Stories

I never dreamt I would be an accountant running my own accountancy practice.My early career was vastly different I ran a catering business. It was a partnership between me, who understood finance, and a friend who understood food production and it worked well for 10 years. The time came for us both to move to something else and we sold the business. For my part I was now a finance professional with 10 years of running a business in trade that I felt added an interesting facet to being an accountant in practice. So, a career as an accountant in practice began.

As a sole practitioner with a business pushing growth meant I was struggling for time and soon it became obvious that without finding better ways to manage what we did as a business we would drown in administration.Where do I go and what do I do? Asking around and thinking about what resources were already in place I got introduced to a database programmer. A few conversations and we, together, produced a potential way of automating a number of core processes that would save time and effort.

A combination of what was already available, together with some Access database development pulled together a number of core processes in our business that made a time saving of 25% compared to our old processes. A big win and the start of our journey to Kamozo. Having achieved such success with my first foray into automation of process I was then on a journey to use technology wherever possible to drive value and improve my team’s and our customer experience. Over the next few years, we continued to improve on the automation of processes and deliverables to our customers.

A major part of our growth plan was managing acquisitions. The first acquisition highlighted the need for an objective valuation to be driven from data. Data acquired was often missing or fragmented across disparate system making it difficult to understand. This inspired us to build a data set that could be interrogated to provide the necessary insights we needed to validate the value of any acquisition to be made, whilst also providing valuable data on the clients we were naturally acquiring. It also helped us understand the business areas to focus on that would drive profitable growth.

On reflection, the team concluded that if this worked for us it could work for others. We decided to market it as a business solution, as Kamozo.
We chose the cloud as the delivery platform for Kamozo and thank God we did. The pandemic arrived and we continued to operate the practice remotely. During the pandemic we focused on productising Kamozo and built our current value propositions. We launched in May 2022 and the journey continues…