“In a nutshell, our experience has been life-changing in the way we service our work,” says Jonathan Bregman, Managing Director at Borehamwoodbased Primera Accountants (formerly JD Bregman), describing the difference GI Outsourcing has made to the firm.
The firm has grown progressively over the 11 years since Jonathan established it from his bedroom to the 18-strong workforce it has today.
A year into the pandemic, Jonathan says his team were much like the rest of the industry stretched from pillar to post and he was finding it difficult to put adequate resources in place.
“I found the team had covid fatigue. They hadn’t had much time off, they were quite tired and flat, irrespective of how many dances and drinks we did on Zoom.
“At that time as well, one of my members of the team was leaving for pastures new and we were facing a perfect storm; stretched work-wise, a team that was tired, and with the fact that lots of companies had covid filing extensions.
“We were finding that we were almost having a double-up of our work-load and we had growth in that period as well,” says Jonathan.
Jonathan was unable to recruit quickly enough, while the quality of CVs coming through was poor and the costs of recruitment agencies unviable.
“One of my managers had experience of having used GI Outsourcing at a previous firm and we thought we’d got to give it a go,” says Jonathan, “so we started to throw across jobs.”
“GI Outsourcing just became an extension of our team and what impressed me was that we would send the work across and the process would be managed with complete transparency. It didn’t matter what the system was, whether it was Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, FreeAgent or Excel-based.
“What impressed me the most was that if a deadline was set by GI Outsourcing, it was always met. We never had to chase it up, we never had to say ‘where is this work’ and, more often than not, the work came back in the right time and the right quality.”
Jonathan says that GI Outsourcing spent a lot of time in terms of understanding the client, understanding who the client was and the type of industry and was therefore able to relate that to the job.
“They were then able to do the job in the way we like it in our working paper style with good quality notes and queries. Some queries might come back with immaterial amounts on but what I liked was that the GI Outsourcing team didn’t look at materiality. Instead, they allowed us to make that decision,” says Jonathan.
“The result of this was that we finished this period with probably days to spare. GI Outsourcing was an extension of our team. It enabled us to get this work done at a time when we were considerably stretched.
“Very simply, without GI we wouldn’t have been able to do that.”
Jonathan says that originally it was a case of getting GI Outsourcing to work on the outsourced finance function and to assist with reconciliations and keeping the books up to date.
“That means we can do some of the more sexy stuff, working with apps and integrations to provide some management reporting in a timely, efficient and forward-looking manner.
“We’ve repositioned our internal team to become more client-facing managers, doing the things they really want to do like delivering management reports to clients.
“Combining our team with GI Outsourcing has been very powerful in enabling us to report and add value for our clients.”