Cover Case Study Story
Combine your expertise with apps to take your clients to the next level I spoke with a customer who’s got some great
advice for accountants and bookkeepers who’d like to expand the services and expertise they offer.
As soon as you talk to Toni May of Peter May Ltd, you’re inspired by her passion for looking after her customers with the best products and service possible. You also see how much she trusts technology to help drive the company’s success.
T
oni uses apps including WorkflowMax, Xero and Shopify to make life easier and to get an accurate picture of how the business is doing at any moment of the day.
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She’s worked with implementation partners to help set up these apps and has found their expertise invaluable. Toni believes that accountants and bookkeepers should consider becoming app advisors and teaming up with software setup partners to build closer, more profitable relationships with their clients. Here’s why she thinks there are benefits for everyone: Taking pride in delivering a great product Peter May Ltd is an innovative company that specialises in the custom design and manufacture of high quality canvas, PVC and protective products. They’re based in Ashburton, New Zealand and provide products for farming, private and commercial clients around the country.
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Toni is a director along with her husband Peter May and the company employs four more people. They’ve now been in business for 40 years and
while they’re a small company, they have a wide production range. “Peter loves problem solving and tackling something like a canvas that goes on a potato harvester, but we realised it’s hard to make much money with custom work. We thought, ‘If we can make a widget, we can streamline production and become very efficient’. We discovered our widget is our work-proof seat covers that protect vehicle seats,” says Toni. They’ve invested in the technology to produce these covers and now sell them from the top of New Zealand to the bottom. But there was a time that they didn’t have the right technology
@WorkflowMax
Larissa Paris, Head of Sales, WorkflowMax I’m the Head of Sales for WorkflowMax and have more than 16 years of sales and leadership experience in the tech space. I love building high performing sales teams and executing global sales strategies, and was pivotal in developing the Xero partner channel in New Zealand. I’m super passionate about how software can make a real difference in the lives of our partners and customers to create more time and space for the really important stuff!
to help with job management basics like accurate job costing and knowing whether jobs were profitable or not. Toni says, “A job would come in, we’d enter it into the system we were using, and it would just disappear into the abyss. We didn’t have a good way to schedule jobs or tasks. And ordering everything – we had no good way to track fabric for a job.” Implementation partners make a world of difference Toni knew the name Xero and went to find out more when she got an invite to attend an information day. She came home buzzing because she learned what Xero could help with and was introduced to WorkflowMax implementation partner Nicole Elvy from Equation. Nicole
Join our webinar - 16 September at 11am (NZT) Join our webinar to learn more about helping your clients move to a cloud job management system. On 9 September at 11am (NZT), we’ll take you through the basics of becoming an app advisor, including:
• Creating your pricing model • Profiling clients’ businesses • Mapping apps to requirements • Working with an implementation partner • Following up with clients and identifying new opportunities
• Identifying the clients you want to target
Register now and we look forward to seeing you!
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