Why Dext Has Been a ‘Game Changer’ for Ad Valorem

Ad Valorem is a leading, proactive accountancy business managing clients from start-up to 20m turnover. As a family business with family values, Ad Valorem support and understand other family businesses to achieve their goals. The team offers everything from transactional advisory services to VAT and corporation tax estimates, identifying opportunities that might help their clients and allowing businesses to manage their affairs.

Our colleagues from Dext Precision spoke to Managing Director Nigel Adams, who described Precision as a ‘game changer’ for his business.

Using Precision

The Ad Valorem team uses Dext Precision daily across the firm. With an entirely Xero client base, the first port of call for Nigel is the Practice Dashboard, where he can see the performance of the client portfolio, and identify any clients that might need urgent help.

Both internal and outsourced bookkeeping benefits from Precision's quality control. The Xero health score is checked before any files are sent to outsourced bookkeepers, and from management accounts to end of year accounts, nothing can be started if the client has a health score below 80%. This consistency of data quality across clients has helped Ad Valorem scale up with ease.

Precision also helps the team have conversations with their clients around debtor days, corporation tax estimates and monthly VAT estimates. These are the things that really matter to their clients, helping them to understand their free cash position and how their business is performing.

"One immediate benefit Ad Valorem have found is that now the practice can scale more easily with Precision: they can expand to take on more clients without losing service quality.”

How have things changed since using Precision?

Introducing Dext Precision has created massive changes in Ad Valorem. Before, management accounts could only be provided for a small focus group because the data had to be high quality, and it was too time-consuming to review all the clients manually. The effectiveness of tools like Futrli have been significantly increased after using Precision to provide more accurate data.

Precision has provided the Ad Valorem team members the structure and confidence to talk to clients, which not only gives the clients more value, but it’s made the team more productive too. New clients and acquisitions can be brought into Ad Valorem and up to quality seamlessly.

Finding the Value

To monetise the use of Dext Precision, any non-bookkeeping clients with a Health Score of less than 80% are offered cleanup services for a fee, supported by the Precision scores which provide evidence so the discussion is not confrontational. Though it’s optional, the cleanup service is very popular, which has improved margins for the firm.

So - is there anything prospective users should know before using Precision? Nigel recommends the best way to integrate Precision is through team inclusion: to start, select a member of your team who has an interest in using Precision and focus on that area first, then roll it out more broadly.

"Plan how you’re going to use it… then monetise it.”

Explore Dext Precision and find out how it can be a game changer for your firm too: start a free trial today.