In this session, you’ll get an inside look at how Silverfin helps firms increase operational efficiency, drive revenue growth, and stay compliant – while maintaining high-quality service with less effort with Silverfin AI Assistant.
Morning, folks. Hopefully, you can all hear me fine. Just give it a minute or so to let people trickle in and join us. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining. I’ll give it another thirty seconds or so just to let the numbers creep up, and then we’ll get underway with things. Grant, we’ll get going. Folks can join halfway through or a little bit into if if they need to. We will, of course, record this. So anybody that that didn’t manage to join on time, you’re gonna get a full copy of things as as we go through it. So, yes, morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Today is, I think, the sixth in our series of, deep dive webinars where we focus on a particular element of Silverfin, and today is, all about Silverfin Assistant. My name is Mark. I’m one of the senior sales execs here at Silverfin. I’ll do a bit of an introduction to the platform, as an overall, bit of a background about who Silverfin is, what we do, where we kind of come from. I’m also joined by by Hannah, from our, CS team. Hannah’s a senior customer success manager. She’s not feeling hundred percent hundred percent today, so we’ve prerecorded demonstration part, but there will be a q and a at the end, if you guys ask any questions. And if I can’t answer them, Hannah will be here on hand to to get answers to us and run through them. I should spend about maybe five minutes on the slides, and then the demo parts run about ten minutes, and that should leave us with a nice sort of five minute segment at the end, to go over any questions that there might be. Perfect. So I always start off these, webinars and presentations with a bit of a bold statement around, what we believe is kind of going on at the minute as, insofar as the tech is concerned in, in in accounting firms. And, that is that the compliance software and technology that you use is outdated. And that’s pretty safe to say. You know, most of it’s based on, well, a lot of the time, sorry, it’s based on tech that’s, you know, twenty, thirty years old. But it’s also limiting your firm’s potential. That’s potential to grow, acquire new clients, offer new services, be more efficient. And they’re all things that that are making it harder to be a, a standout firm these days if we don’t address them head on. And it started because our techs, you know, based on an infrastructure that’s, you know, looking a bit like this. And hopefully, this diagram sort of represents represents is that, the the layout of your tech, the the technology used is is is old fashioned, is outdated, it’s not connected, it’s disjointed, it’s siloed. This side’s meant to be messy. It’s not meant to look very nice. And that’s not me, you know, having a a pick apart of what you guys are doing. It’s just the way tech’s adopted hasn’t lent itself to be, as efficient and as streamlined as it can be, for your firm. A lot of this stuff’s on prem as well. So, you know, you’re not using, you know, the latest technology, in the cloud. That all has a detrimental impact onto onto how you can service confirmation service your clients requirements, through the tech stack that you have. And then even when we begin to bring in some cloud solutions, you know, you know, we’re no stranger to any of this. Xero and QuickBooks are just a couple of examples of cloud software that’s been pushed into the, into the industry over the last, ten, fifteen years, maybe. Even we have these cloud features in place. A lot of the time, they don’t talk to each other. So you’ve got better solutions in place that that bring some efficiency and some improvements, but they don’t all talk to and join up with each other. And that’s how we like to step in a silverfin. So, we are a best in breed solution, we believe for your compliance requirements. That’s all around your working papers, accounts production, corporation tax, and client kind of management reporting. And we add in a, a very healthy dose of, AI into that to help streamline that even further. And that’s really what we focus upon. That’s really what we like to specialize. And where we don’t offer solutions for your general bookkeeping, practice management, that sort of stuff, we then, link out those, other solutions, other third party solutions with, an ease to use and an open API through integration work. So we’re super focused on on this part. And then where we, need to call an expertise of other third party systems, we can do that through our our open API. A little bit of an overview on how Silfin actually works and performs and what it can do and and how a client might sort of flow through, flow through the experience. So, think of things flowing from left to right. We’re powered by your client bookkeeping data. We’re totally agnostic in terms of where that comes from. We really don’t mind. It’s great if you’ve got clients on cloud systems because we have a live sync with those that pulls that client data through. But even if your clients are still on manual records for whatever reason, we can still ingest that data in the shape of a CSV import, and just using that that trial balance and general ledger data and then everything in between. So if you’ve got a on prem system on prem better software the client uses, if they can output that in that CSV format, we can still take it to Silverfin. So we are completely agnostic in terms of where that data comes from. And the first thing we’ll do, kind of signify by this live syncs little icon here, is we’ll convert that client data from whatever chart of account is in use here to a standardized Silverfin chart of accounts. And essentially, what we end up end up with is all your client data in the Silverfin platform in one format. And that is to do two things. It lets us then work with that client data in one standardized, sorry, with a set of standardized workflows. So regardless of where the data’s come from or how it might have been used or touched before it’s come to Silverfin, we can then work with it all in the same way, all the same workflows, all the same processes, all your team kind of working in one unified one unified way. We also then have that database of client data that’s instantly referenceable, searchable for trends, benchmarks, analyzed, because all essentially in that one lung one language in in that one format. And that’s quite powerful because we can then begin to pick out trends and queries, ask the data questions that we might not been able to do beforehand because it was all formatted differently. And on the workflow side of things, the three circles you see here are, the sort of main traditional workflows that we we cover in Silverfin. You can add in management reporting as as a fourth circle as well in there. And they’re overlapping because they talk to each other. So what I mean by that is any relevant data from any of these workflows will flow forwards and backwards to each different section. And what it means is that we’re not having to handle data more than once. So if I’m doing some year end prep work in my working papers module, I’ll have my accounts production module turned on as well, it’s prepopulated by the data from here. I’m not wasting time having to copy and paste it, extract it, reformat it, import it again. It just flows through automatically. Same for a corporation tax. If I’m, doing some CT prep work here or any of my figures in my accounts might relate into my my corporation tax and my CT six hundred, that’ll flow through automatically. And what I like to say is that you’re you’re touching the data once, but having two, three, sometimes maybe even four outputs of that client data. Works as well from a monthly input. So if you are doing monthly or quarterly reporting work for the client around your your management reporting, that’ll flow up into your annual job as well. And, again, we’re just continue continue saving time because we’re not having to handle the data more than once. So we end up with a very efficient way of working because of that automation and flow through of data, through the different workflows. Talks about the API already. So naturally, you can, as most platforms can do these days, you can submit your accounts and your tax off to the relevant governing bodies, but that will talk to third party solutions. So already talked about practice management as an option. Further reporting might be another. It reads as an open and intuitive. It needs to use API. All our documentation is available online for you to look at as well. So you know, no, no secrets there about how we, are able to link data out of Sylvan to different systems. We’ve also got a client portal called pulse, does all the things you’d expect a client portal to do, share documentation with the client, they can send documentation back, e sign documents, ask questions, set tasks, queries, all that sort of stuff, share reports, all within that Pulse portal. And then across the bottom, just a couple of kind of themes that really run through Silphin platform, and they’re really woven into how we work. They’re not kind of separate product pieces. They’re really sort of, core beliefs, I guess we have within within the platform. The first one being AI. AI is not new to us. We aren’t, just kind of jumping on the the recent maybe two or three year, maybe two year, sort of AI trend that’s going through the industry. To kind of back that up, we bought AI development company about five years ago. We had been working with them previously to that for about three or four years. And what it means is that our AI features are really woven into silverfin. They don’t just sit on the side of it as a little tool that we’ve just developed recently and turned on. It really is very cool to what we do. So for example, it helps with the remapping. Well, say helps. It largely completely automates, the remapping of the client data input to our standard chart of accounts. So it’s a very automated process, AI powered. It helps and assists, with the push and pull through of client data to different workflows. So you don’t have to worry about that. Again, that’s large AI driven. It will help, for example, raise up and bring, you know, raise up red flags, sorry, against if you’re missing out particular disclosure notes, for example, based upon, what you’ve been doing in your working papers or the the type of account you’re trying to format. And it would also check and sense check the quality of the client bookkeeping data and raise flags against anomalies. So for example, if it sees that your, DLA balance is is gone over ten k, it’ll raise a flag to say, hey, you might want to go and have some sort of conversation with the customer about this and what it means from a kind of tax planning and full planning solution. The whole idea of our AI, the way we built AI into the platform is to effectively increase your capacity and save time and be reactive rather than proactive. Because generally, we’re working on live sets of client data as opposed to things that are sitting static. So you can actually go and deliver that value add piece to the client sooner rather than later. And all of that rolls up into our kind of review and collaboration piece as well. So, the review aspect of Silafim, which we’ve covered off in previous webinars, and you’re more than welcome to go and go and view those, on our webinar resource page, to get an idea of how that works. It’s a really well liked part of the platform where we can build a very structured and robust and, and tailored way of reviewing your client work and making sure your client work is done properly by your preparers, reviewed in the same way by your reviewers, and then signed off by your your partners and directors, All in the same way, you know, bringing in that standardized way of working again. And then that collaboration piece, anybody within the firm that picks up the client file, whether they’re a preparer, manager, partner, tax focused, accounts focused, prep focused, they get all the context is built upon the client file, the why we’ve done it this way, the notes about the approach we took, the review points that have been set and actioned, etcetera. It’s all within context of InsilverFence. You’ve got this, kind of, as it sort of says on here, this live client file, this super hub, if you like, of client data that can be accessed by your team, regardless of they’re based in the office, if they’re an outsourced offshore team, if they’re working remotely, it’s all available at your fingertips to view and, and work upon and get updated with as as you work through things. What does this all mean? So I’ve I’ve chucked a lot of jargon and words at you and talked about time saving and AI and all the rest of it. But that’s nothing without some real, you know, real tangible results. And here are just three that we’ve picked out from from some of our customers. What I quite like is whilst they all talk to an underlying kind of, message about that capacity and time saving piece, they come at it from three different angles. So BKL, all about saving time. They are able to half, on average, the time it takes to prepare and submit a year end accounts job. Hearst in the middle there, more about revenue generation. So because they had more capacity, they could actually increase their revenues by by offering additional services. And they give this nice figure of two hundred k increase in revenue. We did not cost them that we are a fraction of that cost, and they put down, a lot of the time saved, that unlocks that that extra revenue down to implementing Silverfin. PKF Francis Clark, more around, the quality of work they’re able to do because they’re able to increase the amount of, reviews that were conducted on the work that’s being completed. So they know that the work going out the door as that is a is a highest quality it can be, you know, fulfilling their clients need servicing their clients, and making sure their clients are satisfied by ensuring their work is done on time and accurately as well. So they all talk to that underlying unlocking of capacity, kind of message, but they look at it from three very different kind of, perspectives. And you might find that one talks to you long, you know, bigger, sometimes it’s more kind of spread out and equal. You know, this is just a little bit of a message that we’ve had from from these clients and and what they felt so often delivered for them. And just to kind of illustrate to who we do work with, you’ll see some familiar names on there from the last slide. But also, it’s it’s really a very broad range of firms. Like, we have a great footprint within the top one hundred firms of the UK. I believe we work with thirty six of them now. So you’re just over a third, which is fantastic. But they are generally larger firms that are spread out across, the country, they’ll have multiple offices, and they’ll have a very set of a very different sets of problems that we’re trying to fix. And it might be that because they’re spread out or the growth acquisition, they’ve got very different workflows on their locations. And Silfen’s great. It’s helping to standardize their approach. Other firms on here, and I’ll pick out CCA based down, on the south coast near Brighton, a very small firm, I believe less than ten staff. And what they’re using technology to do is to grow, by by, through efficient workflows. So you haven’t got to be a large firm to work with Silverfin, you haven’t got to be a small firm with Silverfin because then you’ve got lots of firms in between. And these are firms that are either, you know, challenged by their spread out nature or a acquisitional nature, or of firms they brought on brought brought on, or firms that are really kind of in that that middle sort of sweet spot looking to grow and differentiate themselves from the firms that they might that might find sort of competing against. So a real broad spectrum of firm types that can work with Silverfin. We’re not just for the large, we’re not just for the small. And just to finish off, my my slides, before we get into the demo part, Silverfin are backed up by some pretty impressive impressive numbers. So, we’re now working with over a thousand accounting firms, mentioned already the top one hundred stat there. It’s around about four hundred thousand plus client files that are now being pushed through the Silphin platform. So that’s four hundred thousand plus, firms or so four hundred thousand plus, entities, businesses that we’re working with with with our accounting partners. And we also are a global business. We now have presence in seventeen different countries, across the globe. And just there at the bottom, these are all kind of four core markets. We are now a business of around one hundred and eighty plus, employees too. So, you know, not a small business, we’ve been here for, I think, twelve years now, I’m really here to stay kind of part of the furniture, so to speak, particularly, in in these core territories here. So with that done, I am gonna hit play on this prerecording, and we will get going with the demo part of this webinar. Silverfin Assistant is available across all of your Silverfin Silverfin Assistant is available across all of your Silverfin workflows using AI and machine learning to look for certain changes in patterns or expectations, helping you identify potential anomalies in your client data and reduce the risk of human error. The assistant works to analyse your client files highlighting missing transactions, unusual balances or potential advisory opportunities. It is then up to you to decide which of these points require further action or follow-up. You can access the Silverfin Assistant from the assistant tab at the top of your client overview. Other ways that you can access Silverfin Assistant is from the assistant tab in your workflow so that it’s alerting you to potential areas of focus relating to that particular workflow. Silverfin Assistant will also display its checks within the templates. Where a check has been presented a result that relates to that template, a red dot will appear above this assistant icon located in the communication tab. In the Silverfin assistant dashboard you can review all unread checks flagged by Silverfin. Checks can be marked as read and unread to show that the user has considered them as part of the preparation of reviewing a file. Within each check you also have the ability to open in context, This will open up that check-in the template it relates to. Once you’ve had chance to review this check you have the option at the bottom of the screen to then navigate back where you left off. You can also view all checks which allows you to see a list of templates sorted by workflow which can be expanded and collapsed. As well as checks on your balances for completeness and anomalies Silverfin assistant also runs a number of compliance checks across your data. Things such as where section four fifty five may be arising, analysing of any VAT schemes and their thresholds, potentially where you might have any illegal dividends and things like an incorporation test checking whether or not it would be more optimal for your sole trade clients to convert to a limited company. Our completeness checks notify users if given the presence of a related account, another account should also be present and if not why not. This works on things like where you may have fixed asset registers and no depreciation charge or stock on your balance sheet and then no purchases in the P and L. We also have some general checks around things like potentially where an engagement letter is due for renewal and any ratios that we see across the client file. A full list of checks is available for you to view and we will share this with your firm. Silverfin Assistant is also able to extract information from PDFs and automatically input information into your templates. This works for bank loans, a higher purchase and VAT returns. A small purple banner will appear across the top of the template where you select to upload and choose which documents to extract the information from. You can either browse and pick up those documents from your desktop or selecting an existing file within your permanent documents or period specific documents. You can select multiple documents in one go and once you’re happy with what you have selected, choose to attach and analyse the files. Any information extracted by Silverfinite Assistant will be highlighted in purple. You can hover over each of the values in the template and highlight and scroll to the corresponding data within the PDF. Once you have reviewed and are happy with the data accept changes. AI extraction feature within Silverfin Assistant works on the VAT closing balance reconciliation, bank loans and higher purchase account template but we are looking to expand this to the payroll template and when we release the new leases template it will also be available there too. Please note in some templates the banner will only be shown if it doesn’t contain any data yet. If you want to re upload the PDF, remove the content from the template first. You can do this by going to actions and delete your data. You can upload multiple templates at once. The format has to be in PDF and we have a maximum upload length per document of fifteen pages and a maximum file size of twenty megabytes. We also have some checks which can be actioned. We want Assistant to save you time and efficiency by helping you complete actions that result from a check. So we have now introduced several checks where an action can be performed. Our first check is to warn you where the default template has been changed from the firm default templates so that for instance in this example someone has switched the template away from the ideal prepayments template. This will ask you do you want to change the template and revert back to its original default. Our second check is to prompt you to copy data from prior periods where you may have not done this in bulk. If you wish to copy the data into the template then you can simply select yes copy the data. And lastly, we have introduced a check which will append your accrual and prepayment transactions into the template. As you can see here, assistant has picked up that I have a transaction within my advertising and marketing account which it sees is a prepayment. Now please note that if there was a live sync and an attachment attached to this particular transaction, the invoice would also show here. If you’re happy that this should be included within your prepayments then you can choose to append the reconciliation and the information will be pre populated within the purple fields for you to review and accept the changes, minimizing the need for you to be keying in any of that data across all of those particular templates. If you have any further suggestions that you would like to see across our Silver Fin Assistant tool then please feed this back to your champions and if you need any additional support or resource please refer to our support pages or Silverfin Academy. Lovely. Thanks Hannah. Great pre recording. As I said before, this will all go up online and be sent out to folks afterwards as well. So if you didn’t miss any of it or want to share with colleagues, you’ll certainly be able to to do that. I should have mentioned at the beginning that we do have a q and a feature in this, and that would have let you ask some questions as we run through things. One has come through anyway. Someone managed to figure that out, but feel free to pop any questions in now. I’ll just bring up the one that’s been shared so far, but we’ll get that answered. Bear with me a second. I believe it’s around implementation on Silverfin. So, yes, it was, how long does it take to implement Silverfin Assistant into a firm’s workflow, and what are the typical onboarding steps? So specifically to self and assistant, it’s pretty much instantaneous. So it’s a module that we can just turn on. And the minute it’s turned on, it will start analyzing and and and doing the checks, on the client data automatically. And they’ll be there to be picked up and looked into by your staff. Now we offer kind of full training around what it does and how it works and how to kind of interpret it, but it pretty much is instantaneous, as when we turn it on. What we tend to find with it is that it’s quite helpful in the more general and broader onboarding, experience, because it begins to teach people how to kind of use Silverfin as a best in, you know, in a best in breed way. That larger onboarding program, I’m not gonna dive into it too much today, but I’ll certainly give you some of the sort of headlines. It’s it’s based on a ninety day, program. That’s not to say that if you need longer, we start ignoring you after day ninety, and also not to say that it can’t be done quicker. I think the average at the minute’s about sixty five, and we have delivered, you know, a full onboarding program in in as little as I think thirty three days as well. So we we we can change that if needs be. The ninety days are just more of a a kind of general internal, KPI for us to follow-up to make sure we’re being effective and efficient with our time and yours, you know, because obviously it’s your resource as well that’s going into that onboarding program. The program itself covers training, configuration of the system, setup of your environment, a very, high touch, high level of support to begin with as well. You’re assigned a your own dedicated Silverfin, customer success manager, they really kind of act as a, your your link to to Silverfin, that kind of your Silverfin project manager, and they really become, a very important and integral part of your kind of project team. And you’ll probably get to know them incredibly well. And, you know, first name basis, a lot of the time we set up WhatsApp groups, that sort of stuff to help just aid with a, you know, quick response of getting things done. And the most important part of the onboarding that we do is a process or, in my opinion, the most important part is a piece called, process mapping. And this is effectively where we we’ve given you access to the platform, you’ve had the initial training, you’ve you’ve imported some of your client data, you started working on your client data in the platform armed with that training and knowledge. And then with the process mapping, we we essentially have a generally an online, in person, sorry, on-site session, whether it’s a morning or a day or whatever the case might be needed in terms of duration. And we really sort of, analyse what you’ve done, and begin to apply a best in breed approach. We give you tips and tricks around what we see work with other clients, really take our learnings from onboarding other customers and help you build out the preferred way of working. And we call it your your firm’s kind of, preferred way of using Silverfin. We might build SOPs around it. We might document this as well. And the whole idea is that you end up with a almost like a bible of how you want Silverfin to work going forward that you can give to new staff members, or indeed new teams that might use Silverfin in the future as well. So, it really is a very, high touch onboarding program that that we offer, but that is much more generalized. As far as the assistant’s concerned, you turn it on, and it gets working, pretty much straight away. No other questions have popped through just yet, but you are more than welcome to to get in touch with myself or anybody at Sylvan afterwards, you know, through email or we we have, you know, the book a chat option up here, which you can see on the screen to to get in touch afterwards. Loads of of our different call to actions on our website that you’re more than welcome to use. As I say, today was recorded, so we’ll send out a recording of this as well. One last little thing to do from my part as well is to just aid with that. I’m gonna quick shortly start a quick poll that just asks if you’d like Sylvan to get in touch with you afterwards. It’ll be myself, one of my colleagues that will reach out and just say, hey. What would you like to know more about? Do you want a in-depth demo? Do you want, access to the additional recordings, information on pricing, whatever the case might be. So I would really appreciate if you were able to answer that for us, and we can make sure that we respond to it accordingly. I’ll let that run-in front of the sort of ten, fifteen seconds or so, and then we will, we’ll call time on today. As I said, I think this is the sixth webinar that we’ve done, on kind of at the bite sized chunks of the Silverfin platform. All the rest are available, under our webinars on demand section of the website. So do feel free to to go and have a look at those if you’ve missed the previous ones. And, again, if you want to get in touch with us, myself, anybody at Silverfin, we’re just an email or a message away. So thanks, everyone, for joining. Hopefully, you found that useful, and we hope to hear from you soon. Take care.