Glass Wall Lab streamlines practice management for Bentleys Tasmania

Glass Wall Lab has shifted accounting firm Bentleys Tasmania away from disparate APS and Xero systems and onto software product Wiise with the pryme Matters add-on.

This was implemented to take over legacy systems in three locations, with APS used in one office and Xero used in the other two.

Anthony Tait, Glass Wall Lab director, told ARN when it was time to consolidate, the APS office wasn’t prepared to switch to Xero and the Xero offices weren’t prepared to switch to APS.

“They had to find something that suited everybody that had the ability to manage the whole practice,” he said. “[There was] a lack of development from both of those products as well — they couldn’t see a path of how those products were going to improve.”

Development on the system began in February of last year, with the consolidated solution going live months later in July. Tait said the process involved mapping data from the existing set-up into Wiise and pryme Matters, as well as four months’ worth of hard work on preparing Bentleys for the new solution.

There was also a conscious effort in adding in features found in its older set-up that didn’t exist with Wiise and pryme Matters, with Tait attributing the latter of which to regional differences.

The developer of pryme Matters, pryme Global, is based in Sweden and as such its solution reflects European practice management conventions, rather than those commonly seen in Australia.

This included elements such as accounting for family and billing groups, tax file numbers, as well as integrations into a tax product, government reports and other solutions that Bentleys use that weren’t found in pryme Matters, “probably because they just do things a different way over there in the client management space”, Tait claimed.

In the end, it wasn’t difficult to amend the new solution due to the underlying technology being Wiise and Microsoft’s Business Central platform.

“It’s a very quick development process of adding those additional fields in and redesigning the screens; we’re not starting from scratch with Microsoft to build this product to allow us to do what we’ve done with it,” Tait said.

Key to the project was ensuring that on 1 July, users could successfully fill out a time sheet. While Tait felt like Glass Wall Lab achieved this without any disruption to Bentleys’ business, he added that the challenge in the project came from getting users out of the old system and into the new one.

“Unfortunately, we had some people still using one of the old practice management systems, and that caused a bit of a headache,” he said.

“The lesson learned was we should have revoked the access to that whole system for everybody and giving them read only access but unfortunately, they reverted to [the old system]; ‘Oh, it’s quicker for me to do it in the old system this way than in the new system’.

“That was probably our biggest mistake; we didn’t prevent people from using the old system. So, they said, ‘I had no choice. The client was standing there in front of me, I had to do the bill.’”

Even though it went live months ago, Glass Wall Lab is still working on the system’s core although Tait added that there’s not much work left to do on it. However, there is still room for improvement, with future opportunities for the system presenting themselves in the form of integrations with other accounting products.

As a result of the new system, Bentleys claims to spend 94 per cent less time on invoice and reducing the number of timesheets by 75 per cent, with five days saved each month on administration tasks.