VGD is an organisation of accountants and tax consultants.
This year we celebrate our 35th year in business.
We have a dozen offices in Flanders, and employ 250 employees.
Next to our Belgian, or our Flemish presence,
we also have a presence abroad, under our own flag.
This especially in Eastern Europe.
In addition, we are part of the top 10 international network of Nexia.
I am accountant/tax consultant and partner in our office in Brugge.
I started in 2003 at VGD after a first experience in audit at a Big Four firm
and I transitioned from manager to partner in the firm.
What we find very important, is customer contact.
We love meeting people face to face.
This is something we really invest in and where we obtain our added value
For smaller enterprises it can be that this meeting takes place annually,
whereas for customers with whom we work together intensively,
we try to keep in touch more often,
to really listen to our customer and to optimally assist where needed.
Because of our varied clientele,
we have experienced in the past that our reporting was not uniform.
We have customers who do their own bookkeeping and who prepare closings themselves.
We also have customers who we process here at the office
with our own accounting package, our own software.
This sometimes led to reports holding all sorts of diverse documents.
A print from the customer, a print from our accounting software, and this was not uniform as a whole.
In addition, we noticed that the end of year reports were not standardised.
There was a part done in Excel, a part in the accounting package,
the annual reports were in Word... and working with this multitude of tools,
resulted in when modifying something in one package,
you needed to think about
changing lots of other documents as well.
And this can lead to inefficiencies
and also to errors and frustration for employees.
The advantage of working with Silverfin
is that we obtain uniformity, also across our offices.
We are now confident that everyone is working with the same system.
The workflows are fixed, the templates are fixed,
so everyone is working according to one uniform schedule.
And the reporting that follows from this, is also uniform for each customer.
this can of course be more extensive for certain customers,
some customers need a more specific report than others,
but now everything has the same look and feel.
The large advantage of working with Silverfin is the efficiency.
The fact that you can transfer data from the one period to the other
has the advantage of having all the information from the past at your fingertips.
Before we needed to search for information in files to trace certain facts,
But now we have easy access to everything.
The second added value really is the reporting.
We feel that we, as accountants, will need to distinguish ourselves in the future.
The old-fashioned bookkeeper will not survive, we are becoming consultants.
We need to talk more about the financial data,
about the evolution of the data, and also more about the future.
And a tool, such as Silverfin, offering us the right reports to do that,
is absolutely indispensable for this.