How Clarity Street helped Davenport Taylor migrate to more cloud-based applications

The team at Davenport Taylor had been watching the advent of technology in the accounting industry for some time. Their plan was always to migrate across to more cloud-based applications.

One of their biggest motivating factors was that they wanted to go across to Xero, and use Xero as their core platform within the business.

Mark Taylor, Director at Davenport Taylor, decided to engage with Clarity Street to find out the best way to start this process.

The Catalyst for Change

"We saw this as a key step towards growing our practice. So we were focused on fixing our internal production house, if you like, to be as efficient as it can possibly be using technology to operate better, and to offer better services to our clients along the way. We didn't want to just change one aspect of the business... just one piece of software. It was also all of the supporting applications.

The fact that Clarity Street had so much insight into how all these solutions can come together really helped - we were able to ask very pointed questions along the way about you know, why are we doing this, or have we considered this?"

The Solution

"What we changed was a lot, pretty much every thing we used... Our CRM, our work platform... So, we were originally with the HandiSoft suite, and now we run our practice completely through XPM.

Now with the assistance of FYI, of course, we embrace DocuSign moreso after these changes occurred, and with the assistance of Clarity Street, we fine-tuned all of the integrations.

Clarity Street also gave us a lot of guidance and assistance in relation to redefining our admin team roles and some internal procedures."

Advice To Others

"The investment that you make with Clarity Street is well worth it in terms of just being able to cut through the noise and get the support you need."

"It's a very challenging process to do it on your own, or to do it without the team like Clarity Street, I'm just not sure that we would have been able to pull it off. I think we would have stumbled, and we probably would have had a few team members leave, to be honest, because of the stress."

"I think we, as accountants, should concentrate on running our businesses and what we know really well. Clarity Street obviously do this day in and day out, and they just know the issues that you're going to face before you do. 

So I would definitely recommend that you do have a chat to Clarity Street."

This blog post was an excerpt from the 'Davenport Taylor Case Study' video. View the full video here.

Interested in finding out how Clarity Street could help your accounting firm? Book a meeting with us here.

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