Sydney-based provider GKM2 Solutions was born in the cloud. From its humble beginnings as a startup Co-founded by partners George Khalil and Michael Milad-Said, to becoming an industry-renowned provider of IT end-to-end services and support -
GKM2 attests "the key success to any organisation" is to implement the right tools, where investing "very very quickly," is sure to pay.
For the average owner of a Managed Service Provider (MSP), working out the accounting side of things can feel like learning a foreign language -
For George, this wasn't the case. With a degree in accounting and no dedicated finance team, George would become the primary bookeeping person. Each cycle, George would prepare their month-end billing before handing it over to his business partner to double check; a process where "doing things manually from a bookkeeping perspective" would suffice during their early startup days...
...that was, until they experienced "a massive surging growth," prompting a determined George "to investigate and find a fully fledged PSA system."
George is no stranger to digital transformation, in fact, he swears by it. While managing the company's finances, George also oversees all other areas of the business, where he utilises his solid industry experience to help clients digitize their workplace through innovative technologies.
As a passionate advocate of implementing time-saving solutions that drive greater efficiencies, George continually searches for those tools that can help grow the business (without expending resources).
"For us, it's always about working smarter versus working harder."
However, using MYOB, together with a custom-built solution in SharePoint for timekeeping, and Microsoft PowerBI for reporting, was a monotonous process that saw a young GKM2 only work harder as they manually rekeyed information (that was already manually collated into MYOB). Even then, they would still need multiple eyes to ensure the data was actually accurate.
One of the gravest drawbacks from this manual "two-pronged approach," was that having financial visibility only occurred on a month-to-month basis "and it wasn't a true month;' information was constantly "delayed," says George.
Within their first two to three years of operation, GKM2 experienced "a massive surging growth," with a strong marketplace presence, when George recognised now as the opportune time to transform their financial processes.
"As our business expanded, we needed to put these systems in place fairly early on so that we weren't playing catch-up or getting to a stage where we're literally drowning in the work that we're doing regarding basic bookkeeping, timekeeping, and agreement management."
After implementing ConnectWise Manage (PSA) to help with their agreements, billing, and timesheets, GKM2 were still facing two of their biggest time-consuming dilemmas: Rekeying invoices into their accounting package, and double checking various financial information had transferred across accurately.