Insightful Accountant Publisher Gary DeHart caught up with Syft Analytics' Vangelis Kyriazis at its booth at the recent Xerocon 2022 event in New Orleans. (The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.)
Gary DeHart: I am Gary DeHart with Insightful Accountant and I am here at the Syft Analytics booth at Xerocon 2022 with Vangelis Kyriazis. I wanted to see if you could tell us a little about Syft and what you do.
Vangelis Kyriazis: Sounds good. We are in the reporting space for accountants in practice. Essentially, we take accounting data and turn it into business intelligence. That is insights across customer products and account-level insights. We want to make accounting come to life, so there is lots of visualization, lots of training and seasonality.
Gary DeHart: Is the product primarily used by public accounting professionals or end users?
Vangelis Kyriazis: Typically a public accounting professional. At the end of the day, they will be solving many problems. Let's say you have one hundred clients you want to report to ensure your compliance work is done. You want to deliver a report evidencing that. Perhaps there's some ad hoc forecasting requirements or you just want to get some oversights into the dates that are quality in those underlying clients.
Is the data correct or are there any anomalies? What can we tidy up from a bookkeeping review perspective, and then go on to the reporting? For accountants and bookkeepers, we help them solve that end of the accounting value chain. We've done all the work, all the bookkeeping, and then delivered a report to show them what has been done.
Gary DeHart: So it's very visual?
Vangelis Kyriazis: Very visual. You can look at a P&L and a balance sheet, but a graph tells a different story. You can see the trends and the seasonality in a graphical representation.
Gary DeHart: How did you end up starting this?
Vangelis Kyriazis: I had my own practice in South Africa. We had something called Chartered Accountants, which is similar to a CPA. We were taking information and putting it into Excel, building graphs and doing all these analytics. It was quite time consuming. It would take an hour to two hours per client, per month. And if something changes, you have to start that whole process again.
So we figured, why not go straight from that raw accounting data straight to the end product to produce a report that can be updated very quickly?
Gary DeHart: Even though you are from South Africa, you have US customers, too, right?
Vangelis Kyriazis: 100%.
Gary DeHart: Share with our audience how this all works. How do people reach you?
Vangelis Kyriazis: Even though we are in South Africa, we are super committed to our US customer base. We're trying to localize the product for them as well. We have a dedicated US team that gives sales and supports up to 05 p.m. (EST). You will have real time support—a sub two-minute response time up to about 5 p.m. Our team is always available for demos, onboarding, etc. We are a very high-touch business and we work with lots of accountants every day.
Our team is highly skilled in all of the accounting nuances that go into reporting. On the other side of it, we're rolling out something called the Syft Campus, which is all about education. This will help with training staff, onboarding new staff and ensuring they know how to use our tools.
Gary DeHart: Since you are here at Xero, you work with them, too, right?
Vangelis Kyriazis: 100%.
Gary DeHart: Who else do you work with?
Vangelis Kyriazis: We work with Sage products, but that's mainly the UK and South African versions You can import data from Excel in sort of a trial balance, but typically, QuickBooks Online and Xero.
Right now, we're considering FreshBooks, and then a little bit more of the mid-market role in the coming months. We've dabbled a little bit with QuickBooks Desktop, for not still like a trial balance in report there. Not a direct field.
Gary DeHart: Do you have an advisor program or anything similar to that?
Vangelis Kyriazis: Typically, we target our primary customers. We work a lot with Xero advisors, QuickBooks ProAdvisors, but nothing specifically like a program. As I said earlier, we are a high-touch business, so you're getting lots of training and onboarding.
You can check us out at syftanalytics.com.
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