Gold Group gives Thumbs Up for Nimbus

A case study with Gold Group Consulting, Gold Coast, Australia 

The Organisation

Gold Group Consulting is a specialist consulting firm that provides Business Advisory, Tax, Audit, and Wealth management services.  

We sat down with Stephen Hodgkinson, Partner of Gold Group, to talk about their journey with Nimbus so far.  

Nimbus:  Stephen, please tell us a bit more about your role and your background with the practice?  

Stephen:  Gold Group is mostly Business-client orientated. I’ve been with the practice for the last 17 years. I’m a Chartered Accountant with a fairly high interest in the IT-side of things – getting our systems and our IT-processes reviewed and making sure we’re keeping up with current technologies – always looking for alternatives to do things better.  

We’ve done a fair bit of investing in cloud technologies over the last few years. 

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"Covid-19 was the obvious example of where having less reliance on the server made things a whole lot easier for us and also provided the opportunity to re-engineer our business a little bit."

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Other than Nimbus, we use Class for our Superannuation funds, Xero Practice Manager (XPM), Xero Tax and MyWorkpapers.

Nimbus:  How did your team cope with adapting to remote working during the lockdown?  

Stephen:  Fairly seamlessly, since most of our systems were already cloud-based. A few people in our office have worked remotely in the past, but with having whole teams away, we actually realised that some people excelled in that environment. So, we have started implementing that in our working strategy going forward. Some people will remain working from home a couple of days a week, which gives them a bit of a mental break.  

Before

Nimbus:  What document management software were you using before and what made you decide to move to Nimbus?  

Stephen:  Prior to Nimbus we were using HowNow, from Business Fitness, which was server-based.   We did look at their cloud-based applications but it didn’t really suit our practice’s needs at the time. That’s when we started looking at Nimbus and moving over to a Cloud platform for our document management.  

The Implementation

Nimbus:  Tell us what was your experience like during the implementation of Nimbus?  

Stephen:  From memory, it probably took one or two days to upload all the files for about 500GB of data. Overall, it was a pretty good process and we were up and running in about a week with no real dramas after that.  

Benefits from the Solution

Nimbus:  Can you please share a few of the main benefits of the solution that are now evident in the way you work?  

Stephen:  The syncing of client information from XPM into Nimbus works really well and we’ve found that very useful.  

We’ve created a lot of custom fields in XPM that syncs with Nimbus. So, for example, if a client pays Superannuation guarantee or if they’re on Cashflow boost or Jobkeeper – we’ve grouped them all into categories and then using those custom fields in Nimbus to filter and send out targeted newsletters.  

We also found the automated email functionality very useful. For example, we’ve set up an automated email reminder for our Superannuation clients that goes out every quarter to remind them that their superannuation is due.  

A couple of clients are already using the Client Portal, we’d like to look into implementing that next, together with the Digital Signing.  

Nimbus:  If you were to give an estimate, how much would you say Nimbus is saving you on document administration time and costs?  

Stephen:  In terms of being lazy, I don’t have to leave my desk for anything – I don’t have to get any files, I don’t have to go to the back and dig anything out – everything is in Nimbus… a couple of clicks and you have what you need.  

So, you would have to save a couple of hours a week – even at my level, where I’m not necessarily digging up a lot of basic information for a client, but just calling up older emails or conversations:

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"I would say you’d save at least an hour or two every week, and with Administration teams, it will be a whole lot more."

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Plus, the storage space at the back. With physical files obviously there is a huge cost in rent. And even in terms of the server, cloud storage is a lot cheaper than server storage. So we’ve been able to downsize our server requirements significantly in the last couple of years. Our documents were the last remaining thing taking up space on the server, so all of that went to Nimbus.  

Even our server backups and a lot of other processes that you don’t really think about – there’s not a lot on there anymore that needs to be backed up, so there is a cost and time saving there as well.  

Overall, we are very happy with the system.  

Nimbus:  Thank you for your time Stephen, it was great chatting to you and we look forward to hearing more of you in the future.  

Nimbus, being a leading Cloud Document Management system, can be embraced by firms to break the shackles of traditional server-hosted software and deliver a far more scalable and flexible working environment for staff, while improving client communication and relationships.
 

If you would like to see these and other great time-saving features in action, sign up for a demo below and let us show you how Nimbus can boost your productivity with a saving of at least 6 Hours per Employee per Week. 

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