SV Partners

Brisbane, Australia

Insolvency, turnaround, advisory and forensic firm SV Partners learns about the financial health of the business at the touch of a button.

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Company Background

SV Partners is a national specialist accounting and advisory firm, with 13 offices in the metropolitan and regional areas of each state, across the eastern seaboard. With so many offices spread around the country, it is essential the management team is able to keep a watchful eye over the health of the group as a whole, without getting bogged down in individual P&L and working capital. Until recently, that wasn’t possible. 

 

An end to end-of-month consolidation

For nearly a decade, the business had been using MYOB Premier as its accounting software. “We liked Premier,” says chartered accountant, Director of Forensics at SV Partners, Rohan Youngman.

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A Guiding Hand

Integral to the success of the new system was QLD-based MYOB implementation partner ABC Business Solutions, who helped to ensure the structure of accounts in EXO was tailored precisely to SV Partners’ model. The benefit of working with a company like ABC Business Solutions – who are not just software specialists but trained accountants – is that as well as assisting with the technical implications of setting up a system like EXO, they understand the complex statutory and board reporting requirements.

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“We didn’t want to develop a heap of individual EXO general ledgers and then have to worry about consolidation at year end,” says Mr Youngman. “We wanted the opposite – a single, general ledger that could give us the financial position of the group in an instant, but also shed light on geographical locations, disciplines or even directors as and when we needed more detailed visibility.” ABC Business Solutions were able to make that happen, and also support the integrity in the procedures and protocols to ensure accurate and timely reporting.

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Understanding Performance Measures

The detailed information relating to SV Partners’ financial health is built from the bottom up: information on a particular business unit (insolvency in QLD, for example) is fed into a state report; the state reports consolidate into a national discipline (eg insolvency in Australia). The national disciplines ultimately consolidate into the overall group.

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The snapshot view, however, is from the top down. Management can get an instant picture of the balance sheet at group level, without getting bogged down in P&L or working capital at a regional or local level.

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A Significant Improvement

Subsequent to July 2013, SV Partners have a much better feel for the performance and management of the business as a whole. “In the past”, says Mr Youngman, “we had all the parts but we could only go about adding up the sum of the parts on a quarterly basis – usually when we had to comply with reporting deadlines to our external stakeholders. “Now, understanding our financial perspective is a button pressing exercise – which is a significant improvement as a whole in relation to the financial management of the business.” Rohan Youngman, Director of Forensics, SV Partners. 

 

“It was easy to use, had good functionality and it was intuitive in relation to structuring of charts and reporting.” For SV Partners, the need to move to a new system was a consequence of the significant growth of the business that required more sophisticated and timely consolidated reporting. “We had individual entity ledgers in Premier,” explains Mr Youngman, “so if we wanted to report at group level, we’d have to go through a lengthy consolidation process.” In 2010, realising the only way to streamline their accounting was to implement an ERP system, SV Partners made the switch to MYOB EXO.

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The Move to a Single General Ledger

Mr Youngman admits that for the first couple of years, they were little more than babes in the woods. “When we first switched to EXO,” he says, “we were hoping to use an overlay system called Alchemex to generate divisionalised and consolidated reporting. But that never really got off the ground.”

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It was only at the start of the 2013 financial year – when all of the operational business units moved to a common group ownership – that SV Partners decided they could operate under a single general ledger system. “It was then we really started using EXO as an ERP system, structuring the accounts in such a way that we could slice and dice them pretty much.” The advantage of this approach is that it still allows SV Partners to benchmark its individual locations. “We’re always looking for efficiencies that we can adopt across the board. Using EXO, we’ve got that ability to understand what those performance measures are, with a view to isolating and focusing on areas where improvements need to be made,” says Mr Youngman.

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Integrity of Data the Number One Priority

Asked how the business has acclimatised to EXO following nearly a decade with Premier, Mr Youngman is upbeat. From a processing and reporting perspective, he says staff are now reaching a standard of comprehension where they can be more definitive and independent in their use of the system. “We still need support when it comes to the report writing process.” Fortunately that’s something ABC Business Solutions – with their high level expertise in creating complex clarity financial reports for multi discipline, multi level GL structures – can provide.

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“But we’re not creating new reports every day,” adds Mr Youngman. Knowing how to use EXO is only half the picture. In many respects, it’s more important that staff are disciplined and focused in the manner in which they input their information. “Given the effort that’s gone into restructuring our chart of accounts,” says Mr Youngman, “it’s essential that we can rely on the information that comes out. We can only do that if we’re entering information in the correct way to start with. The old adage rings true: garbage in, garbage out.”