When you're an overworked MSP ploughing through piles of paperwork (and most likely, the last of your coffee supply), sure, building your own integration sounds like a great idea! The reality, however, is nothing but one big drainer - time, money, energy, caffeine...you name it.
For Australia-based Managed Service Provider, ADITS, that reality was nothing but "a long, tedious process," one that only hindered their company growth. ADITS aspired to scale but "there was no way" that would happen without having strategic alignment throughout their business.
ADITS were facing the wraith of manual entry: Human errors, incomplete financial reporting, and insufficient data departmentalization. At this stressful time, they managed 500 endpoints, with just three staff members. They simply didn't have the capacity and so, they searched for an integrated solution that would put an end to expending resources, a tool that ultimately, "just worked."
Today, almost ten years since finding that solution, ADITS is a rapidly growing and scalable provider managing 7,200+ devices, with a team of 45+ staff members, and a completely automated invoice lifecycle. Irrespective of their 14.4x endpoint growth, ADITS retains the same finance team, all without having to hire a single person more.
From beginning in 2006 as a one-man Managed Service Provider (MSP) in regional Australia, to becoming a now internationally recognised IT MSP with an ever-growing team, ADITS has surely walked the long and rocky road to reconciliation -
Ashley Darwen, Managing Director, recalls ADITS' situation before implementing Wise-Sync (and later Wise-Pay) as involving a "very manual and tedious process." At the time, ADITS did all of their invoicing in ConnectWise [Manage] and used the desktop accounting package MYOB. This "full manual process" didn't facilitate the interconnectivity needed between platforms, which instead, caused ADITS' team to work even harder to get their numbers to match.
With three technical staff members, including one full-time employee in finance administration, whose role was to solely focus on invoicing, ADITS still couldn't trust the numbers. "We had to check multiple times that the files we imported were correct, and even then, we still weren't 100% sure about what ConnectWise said and what MYOB said," says Ashley.
As ADITS began to expand with multiple offices, it fast became pivotal to make the move from desktop to cloud accounting, in order "to ensure [we] could access the right data in multiple locations." And so, ADITS implemented cloud accounting package Xero, a decision Ashley regards as an even greater imperative today, with "no choice" but to facilitate flexible working.
"The reason for the move from MYOB to Xero was that it was cloud-based, which MYOB wasn't back then, and the reporting features in Xero are much better. We had opened another office, we had multiple offices, and it's just too hard when you have on-premise software.
After implementing Xero, ADITS still "weren't confident" that the data from ConnectWise into Xero was correct, which led a determined Ashley to attend an IT Nation Evolve conference where he met CEO-Founder Paul MacNeill. Paul shared why Wise-Sync started and how the solution works, when Ashley fast figured "it was a no-brainer for [us] to jump onboard."