The firm of Clements has been in practice since 1949.
Shared between both offices are 3 partners, 15 staff and a large,
established client base. Both Clements offices moved over to the
full IRIS Suite in February 2003 but Mr Bobby Strain, Partner,
remembers life before IRIS!
Accounts were prepared
with Sage Accounts Production Advanced and Forbes dealt with
business and personal tax. Bobby recalled "…the Sage product was
very difficult to get started with, there was no obvious flow to
the Software which led to confusion but ultimately, it just wasn't
user friendly." This obstacle was compounded when each release of
the software brought its own problems "…we waited months for the
FRSSE to be updated when IRIS users had had this feature within a
couple of weeks."
In addition, Clements had spent hundreds of chargeable hours
formatting the accounts within Sage, only to discover subsequent
upgrades deleted these! For tax, all data had to be re-keyed into
the Forbes product with none of the computations being performed
automatically. "…With no computations or transfer of data Forbes
was simply a "form filler" for us."
The Partners
quickly realised the integrity of the Firm was at stake as jobs
were taking longer and the accuracy of the final outputs needed
thorough checking before being released to the client, something
had to change.
Within a few short months Bobby Strain had made a few key
observations of the IRIS Suite. "…Even the Partners are using IRIS,
this has never happened before!" All of the staff, including
Partners found IRIS remarkably intuitive to use with comprehensive
help screens, training provided on site and an experienced team of
over 30 staff manning the helpdesks.
For Clements, the ease of use and preparation of final
accounts with IRIS has seen a dramatic increase in productivity.
With the central database, a feature unique to IRIS, no re-entry of
data is ever required from accounts through to self-assessment and
of course corrections and amendments become a few seconds
work.
