ProAdvice runs their Practice with Xero and Nimbus

A case study with ProAdvice, Victoria & Tasmania, Australia

The Organisation

ProAdvice is an accounting and consultancy firm, providing traditional tax, BAS, bookkeeping and financial statement compliance, as well as management and business consulting, virtual CFO directorships and Advisory services.  

We sat down with Bronwyn Walker, Senior Accountant and Practice Manager of ProAdvice, to talk about their journey with Nimbus.  

Nimbus:  Bronwyn, please tell us a bit more about your role and your background with ProAdvice?  

Bronwyn:  I am a Chartered Accountant and have been with ProAdvice since they started in 2006. When we started, I had the responsibility of rolling out our software systems. I did all the software selections and installations, in conjunction with doing some compliance work.  

In the last 2 – 3 years I’ve been doing practice management at ProAdvice and I’m now acting in an IT Director role – assisting clients by providing advice and helping them with their own system implementations, as part of the Advisory overlay within our practice.  

Nimbus:  How did your team adapt to remote working during the lockdown?  

Bronwyn:  We’re doing Ok – some people are finding it more difficult than others, depending on whether they’ve got kids at home. I’d say we’ve transitioned pretty well, but most people are looking forward to going back to whatever the “new normal” might be. Our Tassie office has a lot of people that work from home ordinarily, whereas Geelong predominantly worked in the office and I think will be returning once they are able to.  

Before

Nimbus:  How would you describe ProAdvice before using Nimbus and what made you decide to change systems?  

Bronwyn:  We did a two-way transition – We came from MYOB through SuiteFiles to Nimbus for our Document management, after moving over to Xero from MYOB AE for our Practice management.  

We were pretty happy with what MYOB provided in terms of document management, but we had to move to Cloud as a result of our decision to move to Xero, and we needed a solution that integrated with the database.  

Our initial decision was SuiteFiles, however at the time we found the system to be lacking certain controls, which created a very messy database over a 12-month period. Also, when doing searches, the way the data was shown was quite rigid and we struggled with grouping and finding certain things. As a result, we were looking for a better solution to solve those problems.  

The Implementation

Nimbus:  What was your experience like during the implementation of Nimbus?

Bronwyn:  It actually went really well – I was pretty happy with the implementation, the planning and the training. We did have some data issues but that was on our side – some of the data could not be mapped as it didn’t have any consistency, due to our messy database from the previous system.  

Benefits from the Solution

Nimbus:  Could you please share a few of the main benefits of the solution that are now evident in the way you work, since onboarding with Nimbus in 2018?

Bronwyn:  Version control is a really great benefit, so you’re assured that if you do make changes that you can actually get back the original.  

There’s no ability to hard delete a file unless you’re the administrator, so documents can never disappear once put into the system.

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"The different search options that are available and the ability to look at    data in multiple different ways are great."

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If you are a person that likes to view by folder, you can set up a view that gives you the folder view, or if you’re a person that likes to just search, then the search functionality works very well for freeform searches.  

Generating and pre-filling documents from templates is a pretty good advantage.  

The integration with the Xero database – the ability to pull information straight from there so you don’t have to do two lots of data entry, for example, if someone changes address or if your contact changes.  

Another big positive for us is the linking of documents. We use the document links to link procedures together in procedure-flows. This feature has been really widely used and we’ve also been using it to do our collaboration through Microsoft Teams to link back to documents within Nimbus so that it links back to the same version.  

The Microsoft Office Add-ins are also very handy and we use them a lot to open and save documents back into Nimbus. And the fixed-list custom field feature allows staff to easily select options from a pre-defined list when profiling documents, ensuring consistency in document profiling tags.  

We haven’t spent a lot of time yet on the Client Portal or Webform Checklists, but I think they are really great features and we can utilise them within our business. We’ve just started now using the Webform Checklists and look forward to getting that fully implemented.  

Nimbus:  How much time would you say having a cloud document management system is saving you?  

Bronwyn:  For example, I’ve just had a request to send through financials and tax returns to the bank. The ‘old world’ would’ve been having to go and find those documents and scan and email them across, whereas this will be a 5-minute task for our administration team to do instead of probably an hour.  

And if something happens and you realise just the last minute that you’ve done something wrong, sometimes you need to re-collate the whole job from start to finish. Whereas with an electronic system you can do that easily and you’re not wasting all that paper.

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"Having an online document management solution has also made our      transition to working from home during COVID-19 fairly easy."

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Because everything is still available that we would have when we’re in the office. And certainly, it made it possible for me to work from home when my children needed to study from home as well, whereas any sort of manual system would be completely restricted to office-bound work.  

Nimbus:  Thank you very much for your time Bronwyn.


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.  

Improve Collaboration and Efficiency with Nimbus

If you would like to see these and other great time-saving features provided by our cloud DMS, 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. If you have further questions or enquiries, please call 1800 646 287 or contact us online.  

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Updated 15/11/2022