Relion now compares two years of invoicing lists in under a minute
“It tells you very quickly, in under a minute, whether we came out ahead overall, the new clients against the ones we’d lost.”
Relion is an accounting firm in South Karelia, serving clients across Finland from offices in Imatra, Lappeenranta and Savonlinna. Service Manager Laura Matikainen looks after the firm’s client management system. For larger clients, she also produces financial reporting for their management teams. Most of her Qaicu use goes on analysing the firm’s own business. Previously, she had nothing for that but Excel, reports pulled from many parts of the client management system, and her own memory.
Starting point: comparisons relied on Excel and memory
Relion tracks which clients are new and how invoicing has changed for each of them. It also tracks how its own financial figures change when client companies cease trading, for example because the owner retires. Before Qaicu, that meant laying two years of lists side by side.
“If we set out to analyse it, there’d be no other way than to compare the client system’s reports with each other in Excel. It’s hours and hours, trying to compare two years of lists to see what services we sold this client at the same time last year, because memory fails you very quickly.”
July invoicing: new clients and lost clients
Laura did the firm’s July invoicing at the start of August. She wanted to know how much revenue the new clients were bringing in.
“I asked it to list all the clients we’ve invoiced this year who weren’t there last year, along with their sales in euros.”
A second question did the same for clients who had left: how much revenue went with them. In under a minute, the difference between the two answers showed whether the firm had come out ahead on new versus departing clients. It also showed how invoicing had changed, with every client listed separately. Laura says this is exactly where she sees the benefit: managing her own work has got faster.
Ready-made templates for monthly reporting
Laura handles group and financial reporting for larger clients, though she no longer does their day-to-day bookkeeping. The same standard information has to be pulled every month.
“I’ve got these ready-made templates I’ve built myself, so I can throw them into Qaicu and say, update this with the information for the month we’re reporting on. I don’t have to log in and drill down and go through every account on the profit and loss and the balance sheet to see what new purchases there are, what transactions, and which cost centre they’re on. With Qaicu I can get into the detail of a client’s situation very quickly.”
A client asks Qaicu directly
One of Relion’s clients uses Qaicu themselves. Laura has heard they have used it to work through changes in inventory. Another question was why the profit and loss shows a different gross margin from the online shop’s own reports.
“You’ve got a conversation partner that can actually see your company’s information.”
Who Laura recommends Qaicu to
“I’d recommend it for managing your own business: when you want a deeper understanding of how we’re doing, and when you’re interested in budgeting or cash flow forecasting. So if you want something more than just the basic reporting, and you’re interested in why things happen. Those would often be the questions you’d ask if you had a finance manager on the payroll.”