Apr 15, 2019
Today I am speaking with Cameron Lynch founder of Etani Business Platform
Cameron is a Chartered Accountant and the founder of the
Etani Business Platform. He believes he can help businesses survive
and prosper in today’s disruptive environment.
Cameron is experienced with Business Intelligence (BI),
Analytics, Big Data and implementing cloud-based solutions to
streamline reporting systems.
Live data has a significant role to play in assisting businesses to
make wiser decisions, both now and in the future. Cameron’s
passion is driven by the concept of creating vehicles to help
businesses and individuals prosper.
Cameron worked previously in Consolidated Financial Reporting.
Every month, a team of accountants would send the subsidiary
financial accounting data to existing, pre-filled tabs on numerous
Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for consolidation.
While this may sound like smooth sailing, all it would take is for
one person to hit the wrong key in the wrong cell, paste data into
an incorrect tab, or add an additional column, without updating the
SUM formula, and everything was corrupted. It was impossible to
retain the integrity of all the accumulated data.
Imagine this scenario:
You walk into a meeting with your Board of Directors, armed only
with your phone, tablet or laptop, containing live consolidated
management reports. Your device can continually review all
marketing, sales, finance and operational data in one place at any
time. You can access updated information and answer all questions
raised in the meeting, saving everybody a great deal of time and
providing invaluable accurate insights.
Finally, Cameron has created a diverse new system, the
culmination of years of experience, searching, testing, learning
and an overwhelming passion to be the best.
How does the Etani Business Platform help
accountants?
When you couple Etani and Microsoft Power BI, you have a powerful
system to help accountants in many different ways:
1. Etani provides your SME and small corporate clients with the
best analytics software in the world. They have full access to live
business insights simply by using their phone, tablet or
desktop.
2. Accounting firms are enabled effectively do Power BI analysis at
scale
3. You can extract data from third party SaaS software. Xero, MYOB,
Quickbooks Online, Workflow Max, SimPro, Dear inventory, and many
more. Live data is then streaming straight into your client’s
dashboards
4. The Etani Bootcamp gives you 5 x 2 hour training sessions on BI
in-house. Unlimited staff can attend or do the training online at
your own pace. There’s plenty of on-going training
available.
Templates:
Etani has created a lengthy list of templates you can use inside
Power BI. These cover sales analysis, budgeting, cashflow analysis,
and various other scenarios. This template library continues to
grow. Instead of your client struggling to make their own templates
for each aspect of their work, these have been created for them,
saving thousands of hours.
Client delivery vehicle:
Etani embeds your reports and dashboards into your own branded
application. These are available on Desktops, iPhones, iPads,
Androids and Tablets for your clients to use.
There are numerous benefits of doing this.
• Your clients don’t need a Power BI Pro account (at a cost of
$12.70 per month per user) to use the business insights.
• You retain control of your IP.
• The client can’t take the Power BI work you have done to another
accountant.
In this episode, we talk about . . .
- How his training to be an accountant, and understanding of cash flow has equipped him to run a business
- How Etani and Microsoft Power BI help practices deliver advisory services to SME’s.
- The two main reasons, Cameron thinks users love Power BI
- The different data sources clients want, beyond Financial data
- The most successful rollouts of Etani Business Platform and Power BI are undertaken by firms charging a monthly fee, productising their offering, and benefitting from recurring revenue.
- And I have included in the show notes a link to The International Federation of Accountants post stating that the reported balance sheet only reflects 20% of what is happening in the business and a link to those Trello templates.
Thank you for listening to Cloud Stories. I hope you enjoyed the show. Can I encourage you to sign up to my newsletter, by visiting