought MMP into contact with Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting UK.

Why MMP chose Wolters Kluwer
Over a consultation period of around six to nine months, and taking into account the inevitable difficulties of learning to use new software, MMP decided to make the switch to Wolters Kluwer’s CCH suite.

“We had several calls with Wolters Kluwer about CCH,” Paul said. “We also spoke to another practice we knew, based in Liverpool, to get another perspective on the software. We did have one or two chats with other providers, but when we saw the CCH demo, we liked the central database and we were happy to go forward with it.”

How Wolters Kluwer responded
Wolters Kluwer combines almost two centuries of deep domain knowledge with advanced technology; for professional decision-making with confidence. We responded with a full suite of CCH solutions, facilitating an all-encompassing switch to our system for MMP.

“The data transfer was brilliant,” Paul said. “The timing of training wasn’t ideal, because some of our in-person sessions were due to take place just as COVID-19 struck in spring 2020. In the end, those sessions couldn’t happen, but we found that tools such as CCH Personal Tax were pretty straightforward and easy to pick up. It’s so much quicker and more efficient for the way we work, and we love it.”

The results
“It sounds daft, but one of the problems with our previous provider was that we could only have one client’s details open at any one time,” Paul told us. One can imagine the scenario; while an accountant is working on one client account, another client rings. The accountant needs to access that client’s information onscreen quickly. Before adopting Wolters Kluwer’s CCH suite, Paul told us that his practice couldn’t do that without closing the previous account down.

Most importantly, the time savings brought about by CCH have been highly significant. “I would say that CCH saves us 10-15% of our working week,” said Paul. “For our four most senior people, CCH might save us as much as 20%. From my own experience, it could be an extra day a week, in comparison to what we had before.”

Want to find out more?

The results speak for themselves. MMP switched smoothly to a full suite of CCH solutions and now enjoy improved value for money, time savings and functionality. Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting UK is proud to serve practices like MMP. Our priority is to transform customer interactions across the entire journey into a seamless, customer-focused, end-to-end digital experience.

To find out more about our CCH solutions, and how you can achieve results like MMP, get in touch. Our CCH Accelerate software bundle is designed to allow medium-sized practices to move to a fully integrated suite with one swift switch.

Aug 2022

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