Foundry56 is a New Zealand-based chartered accounting firm with expertise across a broad range of industries. The Spotlight suite is the firm’s primary platform for delivering dashboards, reports, and forecasts across its client base.

Aaron Pullar, Advisory Manager at Foundry56, has spent five years leading the firm’s advisory delivery. He says his team uses Spotlight tools to provide financial intelligence that helps clients make confident decisions and pursue their growth ambitions.
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“We’ve always had a clear mantra at Foundry56 – to educate our clients and improve their financial literacy. Everything we do is focused on helping clients understand their numbers, so they can run stronger, more effective businesses.”

The time savings from the Spotlight suite are significant. In turn, this enables a more cross-functional approach to advisory, where team members at every level, from junior to senior, are involved. This allows the team to focus on everything from booking meetings to delivering financial insights and driving action.

A Connected Approach to Reporting, Forecasting, and Advisory

Since 2016, Foundry56 has been using Spotlight Dashboards, Spotlight Reporting, and Spotlight Forecasting to deliver a complete advisory experience, giving clients a 360-degree view of their financial performance.

Every premium client receives a tailored Spotlight pack, which typically includes:

• Spotlight Dashboards for quick, real-time insights
• Spotlight Reports for deeper financial analysis
• Spotlight Forecasts to support forward-looking decisions

This gives the team a clear, end-to-end view of each client’s financials, from reviewing past performance through to planning future outcomes. The best thing is that it is all within a single platform.

“Because the financial data flows directly from Xero into Spotlight, there’s no need for double entry, so that’s the first time saving. As long as the report codes are set up correctly, everything comes through instantly. With our Spotlight Dashboards, we just drag and drop what’s needed, and we use templates to make the process even faster. We have a default template that covers three core areas we want to focus on, followed by key insights. In most cases, that takes about five minutes to prepare, and perhaps a few extra minutes if we're customising graphs.”

High-Impact Using Spotlight Dashboards

Spotlight Dashboards have become one of Foundry56’s most effective stand-out tools for engaging with clients, and it’s the accounting graduates at Foundry56 who are producing high-quality dashboards and insights. 

"One highlight from last week was from our junior intermediate accountant. She has two years of experience and sent out three dashboards with meaningful insights and a call to action in each email. Within that same week, she had three meetings booked for me to go over coaching goals and client insights. If someone with two years of experience can achieve that, what’s stopping everyone else?"

Aaron says the same time savings apply to reporting. 

“The data is already there, the features are intuitive, and it doesn’t take long to build out a complete report. Spotlight Reporting’s new AI feature for Executive Summaries is making the writing process faster. What used to take time to write and refine now starts with a strong first draft, which we can quickly adjust if needed.

Overall, Spotlight is saving our firm a lot of hours each month. All that extra time is being redirected into working more closely with clients.”

Using Spotlight Dashboards, Spotlight Reporting, and Spotlight Forecasting together, has created a scalable, effective advisory model that is time, cost, and technology efficient.

Aaron’s Advice for Accounting Firms Considering Spotlight 

Aaron recommends the following:

• Commit fully to the Spotlight platform and use it in real client scenarios.
• Engage with Spotlight’s Customer Success and Support teams. 
• Produce a number of reports and you will see value quickly.

Rather than just skimming the surface, he says firms should integrate Spotlight into their day-to-day workflows and client conversations. Once this happens, the benefits become clear and the platform becomes an essential part of advisory delivery.

“For us, the experience with Spotlight Reporting started with support. Whenever we had a question or needed help, we could reach out to Richard Phillips and get a response quickly. That’s not something you often experience with support teams. The answers were always timely, thoughtful, and genuinely useful, which made a really strong first-impression.”

From there, Aaron explains how the relationship has grown beyond just support. 

“We’ve also got our own Customer Success Manager (Naomi de Kock) who’s always here for us. There’s been ongoing interaction around how we’re using the product, like whether we’re getting the most out of it, how we can improve, and how we deliver and position our services to clients.”

That consistent engagement with the Spotlight team has helped Foundry56 continually refine their advisory approach based on the tools they’re using and ultimately deliver a better service to their clients.

The Total Cost of Ownership With Spotlight Tools

Because Foundry56 is using the full Spotlight suite and making the most of Spotlight’s Support team and Customer Success Team, it improves the firm’s technology investment, or Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). 

TCO looks beyond the price tag to consider the full cost of using a solution over time. This includes implementation, training, ongoing support, and the hidden cost of inefficiency when systems are difficult to use or slow to adopt. 

TCO considers:

• Implementation and onboarding time
• Training and support requirements
• Ongoing efficiency (or inefficiency)
• Time-recovery

By prioritising tools that are intuitive and well-supported, Foundry56 reduces hidden costs and accelerates Spotlight adoption.

The result is faster onboarding for all team members, less rework, and more time spent on client-facing advisory.

Want The Advisory Advantage?

Spotlight’s suite of tools gives you the dashboards, consolidations, budgeting, forecasting and management reporting tools to deliver high-quality, scalable financial reporting that clients can trust and understand.

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