In this Deep Dive webinar you’ll learn how to run branded, value-driven reports-out-of-the-box or fully customisable, and use Insights to query portfolio-wide data on everything from workflow status to profitability. Spot trends, identify risks, and quickly answer key client questions, all while saving time, uncovering new opportunities, and strengthening client relationships.
K. I think we’ll get started. So good morning, everyone. We are here today. It’s been a half an hour or so, looking into Silverfin with a particular focus on our reporting and insights, module and capabilities. So my name is Mark. I’m one of the senior execs here at Silverfin, and I’m joined by Hannah today. Hannah, you wanna quick intro to yourself? Hi. Yes. I’m on the customer success team here at Silverfin, so I’ll be jumping into products and showing you the insights and reports capabilities. Lovely. So we’ll probably spend the first sort of five, ten minutes or so just going through a couple of slides about who Silverfin is, who we are, what we do, a bit of a general overview of the platform. And then as Hannah says, the main part will be probably ten, fifteen minutes or so diving into that reporting module and and how we can, you know, tease insights out of your client data. The question and answers q and a feature is open for you. So any questions that come to mind as you go through things, please chuck them in there, and we’ll make sure we have some time at the end to answer them, either on the webinar itself or perhaps if we can’t quite today, we’ll we’ll get get back to you offline. And then at the end, there’s a very short, just one question poll asking if you want us to get in touch with you at the webinar directly and discuss things in more detail. So, yeah, that’s a bit of housekeeping. So without further ado, we’ll crack on with things, and we’ll whiz through these slides and let you look at products before too long. So we start off with quite a a sort of bold statement, I guess. And a and a self belief is that a lot of the tech that’s in use in firms in the compliance kind of areas and workflows is outdated. But not only that, it’s actually limiting your firm’s potential. And I think you’ve only got to, you know, ask yourself the question, how long have you been using the software in and around my compliance workflows? And it’s probably, you know, quite a while. So you’re not just, you know, working without data software. It’s actually damaging potentially how you could work into what you could achieve as a firm. A lot of time, I I I work predominantly with, you know, helping firms figure out SilverFit in the initial sense and evaluate the products, you know, before coming on board as customers. And I generally talk about an environment in their firms that looks like this. And I think a lot of lot of firms that we we talk to can can resonate with this. You’ve got lots of bits of data lots of different places, not talking to each other very well, not joined up. A mixture of cloud systems, on prem systems, manual systems, generally, it’s quite messy. More recently, and I’m sure folks are no sort of stranger to this, we began to put some of these technologies in the cloud, and you’ll see some of the, you know, I guess, some core ones mentioned there, your tax management, your accounts and tax stuff, esigning, client portals, that sort of stuff. And even though they’re in the cloud and using more up to date and advanced software, they’re still disconnected and broken. So you’ve got some efficiencies, but you’re still not really working in a in a joined up and unified way. And that’s where Silfin comes in. So we, particularly specialize in and around the compliance, space space, as I say. And we group together your kind of accounts and year end management accounts, preparation work, your work papers module, then the actual accounts and tax, work themselves. And then we kind of finish it all off with, a sprinkling of AI and and reporting capabilities around your client data and what’s been managed or your insights into your client’s client financials. And that’s what we specialize in with, and a laser focused on that particular area. And where we don’t, for example, offer bookkeeping options or practice management, tools or, esigning, we’ve got a very open, robust, easy to use API, and we’ll integrate with other best in breed softwares out there. So the whole idea around slotting to a much more, I guess, bespoke and and configured and what’s better for your practice tech stack as opposed to being a sort of, back of old trades, master of none, approach to perhaps, you know, some of the older softwares that are out there in play right now. A real quick overview of how the platform works and and and sort of a a very high level, just graphically how our client file can flow through Silverfin. So we’re powered by bookkeeping data, totally agnostics. You’ll see some friendly names there. I’m sure we all know and love to varying degrees. But if you’re not on a cloud system, if it’s on prem, if you’ve got clients still using manual records, we can take simply just a CSV file balance and then pull that into the platform. And largely, the experience going forward from that point onwards will be pretty much the same no matter where it’s come from. There’s a few, you know, little bits and bobs that change slightly. But, generally, once you’re in the platform, you’re experiencing the same regardless of where it’s come from. And one of the first things we do, and and Hannah will kinda go into this bit more when we talk about data and looking at the client data, is we standardize the format of that client data by converting to a standard self and chart of accounts. What that means is you can then work with every client in the same way regardless of where they’ve come from in terms of bookkeeping, environments. And you’ve got a clean set of data as well that could then be referenced, benchmarked, and analyzed against each other, again, regardless of where it’s come from prior to coming into the platform. So got more insight into your data just by having it in in one language. The job you see in the middle, the three circles, I guess, is sort of four as three main areas that we that we cover. And we do do management reporting as well, management accounts back of that too. So you could could add that as a full circle, I guess. And traditionally, those sort of four jobs are perhaps spread out across three or four different software. So your work papers right now might be done in Excel. Your account attack can be done somewhere else, and then even your management account stuff can be done in another tool altogether. We’re different because we do it all in one place. Significance of that is that these workflows then talk to each other. So what it means is that there’s far less kind of picking up of data in one place, working upon it, putting it back down, moving it somewhere else, restarting that job again in in a different environment, you know, for a different kind of process. Our jobs and modules and workflows all connect and talk to each other for a far more efficient, connected way of working. That’s the main beauty, and and I guess the main benefit of what the platform brings is that we can handle data once, have multiple kind of outputs from working on that client data. In and around all of this, we’ve got, you know, our AI capabilities. Certainly, a bit of a buzzword over the last eighteen months or two years. I like to think that we’re a little bit different, and we’ve actually been, you know, much I have much more experience with with AI in general. So about nine years ago, we bought an AI development company, and they’ve been ingested to Silverfin now. And it means AI is really woven into the whole system. It’s not just a kind of tool we’ve turned on in the last couple of years to hop on that sort of bandwagon that that’s currently running. It helps with sense checking the client data as it comes into the platform. It suggests, where they just should go to and from a different workflows. The whole premise of it is to kind of save time by raising red flags against kind of potentially erroneous data, train folks what to look for, and act as a bit of a kind of a safety tool. You might have seen some previous webinars where we did a bit of a focus on AI tools, you know, encourage you to go and look at those on our website if you wanna have a bit more information on how how the AI comes to to life in Silverthim. We’ve then got a very robust, and structured and easy to use kind of review and collaboration tool throughout the platform. So that’s making sure your work’s getting actioned correctly, signed off by the right people, reviewed correctly, and all the kind of tracking and and management that was to go into that. And then last of all, last two points, you’ve got an open API, like I mentioned beforehand. Of course, you can submit your accounts and tax, off to HMRC company’s house, but you can also, link into third party systems through that API. We’ve got plenty of clients doing that these days. More recently, we launched integration with Carbon. So, you know, plenty more of that kind of, work to come from us in the future. And you can also share your client data, and reports, questions, queries with the client through our our Pulse portal. And, of course, clients can pay back information as well, esign documents, all that sort of good stuff that you you expect a client portal to do. So, yeah, quick run over of how the platform comes together at a very high level. What does it all mean? These three stats, I I quite like they’re all quite different. They all focus on a slightly different benefit that that that firms have felt from using Silverfin. So if we take BTLs as an example, theirs was all about saving time. They felt that the the kind of biggest benefit for them was that Silverfin saved them about half the time needed to complete a typical typical year end job. So, you know, huge for them to go and reinvest that elsewhere in the business. Hearst, slightly different sort of metric here. Theirs was very much revenue focused. And across, the implementation of Siliphene across three years, they were able to increase their revenue by the figure of two hundred k that you see there, and we did not cost two hundred k. We were, you know, we’re a fraction of that in terms of what it cost to have Siliphene, so a real strong return on investment. And last of all, PKF Francis Clark, they were able to really increase the amount of review work that they did across their client files, and improve, I guess, the quality of work that goes out, ensuring that mistakes aren’t made, being summoned by the right people at the right time, increasing the kind of capacity piece around, ensuring that work goes out at the right level and right standards. So three very nice different metrics there. It might be felt in equal measures across the firm. Some might be more revenue driven, some might be more time driven. You know, lots of good ways this can bring benefit to your practice. And a quick snapshot about the types of firms we work with. There’s a perhaps a bit of a misconception, although it’s changing, as as as, as the days go by, that we were a large firm only bit of software, And we certainly have some fantastic larger firms that we work with. You can see, you know, the likes of BDO, the Lloyds, John, and Paul Michael, you know, top twenty firms, if not top ten firms in their own rights, here in the UK. Then we do have some, much, much smaller regional firms, firms that are growing through tech rather than than people as a resource, firms that have a very high touch model with their client base offering lots of, additional services just, you know, beyond the the compliance and services that are out there, and then everything in between. So, you don’t have to be a multinational, multi office firm to use Silverfin. You can be, you know, a practice of sort of four, five, six staff and still get the same benefits that we’ve talked about on the previous slides. And as a business, we’re really growing at a rate of knots. So very recently, we we we ticked over over a thousand accounting firms that we support. We work with, I think, at last count, thirty seven of the top of hundred in the UK. So a real strong customer base with those larger firms out there that that help us kind of build and steer and design the products going forward. We also have over four hundred thousand client files, so client entities on Silverfin. We work across seventeen countries too. So and that’s across the globe. So pretty sure we’ve a footprint in every continent bar bar in Antarctica these days. So yeah. A very very global field to who we are and what we do as a business. And our core product core market, so sorry, are very much the UK and the Benelux region. And, yeah, we’re now about a hundred and eighty employees across our four office locations as well. So, you know, certainly, a business is here to stay that can support, you know, what you guys are are doing and how you’re looking to grow and develop in the practice. And with that, I think it’s time for me to stop going through some slides and hand over to Hannah to take you through a bit of the reporting and insights features in the platform. Oh, as Mark previously mentioned, Silverfin gives you the tools to interrogate the data at a client portfolio level, and this in turn is what we call our insights. That helps you then drive those business advisory conversations with your clients. So this could be done via queries across your financial data that you have across all your clients because as Mark mentioned earlier, a lot of that is standardized when we put the data into your client files. But also it can be driven by anything that is stored within those templates such as if you’ve got anywhere those partners, managers stored. As long as the data exists within your files, we can query on that information. So to give you a general idea, insights consists of two main blocks. You’ve got your insights where you start to build and run the queries, but then we also have triggers. So in the insights tab, you can retrieve any data from the filters that we have across all of your records. These can all be then saved as our queries, and they are stored within your firm queries. And once you’ve saved those queries, so if I jump into one of my in the insights, and if I just run one I’ve got here at the top of my page, you’ll see that once we’ve built these queries, and you can use some of our recommended ones that we have here, it’s just that you have to then save them down, create your own, and then you can start to build triggers on top of that. So the triggers really allows you to just automatically add any notes or to dos across any of those files so that when the criteria is met within the query, it will ping that client file and anyone who you’ve tagged in as internal to that query and communication and give them that notification that something might need to be done on that file. Just before I jump into more detail on queries though, in terms of building your initial queries, we as I mentioned, we’ve got the pre built one set, but some of the ones that you might be wanting to look to build could be looking at your practice management data. So if I scroll down here, you have some pre built filters that we allow you to use. Now this could be in terms of that portfolio management or practice management, however you want to look at it, where you’re trying to just look at things maybe like your workflow progress, so how far have you got within a certain workflow across a file. Workflow status as well, we also have that where actually you can start to track which stage of the job you’re at, or it might be around some of that submission data. So where you’ll use our accounts filing and tax filing through Companies House and HMRC, we can also start to interrogate some of that data across your client files. So really easy, simple tools to use here in terms of getting that data across your client files. And then actually some of these filters are then also looking at the underlying data within a client file. So this, again, because we’ve standardized it using our mapping list across all of your client data, it might be that we’re trying to generate some formulas which can show us some of that data. So in my example here that I’ve run, I’m looking at the revenue and the profit and loss across all my client files just as a snapshot. Now it might be that you then want to take that one step further and you might want to include some real niche detail within some of your templates. So for example, you might want to start to pull not only your revenue and profit across all your client files, but you might also want to see what your employee numbers are as well. Now this might look super technical here in terms of what we’re looking at on a client file, but actually it’s really easy to start to interrogate that data at a template level. So if for instance in this example, I’m pulling all of my employee numbers here, and if we dive into where some of this information is held, then you can see when you go into your actions, you can actually view the data that is available within any template across all of the self infin platform. So that could be somewhere sat within your working papers or your accounts production or your corporation tax workflows. And actually, the queries that you can then run are all sat here. So straight away, you can either use, so you can copy, you know, if I wanna see the number of employees for my current year across all my client files, I can copy that information here and pull that into that query, or I can slim simply hover over this icon here, and that will actually just open up that query for me straight away. So I’m not having to key in any of that data. But if you’re just adding that information to other queries that you’ve already built, then you you can run that as well. So super easy to get that information from a template level. So it could be anything. Right? So it might be even things from your general information in your accounts. Simply things like tell me all my files and their signing dates of the accounts, or tell me where all my engagement letters are and actually when they was last renewed because we want to start to renew them every three years or whatever it might be in terms of your firm policy. So all of these queries can be saved at firm levels, so once you’re happy that you built what information you want to see, and again that can be made up of loads of different things. Right? So you might want to see file numbers, VAT numbers, company registration numbers, anything within here. You build that initial query, you save it as a firm query, and then any of your users then, if you’ve given it access across the firm, so we’ve got different access levels here, whether they are visible to just admin users. There might be some queries that only admin users you want to see, or actually we can share that with the firm, which means then that each of your users can then run those queries for their own portfolio. So they can simply just save them down with their own files that they’re following or if you have a custom built insights template within your file, can start to look at that information on who the preparers are, who the managers are, and who the partners are as well. Now in a scenario that I am gonna just look at today just to give you a general idea of how that then could flow through to our reports to tell it as a little bit of a story, is I actually wanna just look at all of my clients where we provide a VAT only review service to. And on the back of that, what I wanna then do is send out a super easy to run management accounts pack, because actually I wanna prove to them that this is the type of level of service that our management accounts team could produce for them and actually sell a bit of an extra service to them, hopefully, on the back of it. So firstly, what I’m gonna do is I’m just gonna run a check across all of my client files to see actually where are we doing the VAT review only work. And super easy for me because I actually have a VAT review workflow within my client files that we do that service for, which is like a just condensed working papers workflow. And what I’m gonna do is I’m only gonna run it on where this is actually present because they’re the only clients I wanna see. So straight away, I’ve got all my clients here that we run that service for. Great. So I’m gonna jump into that client file then, and what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna run an four, which is my style pack, which is a pre built management accounts pack just so I can see actually straight away what that looks like. And and I say an example here, I am gonna jump into the styles and just show you how you can tailor some of this. But actually, it’s once it’s set up for a firm level and it’s super easy to set up, you can just run this at the click of a button and include all of the pre built Silverfin reports. So the reports that you can see, although I’ve branded them, they are just the standard Silverfin reports which come with graphs. You can pull in your external documents to the branding that we’ve set within these packs. You can split them out differently, so you might have certain reports that you want to split out separate. And again, this is a key financial metric report which is available to everybody. It comes along with some charts within here, so that just gives you a general idea of how you can just quickly at click of a button run that for your clients. So to run and edit any of our reports initially, before we jump into the actual building of the style packs, you’ll see that within our report section, within each of the client files, you’ll have some silverfin reports that you’ll have access to depending on what we pull in as part of the actual client template that you’re using. If you want to add any more reports at that stage, you can just add a new report, pull those ones in if you need to, and just so you also are aware, we also have access to set up budgets as well so you can start to report against your budget too. With our reports though, what I would always recommend that you do is if you’re starting to tailor any of these, so if you’ve got the option to custom build some of your reports, then the easiest place to start is to to copy the original report and start from a basis. Now you’ll notice as well that all of our reports that have a p and l within that also have the charts pre built in the background and you can visualize those as well. But if I jump into my income statement first of all and where we want to start to tailor this and build these, which we can then set at firm level. So actually, you can start to visualize them across all your client files, or you might set a firm level report and then pull that down and do further editing and tailoring at a client level. It’s all completely possible within the custom reporting in there. So in actions, we’re just gonna copy a report and that will then take us into the editing part of that report. Now I will show you some of the functionality within here. Anyone who’s got access to our Silverfin Academy, there are some really detailed courses around how to start to tailor these reports. Definitely check those out within Silverfin Academy if you have access. But within here, is where we can start to really customize things like your rounding, your periods that you want to see, you know, do we want to see month on month periods or is it just year on year that we’re happy to view and start to add in these blocks of detail and really start to customize what it is that we want to see from here. So do we want to see actuals versus budgets? Do we want to see it for this period, last period? And you can really start to build up those blocks of columns. Then if you scroll down as well, you’ve then got access to really tailor how the rows are displayed in here, so you can start to group quite a lot of that financial information in here, and then drag and drop if you need to display some of that differently to how Silverfin would show it. You can also add any formulas and start to build any of those formulas that you would like to see on the report, and super useful then if you do want to start to build your own charts using some of those formulas within those charts. And then we also have options around new data lines. So this is where you might want to include anything that is nonfinancial. So it might be you want to see actually I want to see all my last month figures as a proportion to my employee numbers. So you’ll add in the new the data line, type in what your employees are for that month, and then it will calculate that information for you. So a really good way of getting that information into those reports. You’ll also see as well that we have different styles, which when we come to look at the style pack building and where you saw earlier in this pack where I’ve got these different blocks of color, that’s the way you to start to set your styles and branding within the packs themselves. Save those reports down, also in here just worth to know you can add your own charts as well and graphs if you want to. So if you did want to add perhaps any sector specific charts that might be really relevant for a certain batch of customers that you have, then you can come in and start to add your own charts, pie charts, and graphs for those reports as well, so they can be tailored. Also to know if you do have any analytical files, then you can also report on your departments or tracking categories. So if you have tracking categories where you have a live Xero sync, they will be pulled as part of that analytical file, and we show that as dimensions in Silverfin, and you can start to run reports on those different departments and visualize that within your report. So taking a look at our styles then, so styles can be accessed by your admin users and set them up within this style area at a firm level. Now this can be done in the branding. We’ll take a look at the actual style settings in a second, but as you can see, our our actual packs are built up as what we call like the different elements that you can see here down the right hand side of the page. So things like your reports, super easy, we just drag and drop them in and then you pick from the list of reports what it is that you want to see. And you can then further tailor that at a firm level and say, right, well actually I only want to show original account numbers, which means when we run that report, we’re gonna see the actual bookkeeping underlying details rather than the Silverfang codes that actually clients might not be familiar with. We might also want to run that quarterly, and we might want expand the report so that you can see everything within that report at a firm level. You can save all these elements and then at a client level further tailor those if you need to. We also have the option to bring in anything that sits within your workflows. So things like it could be that we wanna bring in a particular template within your working papers, so it might be a summary of fixed assets at a firm level as well as standard. You can bring in external documents if you like, so any external documents can be drag and dropped in. And as you saw within our tailored pack, when you do that, it will hold the branding that you set within that pack as well. Found where I was. And then as well, we’ve also got the option to bring in your text documents. So within each client file, you do have the option at a documents level to start to build some text within there. And for me, for my management accounts perks, that might be a little bit of an ex executive summary, which we can liquid code in the background as well. If you if you are super technical in that way, you can start to build some liquid code into these so that it’ll automatically pull information, but you can start to pull that within those packs as well. Adjustments, so if we want to bring in our adjustments that could be just the external ones or the internal ones. So if you are tagging those profit affecting adjustments that you want the client to see as those external ones, can bring in those as well. And communications, which you can now filter on as well. So with the communications, you can start to filter by those tags where it might just be those talking points that we might have or those client queries that we might wanna see. In terms of the style settings themselves, so when you’re in the style settings, this is where you can start to set those cover pages, any title pages, any header graphics, photographics, or logos, anything like that that you wanna see within that branding path. Any font changes, font size, and then as well where we saw the styles that you can set, this is where you can come in and change the colors that you want to see and change the text colors as well and our chart colors. So you can have as many packs as you want within a file. Again, if I just jump into another pack that we’ve pre built here, you can start to see where you customize those reports and add that brand in. It’s super easy to then run that and tailor it at a firm level. Great. Any questions on that? Lots of detail there. So, we obviously record these sessions and then share them out with you afterwards. We also post them online, like I said before. So, yeah, feel free to to share those around with with your colleagues when they when they get posted online. On that resource online as well, I think there’s five preceding webinars we’ve recorded now across the different elements of Silicon. So, yeah, if you want to have a look at the other bits of what we do, the first step, they’ll let all there online. I’ve not seen any questions come through, so I’m guessing that means Hannah, you did a fantastic job of, giving everybody the permission they needed. I’ll quickly run that poll I mentioned. So, super simple. If you would like us to get in touch afterwards with automation about something in general or any part of it specifically, you can answer yes, and we will. I’m trying to find the poll. Where has it gone? There we go. So yeah. Really appreciate it if you could just take a second to give that a quick yes, no, and we’ll follow-up with you accordingly. Lovely. Thanks, everyone, and we’ll leave it there. As I say, we’ll we’ll send out the recording. They’ll be posted online as well in the resource area, and, hopefully, we see you in a month or so time for the next webinar we do where we deep dive into Thanks very much. Have a great day. Thanks, guys. Bye bye.