"Any practice would benefit hugely from BankLink"
30 May 2012
When it comes to making money from property accounting, speed is king. Tony Thorne recognised this and quickly made The BankLink Service an essential part of how his practice processes accounts for rental property clients. Consistent year-on-year growth of $50,000 proves that he made the right decision.
Prior to implementing The BankLink Service in 2005, processing rental property accounts was a tedious and time consuming affair for Thorne Accounting. Without full narrations from bank statements they lacked a good audit trail, but entering those narrations took too long.
“To make good money in property accounting, we need to get through rental accounts quickly. Even with small numbers of clients we could see the capacity problems if we had to manually process bank statements,” says Tony.
Operating with just three staff, Tony identified The BankLink Service as his opportunity to significantly increase capacity in the practice.
“I think of BankLink as an extra employee, one that never makes mistakes, gets lots done and doesn’t cost much.” And according to Tony, cost is vital.
“Some accountants with rental property clients may look at it and think ‘what’s the point if I can pay an admin person to do it?’ But there are other things to consider, like the time spent chasing clients and their banks for missing statements and the time wasted correcting narrations. Then there are the costs associated with the extra staff; the hassle, the space for the extra desk. It all adds up.”
In comparison, Tony found The BankLink Service offered him exactly what he needed. “It needs to be cost effective, and it is. On average I only need to save around 15 minutes per account and I’m better off.”
Tony actually found that by using The BankLink Service for all of his rental property clients the time savings far exceeded the 15 minutes he needed to break even.
“After using BankLink for a year we found that more than 95 percent of transactions were being automatically coded. Basically, the longer we used it the more efficient we became and we could invest the time savings into growing the business.”
And grow they did. By investing the time they used to spend manually processing bank statements back in to prospecting, Thorne Accounting has achieved outstanding growth every year they have been using BankLink.
“Sales have increased every year by about $50,000, while the amount of time I’ve invested hasn’t changed much at all. I can only put that down to better processes of which BankLink is the biggest factor.”
Thorne Accounting’s success in the field of property accounting has been so substantial that for the last four years they have not taken on a single client that didn’t have property investments. And all those that they do take on are put on to BankLink. “All clients that have a dedicated rental bank account are signed up on BankLink, no exceptions. Those who don’t have a rental bank account are told to set one up, and then they go on BankLink
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