New Zealand accounting firm Sidekick has signed up with Australia's FYI, a document management and process automation for accountant specialists, becoming the 1,000th customer on FYI's product suite.

Sidekick was one of the early adopters of Xero and was the first ever Xero platinum partner – not just in New Zealand, but anywhere in the world.

FYI founder and Chief Executive Rob Cameron says he was excited to help another accountancy firm realise the benefits of automation, saving them both time and money.

"For over a decade, New Zealand accountancy firm Sidekick has been serving the modern accountancy industry, and today runs eight offices across the South Island. They were pioneers of the cloud-based accounting model, and were the world's first Xero platinum partner," Cameron says.

"And they have since continued to invest in emerging technologies like FYI that have been proven in terms of ease of use, functionality and ROI," he says.

"It is a testament to the strength of FYI's offering that we have been able to sign on 1,000 practices in such a short period of time given the usual buying cycle for similar solutions can be lengthy, in some instances taking years."

Julie Copland, Sidekick's Group Operations Manager, says they were constantly pushing for smarter and more efficient ways of working.

"One of the biggest things we were looking for is a system that stacks up in terms of ROI those quantifiable benefits," she says.

Comparing their current systems with what they would be using afterwards, they realised the key driver for their ROI decision was the automations within FYI.

"We realised the automations would potentially be a game changer for us,"  Copland says.

Sidekick's primary goal in the first three months of using FYI was to automate five key processes within every office. Since onboarding in April, one of its offices has already achieved this and is now moving on to automating an additional five processes.

Cameron says this was typical of FYI customer experience.

"FYI's onboarding process and the achievement of desired outcomes tend to happen much faster than most companies expect, which is something FYI always strives to achieve," he says.

Since 2016, FYI has been focused on building the world's most efficient document management and process automation engine, purpose-built for accountants. 

Combining the very best of cloud-based document management with advanced productivity tools and process automation, FYI is delivering cutting-edge efficiency to accountants across the globe with offices in Australia, New Zealand and UK.