Ricky Kemp and I have just returned from the Digital Accountancy Show at Evolution London in Battersea, where we immersed ourselves in the latest and most cutting-edge apps designed to help your business work better and smarter.
Here are some standouts from our tech stack:
🔹WorkflowMax by BlueRock: A simple yet powerful timesheet, billing, and job management system that integrates seamlessly with Xero. It helps you track what’s happening across your client base and jobs. At Avant Advisory, we add the data to PowerBI for deeper insights. Great to catch up with our business relationship partner, Ryan Kagan, who flew in from Oz to be at the show!
🔹ApprovalMax: A sophisticated supplier invoice scanning tool that streamlines invoice approvals based on your internal structure, ensuring control and compliance.
🔹Ignition: A proposal system that seamlessly manages both recurring and ad-hoc billing in Xero for professional services firms. We had an insightful chat with Emily Phung, who introduced us to their new Deals feature for tracking leads and pipeline management.
🔹Modulr: Jock Loveridge and the other rock stars at Modulr are quietly taking over the world by providing the plumbing for banking and embedded payment systems.
🔹iplicit: While we primarily work with Xero, we recognise that for some medium-sized businesses, a bigger and more configurable solution is needed. Enter iPlicit, one of the leading born-in-the-cloud providers, as represented by their Chief Product Officer, Paul Sparkes.
We didn’t just catch up with existing providers. We spent even more time exploring new innovations.
📢 The big theme this year? Unsurprisingly = AI
Software providers are racing to embed AI into their platforms, though the reality is mixed.
While AI isn’t replacing human bookkeepers just yet, and that is not likely for a while, some credible tools are surfacing. Apps that offer finance system audits for missing or inconsistent analysis codes, duplicate invoices, and more.
Over the next few weeks, we will be deep-diving into demos and testing to separate the hype from the genuinely useful.
Our mission remains the same: to research the market for how to solve your business issues, so you don’t have to.