My name is Timothy. I’m a senior manager at the accountancy department,
where I’m responsible for everything that has to do with new technologies.
So I’m implementing tools like Silverfin and other and make people change their way of working.
Grant Thornton is a consulting firm mainly active in all areas of accounting, taxation and others.
We want to support businesses and deliver the information they need to make important decisions.
At Grant Thornton, we were still challenged with all the paper that was floating around;
closets full of documents, too much paperwork that was there. We had to move towards the digital age
and Silverfin was the perfect fit for that.
The three biggest trends I see in the accounting industry at the moment are speed, digitisation and flexibility.
We chose Silverfin as a partner because we see we need to jump on the digital train but not at all costs.
So the challenge for the implementation of Silverfin was mainly to take the digitisation train.
We still want to provide a certain reliability and quality that our customers are accustomed to.
With Silverfin as a partner we can do that in a structured way.
My role was finally to coordinate the integration of all the files we had on our accounting software.
Once these files were integrated, it was also my role to start training my colleagues.
It’s obvious that the next generation they would like to digitalise, they would not like to work with papers anymore.
I’m now convinced also that people already this year coming in are really anxious to get new solutions,
new offers, new cloud solutions to work with. And, again, Grant Thornton and Silverfin, I find this a nice combination.
So the main challenge is actually having all the team members on-board of the project. It’s a migration process.
We needed to help them. And the way we did it is really to keep investing time in those people.
I have to say that it is rather self explanatory. It actually is rather easy to use. It allows you to quickly receive certain reports and results about the work you delivered.
The biggest benefit that we see is that data is available at all times.
The fact that everything is digital means we can always have personal conversations
at any location and we have the necessary tools to have figures on hand.
The big advantage of having Silverfin is that finally, we can work on the file really from any office.
Today, entrepreneurs want to see figures much faster and much more frequently.
They want to make decisions much faster, so that we, as trusted advisors, have to pick up on things much faster.
We are really on the process of digitising - trying to go paperless so we have less and less paper.
It's a mindset that needs to be adopted, but once you've taken that step, it's a liberation to have everything digital,
at all times, to be able to consult on everything anywhere.
If you look at our new offices, you can see that digitisation is there. You will not see any paperwork.
So it’s nice moving forward and see to it that we really have a clean desk situation.
We have a standardisation of working documents, since everyone is working on the same template.
We of course have added some of our own; Some text templates because we needed a personal touch,
a Grant Thornton touch and we added some letter for the customers with our own look and feel
and our own text in it.
It’s very nice to see that the clients recognise our reports. They recognise the look of Silverfin/Grant Thornton.
Our advice to firms who are on the verge of the same transformation is not to be afraid,
be well informed about the possibilities and dare to make decisions.
Put somebody in charge for the project and go for it.