How Hale & Company Created a New Service With Float
About Hale & Company
Employees: 25
Clients: 1,000
Location: Maidenhead, Berkshire
Industry: Outsourced Accounting and Business Advisers
I’m Daniel Cole, one of the partners at Hale & Company. We are a long-standing firm of Chartered Accountants and Chartered Tax Advisers based in Maidenhead. Our client base is extremely diverse but our core business is servicing small to medium sized owner-managed businesses and a large portfolio of private clients. Five years ago, we made the decision to move our clients away from Sage and onto the Xero platform, and have subsequently seen a huge boost in efficiency. Because Xero doesn’t provide cash flow forecasting, we turned to Float to assist with not just our clients’ cash flow forecasts, but also our own.
Forecasting cash flow manually is cost prohibitive
For many of our clients and for our own practice, forecasting future scenarios had always been an arduous task involving sometimes days of preparation in a spreadsheet or in Sage Winforecast. Both options were extremely slow and inflexible.
The solution? Float
Since using Float we’ve been able to work through and make decisions on very important matters facing our own business – including whether or not to take on a sharp increase in rent at our current office or move into, and remodel a new office. The Scenarios feature in Float has helped us visualise our options much clearer and more efficiently than we could have ever done in a spreadsheet.
For our clients, Float has meant far more accuracy, and therefore confidence, with the added bonus of showing historical actual cash flows as well as the forecast numbers throughout the period of review. Showing historical actual cash flows really helps our clients plan forwards.
A number of start-up clients have also found Float extremely useful in providing clarity on the current cash position, future pinch points and the timings for future investment rounds required from their investors. Float has not only assisted the client but has instilled confidence in the investors, which is critical for any high growth start-up company reliant on external finance.
“I find that when creating cash flow forecasts, it’s imperative to be able to update things quickly because things do change and before you know it a carefully crafted spreadsheet could be wildly out. With Float it’s just a few clicks to make a change, not hours or days.”
With Float Hale & Company has complete confidence in the numbers. We can see trends really quickly, and spend more time helping our clients to avoid cash shortages or take advantage of cash surpluses, and less time on data entry. Additionally, we love the professionalism of the Float interface and find it straightforward to use.
What it means for our business
Using Float means that for a relatively small spend, Hale & Company has been able to add another outsourced service to our practice. Having this service to offer clients is also another selling point, and gives us a lot more credibility with our clients who see more value in the services we are able to deliver, and (we hope!) will remain with us for longer.
Float is fast to set up and connects straight to Xero, so if ever we need to pull together a forecast in a hurry to support a business plan or a finance application, it’s no problem. The multi-user access is great for us because we can give our clients access straight into Float. The client can take on credit control and we can handle the cash payment numbers.
It’s easy to update Float on a monthly basis, and where Float really comes into its own is showing actual cash receipt and payment figures that we can use as a guide to help forecast future figures, again providing confidence in the numbers.
Overall Float has given Hale & Company the opportunity to sell a cost-effective and very useful forecasting tool as part of our outsourced accountancy services offering.
Join the free Float Partner Program for Accountants!
Are you ready to test out a cash flow tool that connects right into Xero, QuickBooks Online and FreeAgent saving you buckets of time? Just visit this link to join for free! Float partners get some great perks including substantial discounts.
