34 minutes
«…with Penneo the fastest report we have received back is 34 minutes.»
Sven Cornelis, Owner & Partner at Acco Accountants
About Acco Accountants
Acco Accountants is a Belgian company that started its activity in 1985 and has evolved to become a reference in its sector. They assist and advise clients with their accounting, tax management, or legal procedures.
The company has around 30 employees, and its two offices are located in Antwerp and Mechelen.
Challenge
Acco Accountants has always had the drive to remain a modern company, and since 2016 the company has decided to accelerate the digitalization of its business and the automation of its processes to offer a higher quality service to its clients.
The two main challenges were:
- Reducing manual work and saving time
- Using an API to connect to an existing and dynamic infrastructure
«Before that, the typical process in an accountancy firm when it comes to getting annual reports signed was quite a paper-like workflow. You started by printing everything out, sending it in, then asking the client to sign it, and sometimes the document would get signed in the wrong places… It has always been a bit of a challenge to let that process run smoothly.» – Sven Cornelis, Owner & Partner at Acco Accountants
The company is constantly looking for new ideas and methods to improve its business, and this is what will allow them today to position itself as «one of the accounting industry’s forerunners in automation and digitalization.»
Solution
Acco Accountants decided to implement Penneo Sign to save time and focus on the essentials – their clients.
«Everything that you automate, that you digitalise, you have to take a step back and ask yourself: ‘How are we doing today? How would we like to do it tomorrow and how can we best embed this in a tool like Penneo?» – Sven Cornelis, Owner & Partner at Acco Accountants
The Acco and Penneo teams worked together to develop a solution that fits Acco Accountants’ technical requirements (via API) and meets their daily challenges.
«We have now an integration that communicates between Silverfin, Penneo, and with the clients to get documents, annual reports that need to be signed in time. Everything runs now automatically!” – Sven Cornelis, Owner & Partner at Acco Accountants
Collecting signatures from different stakeholders in a specific order and keeping a complete overview of the entire process was a key feature for Acco Accountants.
«The signing flows of Penneo… it is a different way of working.
Actually, beforehand you have to think about how you are going to set up the signing flow, so it forces you 1. to question your own process, 2. possibly to adapt it, and to work with new insights, but once that is set up, it is like a piece of cake, I would almost dare to say.» – Sven Cornelis, Owner & Partner at Acco Accountants
With Penneo, Acco Accountants can now provide its clients and partners with a secure and fast way to sign documents such as digital annual reports and compliance-related materials and make sure that all deadlines are met.
Results
The integration of Penneo has been beneficial to Acco Accountants as it has helped them and their clients to save time. They can now exchange and sign documents in minutes.
«…with Penneo the fastest report we have received back is 34 minutes.» – Sven Cornelis, Owner & Partner at Acco Accountants
The collaboration with Penneo and itsme® in Belgium was a strong advantage for their clients too. They can safely and quickly confirm their identity and sign digitally using itsme®, across devices.
Acco Accountants mentioned that communicating with their clients has been simplified as they can set reminders in a few clicks when for example, a document has not been signed on time.
«It saved us a lot of time and it was also more interesting for the customers because there are fewer paper flows. We saved a lot of time to focus on our customers. It’s also much easier to follow up, to know what is completely finalized, and to whom we need to send reminders.» – Sven Cornelis, Owner & Partner at Acco Accountants
