Just another accounting firm

It’s no secret, the early days of Quantico looked just like any other accounting firm 😬.

🤦‍♀️ we centralised everything rather than working in our partners’ teams

🤦‍♀️ we offered fixed services for a fixed fee

🤦‍♀️ we made them all use the software we wanted to use

The top two we fixed pretty early on. You now get someone from Quantico in your team for just the amount of time you need (and you can read much more on why that’s better here).

But until now we’ve been imposing our system stack on our partners and our team without questioning whether it was actually the best way for each of them to work.

How did this happen? How can we untangle this mess… let’s get into it.

The best systems money can buy

We’ve got - and I don’t mind bragging about it - the best system stack for running finance functions that money can buy (Front for email, Slack for messaging, Process St for recurring task management, and Coda for project and partner management).

It made so much sense to us to have a tried & tested stack of systems that we would use with every single partner. We’d spent a lot of time trialling and configuring them so they worked really well for us.

Surely, our partners wanted the best systems money could buy?!

BUT… what happened if the partner used Notion or Jira, and not Coda? What if the sales team managed everything in ClickUp? What if Process St wasn’t needed because we were supporting a fixed project?

We were forgetting one major thing - and it’s what Accounting Firms everywhere do wrong. The system stack works really well for us; it didn’t always work well for our partners.

And we were making all of our partners pay for ‘one size fits all’ software - see our transparent pricing. 😩

In your team means in your team

On top of all of that, we were actually making it harder for our team to integrate with their partners.

Our team really like to get under the skin of the partners they work with… they get an email, join Slack, attend all-hands… go to socials 🍻

But we were dictating a software stack they had to use.

It was actually hindering their ability to integrate and own the finance function. It wasn’t easy for them to add & change features, they couldn’t invite new team members or, with some tools, even work collaboratively with the wider teams in which they worked.

All that is about to change!

We’re transferring ownership of all the finance tools back to our partners and handing back control to the Quantico team using them.

Best practice, guides and training

As we will no longer be centrally managing logins, refreshing integrations and setting up profiles, we’ll have more time to focus on support that really adds value to our team and to our partners: best practices, guides and training.

We will invest more in our L&D Wednesdays and our L&D Away Days (the last one included an in-depth review of the very best practice project management tools: Monday, Click-Up, Jira, Coda, and many more).

We will continue to build great relationships, discounts, and fast-track onboarding with some fantastic software platforms (like Pleo, Spendesk, PayFit & Causal), which makes them great tools for our team and our partners to use.

And we are building on our library of resources & best practices for “All Things FinOps”.

And there are loads a lot of new things that we can’t wait to talk more about too:

👏 adding the power of AI to your finance inbox with Luka,👏 universal search across all your accounting entities with Translucent

👏 automating all things intercompany with Mayday

If you’re working on the coolest, new FinOps tool - I’d love to hear about it!

So, what does this mean for the future?

I’m embarrassed it’s taken us this long to get here but I know this change will be better for everyone.

It’s a ‘no one size fits all’ approach, that will make life better for our partners and better for our team.

It will ensure that each one of our partners will have a bespoke, best-practice finance stack that integrates seamlessly into their business. It will ensure that our team have the support and freedom to use the tools that will work best for them.

We’ll never stop iterating to ensure we get the best possible outcomes for our team and our partners.