Speaker: Ollie Turner, Tax Partner, Verallo Advisory LLP
Ollie Turner: Hi, my name's Ollie. I'm tax partner here at Verallo Advisory LLP. We're a firm of accountants. So one of the services we offer personal tax compliance. So we prepare and submit personal tax returns on behalf of a number of clients.
Before using Glasscubes, how did you request information from clients, and what problems or frustrations did that cause?
Ollie Turner: Prior to Glasscubes we had a number of options in terms of how we requested information from clients. These varied in success but generally were much more manual. So, we'd often email clients, on a case by case basis, with a bespoke email requesting specific details from them. We'd also use our, so we use CCH. So we use our OneClick portal. Upload questionnaires onto OneClick. But again, it was very difficult to do that for clients on mass. So, yeah, everything was quite manual. We didn't necessarily have a clean way of kind of tracking progress with information requests. We had no visibility over whether clients had seen or read our requests and often it resulted in them replying in a piecemeal way. So, we we'd get bits and pieces of information not necessarily in the best format.
Did you have any concerns about moving to a new solution like Glasscubes, and were any of these subsequently realised?
Ollie Turner: We did have concerns, I guess the primary one would be, client uptake. How well clients would respond to a new system. Whether there'd be any negative feedback from their side. We have had one or two clients who prefer not to use it. Who have been acting, dealing with us in a certain way for a number of years and have preferred to stick with that but the bulk of our clients have been quite happy to use the Glasscubes platform. A lot of them prefer email correspondence, so it kind of acts as quite a good middle ground between email and a secure portal. So, yeah, the feedback has been positive.
Please describe working with us. How has Glasscubes helped you, your firm, and/or your clients?
Ollie Turner: Glasscubes has been excellent for us, as I was saying before, there's been there's been a really good uptake from our clients. Gives us really good visibility over progress in terms of requesting information. What it also does is it takes away that kind of menial task of monthly, or bimonthly, chasing for information. That's all automated, so that's been great. In terms of the firm themselves, Glasscubes have supported us throughout the process. So they helped us with an initial bulk upload of our clients into the system. They handle all of that for you. They just explain what they need out of your database. So that that all happens in the background, which is great and if you've got any queries, or concerns, or questions, or suggestions, then they're always on hand to help with those.
Ollie Turner: We would absolutely recommend Glasscubes. We've had good success on our personal tax side. We've also started to use it in our audit team as well, to request information at the start of audits and again, that's been a really positive process for us. Clients like it, they like the look of it, they like the feel of it. It makes things easier for them as well as for us. So yeah, absolutely would suggest going ahead. Now's a great time [October 2024] if you've got a list of a number of clients where you just have no uptake in terms of providing personal tax information, it's a good time of year to go ahead. Last year, we introduced it part way through the tax year. We were able to to start with just a group of clients rather than our full database and it really gave us an initial kind of bit of traction in terms of gathering that information.
