Thorne Widgery relies on Acterys to automate data integration, breaking free from manual spreadsheet tasks, and gaining real-time insights for efficient operations.

Background

Thorne Widgery is a leading U.K. accounting and business advisory company with a 70-year history. The company’s mission is to bring digital transformation to accountancy and financial advisory through its wide-ranging accounting expertise and innovative technology focus.

Thorne Widgery turned to Acterys for a solution that clients could profit from while utilizing automated reporting and interactive dashboards based on data from accounting, project management and timesheet systems. The firm works with different accounting systems to manage customer data, internal timesheets and billing data from Xero’s WorkflowMax and Practice Manager platforms. Based on clients’ reporting and analytics needs, Thorne Widgery has built a tailored offering using the Acterys Power BI platform.

Key Challenges

• Struggled with time-consuming and error-prone manual spreadsheet maintenance.
• Fragmented data led to inefficiency in accessing comprehensive financial information.
• Lack of real-time insights limited its ability to respond promptly to issues and variances in key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Creating and maintaining a data warehouse to load data from various companies was a resource-intensive process that required specialized IT support.
• Staff was spending significant time on repetitive manual work, resulting in resource inefficiency.

How Automated Processes Helped Thorne Widgery

Thorne Widgery implemented Acterys based on its integrated framework supporting Azure SQL database with Power BI and Excel frontends. Using Acterys’ write-back-enabled and AI-enhanced planning capabilities, Thorne Widgery automated the reporting process and provided customers with management reporting and interactive dashboard capabilities. The new solution enabled the firm to eliminate costs and effort spent on manual spreadsheet maintenance. It also significantly improved analysis and reporting options.

Using Acterys automated the process of creating and maintaining Thorne Widgery’s data warehouse, which loads the data from various companies. Now, the team autonomously maintains and extends the solution with no specialized IT support. This includes the automatically generated Power BI reports and dashboards, as well as adding data from other enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

Results

With consolidated data from different accounting systems and a completely automated process, the finance team now has up-to-date information supported by powerful interactive analytics features in Power BI. Thorne Widgery can now react in real time to issues and variances in KPIs and work-in-progress reporting. Since data is loaded in a SQL data warehouse, manual work in spreadsheets is no longer needed — all data is automatically available in Power BI reports or with a live, two-way (read and write) option in Excel.

Streamlining all of these processes has saved two weeks of working time per month that would otherwise be spent ‌performing repetitive, manual work.

Thorne Widgery’s partnership with Acterys has delivered transformative results. By embracing automation and leveraging Acterys’ capabilities, the firm has achieved real-time insights, eliminated manual spreadsheet work and significantly enhanced reporting and analytics. This digital transformation has not only saved valuable time but also empowered the finance team to make data-driven decisions, ultimately enhancing client service delivery.

Thorne Widgery’s commitment to innovation and efficiency continues to drive its success in the ever-evolving field of accounting and business advisory.