Hamish Macnicol for Stuff.Co.Nz writes: Helping accountants switch from poking through shoeboxes for receipts
to advisers who make their clients successful gets Richard Francis out
of bed in the morning.
And after a $3 million capital injection
this year, his business has rapidly grown to being on the cusp of
seven-figure turnover, as it looks to become the number one toolset in
the Xero ecosystem.
Spotlight Reporting was established in 2010
because chief executive Richard Francis' own accounting practice,
Francis Consulting, needed cloud-based software to provide good business
intelligence to its clients.
"I'd always been interested in
software and really I was looking for a cloud product that could produce
reports, forecasts, dashboards, quickly and effectively at the push of a
button using Xero's API (application programming interface).
"There
was nothing out there so I started developing my own product, got
together a really good team and next thing I knew we were really getting
demand from a lot of other accounting practices." Spotlight Reporting's
four products include an application of the same name that creates
performance reports.
Spotlight Forecasting, meanwhile, builds
simple cashflow forecasts and scenario budgets, and is being redeveloped
to a fully featured desktop product, where Francis said there was a big
gap in the market.
Spotlight Dashboard tracks key business
metrics, and Spotlight Multi is aimed at franchises and not-for-profit
organisations which can import, analyse and compare up to 1000 Xero
organisations.
Prices range from about $69 a month to $229, depending on the tools required and size of the user.
Francis
said the products basically did some of the things Xero did not do and
could not be expected to do, like multi-currency consolidation. It has
also integrated with QuickBooks Online, Xero's rival in the United
States, and was currently integrating with retail software firm Vend as
well.
"We take the data, we mash it up and we come up with trends
and analyses which a typical accounting system like QuickBooks or Xero
can't really do.
"So we have this really good data mash up and that was just something
quite unique in the market, ended up selling the software to other
accountants all around the world." Spotlight Reporting had since grown
to seven offices across New Zealand, Australia, the US and United
Kingdom.
Sales were growing at 100 per cent a year, Francis said, and the business had grown from three staff to 15.
He expected it would employ 30 people next year.
"That's
what basically gets me out of bed in the morning, is being part of an
industry that's seen as boring and reactive and doing stuff that no one
really wants, to transform that into accountants being advisers, doing
useful s... that actually makes their clients successful.
"That's
been my mantra ever since I started out in the profession and realised
that poking through shoeboxes of receipts was pretty ordinary." Francis,
a chartered accountant, is a director of Wellington open-source
software development company Silverstripe, where he was formerly chief
financial officer. His wife, Julie, continues to run Francis Consulting.
Spotlight
Reporting raised $3m in investment capital in June, and wanted to
become the number one toolset for Xero across Australasia and the UK.
Francis
said the company now had some "heavyweight backers", including MYOB
founder and Xero director Craig Winkler, former Xero chairman Sam
Knowles, Xero director Graham Shaw, Snapper chief executive Miki
Szikszai and Vend and Xero investor David Wilson. He said their backing
was a strong endorsement.
The capital had helped fast-track the
company's overseas expansion, he said. He thought about 25 per cent of
the accounting market "intuitively" understood Spotlight Reporting's
products.
"We don't need to be the size of Xero because we're a
more niche product; we're targeting the smart-end of the accounting
profession.
"There's still a lot of accountants who are quite
happy just pumping out tax returns, sitting in their little hen huts,
but we're trying to convince them in the end to come towards the light."
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