Bloomer Heaven, a Birmingham-based six partner firm chartered accountants, is upgrading its Star Practice Management system in a drive to further improve the way in which it runs the practice and interacts with clients.
Bloomer Heaven believes its move to the Microsoft SQL Server version of the Star Practice Management solution will bring significant business benefits. As well as the core time and billing system, the Star Practice Management upgrade includes the Star Practice Dashboard, CRM (Client Relationship Management), eMail Alerts, and Star EASY Document Management.
Chris Stephen-Haynes, Managing Partner, explained that Bloomer Heaven aims to exceed client expectations by constantly assessing the effectiveness of its services. “We provide business and financial services for hundreds of clients, many of whom find themselves under increasing competitive pressure – not too dissimilar to the challenges facing professional firms. We too need to grow business and improve profitability while maintaining client satisfaction. This means assessing our own processes, balancing quality and levels of client services, with good financial and operational control and we see the Star Practice Management system – especially the Star Practice Dashboard – as a valuable tool in helping us to achieve these objectives,” he says.
The Star Practice Dashboard puts a wealth of information about clients, and practice-wide and individual performance at the fingertips of Bloomer Heaven’s partners and managers, combining a broad range of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and associated facts into a suite of easy to customise screen views.
Importantly, data can be retrieved from almost any source or database used by the firm – whether within the Star Practice Management system or third party applications, including accounting systems.
Bloomer Heaven can monitor work in progress, debtors, billing, cash collection and staff performance and so on – including efficiency and profitability – against practice targets and budgets, analysed by partner, manager or staff member. At any point, authorised users can drill down from high-level summaries to the underlying detailed information. If they wish, partners and managers can benchmark their own performance against their colleagues.
Additionally, the Star Practice Dashboard is able to integrate with document management to locate and retrieve client-related documents, as well as generating and auto-filing letters and emails.
Steve Lee, the Manager who heads up Bloomer Heaven’s IT department, commented that the system had already made a huge impact: “It has really opened up access to information to everyone. By entering a partial name, we are able to call up virtually everything we want to know about time records, job and fee details, work-in-progress, client correspondence and a whole lot of supporting detail.
“We have also eased the pressure on the administration department by transferring responsibility for completion of timesheets and client billing to fee earners. Because our staff members working with the client are more directly engaged, this has helped to ensure the accuracy of billing and that more billable time is identified, recorded and recovered.”
Bloomer Heaven also has innovative plans for using the central Star database with the eMail Alerts module, in conjunction with CRM, to help deal with regulatory requirements, such as monitoring money laundering risks, for example. This is all made possible through the tight integration of the entire Star Practice Management system, augmented by links to complementary software and systems from other providers.
Bloomer Heaven was founded in 1877 and works in partnership with a wide range of organisations, from owner managed businesses to multinational corporations, providing them with the support they need at every stage of their development. The partners form the basis of an operation that is networked with specialists in every profession associated with business and finance.
