With offices in Bolton, Crewe
and Nelson, Unity Services Business Group, formerly known as
Jacksons, has thrived because of the quality of its specialist
services, competing with the top 20 firms in areas such as tax
consultancy, insolvency, corporate finance and financial
planning.
Owing to this rapid
expansion, however, the firm has regularly outgrown its computer
systems, to the point at which, by 1997, the various branches of
the firm were each running a range of software systems from
different suppliers.
As a result, Unity decided to review its IT systems. In the
modern accountancy practice, the quality of the accounts production
and taxation software, in particular, can make a dramatic
difference to the productivity of fee earning staff. Unity's review
was aimed at ensuring that it established a single preferred
system, to be implemented, in time, across all branches.
The review soon found that the software most of the branches
were using was not producing the time-savings the firm wanted, and
so the firm decided to replace it. Managing partner John Gillibrand
explains 'We decided that a key criterion for our preferred system
was that it should offer seamless integration between the software
for producing our clients' final accounts and the software for
doing their corporation tax returns.
The bulk of the information for the tax returns is
contained in the final accounts; it can save a great deal of time
if you can read across from the accounts to the tax package.' He
says that when Unity explored other packages, they found that
information from the accounts could only be brought into a tax
package via an awkward file export procedure.
He says that IRIS, with its central database, was the only
package that allowed every part of the system, from final accounts
through to self assessment, to share all client data. He also says
the IRIS central database has other obvious benefits. Unity is a
large firm with discrete functional departments, such as tax and
audit, handling different tasks for the same client. If any client
details change – such as address or directors – these can now be
entered once onto the central database.
'In those parts of our practice susceptible to automation,
audit and tax, we now have a system that can take accounting
information from the client's computer, and automatically feed it
through the IRIS software to generate a set of final accounts for
the auditor's opinion, the business's tax return and the
self-assessment return for the directors. It is a system that gets
the maximum possible efficiency from our fee-earning staff.'
This is the most productive and beneficial way to use
the functions that an advanced software system such as IRIS can
offer. It promises to help Unity enjoy an enviable record of growth
for many more years to come.
