Spotlight Articles for Advisory & Business

The combination of technology and human expertise is a powerful one, with leading accounting firms bringing these two important ingredients together to better serve clients and grow business. HW Fisher is setting an example of how technology can elevate advisory services and specialised offerings.

In tough economic times, it is more important than ever that businesses help one another. With eye-wateringly high energy prices, a soaring inflation and businesses struggling to make ends meet, it is now that businesses must innovate and plan, which is exactly what the team at Moracle have been helping their clients do since 2008.

For a global accountancy firm such as Moore, with history dating back to the early 1900s (a time where nobody had even heard of Excel - or a computer!), the waves that technology was slowly making saw the start of something new.

In such a technology-focused business landscape, businesses like Empowered by Cloud are revealing just how useful and transformative cloud accounting solutions such as Spotlight Reporting can be in everyday use.

In a bid to understand how William Buck is using Spotlight Reporting, we took a trip to their offices in Sydney’s CBD to discuss how they use the technology to prepare reports and forecasts, and enhance their business advisory services.

Strata Cloud Accountants are passionate, virtual CPAs and expert accountants with a mission to provide financial freedom to their clients.

“Not only did Spotlight Reporting do everything our previous reporting package did, but there was also greater flexibility. It was more visual. You could convey complicated information much more easily. So we decided to commit to Spotlight Reporting.”

After subscribing to Spotlight Reporting, AIF’s month-end reporting time was cut in half, and their management reports became more accessible for teams across the company—including those without a financial background.

Katherine Robertson and colleague David Adderson built Youtopia Solutions with a clear vision: to create deep client relationships supported by the best technology available.

“My biggest tip in terms of Spotlight would be, first of all give it a go. Take the time, set it up and really explore the different opportunities that it will provide your client.”

Fresh Accounting was designed to be cloud-first—so much so that they were the first Spotlight Reporting users in the region, and one of the first 10 Spotlight users globally. They’re a pioneering firm for cloud accounting in Asia, and as such, they’re in high demand.

There are 200 individual Cheesecake Shop bakeries throughout Australia and New Zealand—meaning that Ken is all too familiar with the trials and tribulations of manual consolidated reporting.

Steve Janz, an Accounting Instructor at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, firmly believes that Spotlight Reporting is the future.

"Postponing the Tokyo games out one year to July/August 2021 has affected our funding and our costs," says Tracey. "I've been doing a lot of financial modelling over the last year, and using Spotlight Reporting to present to the board."

Singapore-headquartered accounting firm Stepping Stone is a digital-first practice, partnering with clients’ internal teams to implement software like Xero and Spotlight Reporting.