Blu Sky is an award-winning North East firm serving over 340 thriving tech and digital clients. They provide essential services like year-end accounts, tax returns, and VAT, alongside additional services to enhance clients' financial well-being. In 2023 alone, Blu Sky welcomed 64 new clients and won 3 awards!
In an interview with Paula Henderson, Financial Controller at Blu Sky, Telleroo explored their migration to Xero as their portfolio expanded. This strategic move aimed to streamline operations, eliminate time-consuming manual processes and mitigate the risk of human error.
Now a Xero Platinum Partner, it all started with migrating clients to the accounting software:
“This cloud software was easier for us to use and to sell to clients. About nine years ago, we did a massive push to all our clients and helped them migrate over to Xero.”
In initial client meetings, Blu Sky discussed their preference for Xero software with prospective clients. These conversations brought a shift in the firm’s niche:
“Over the years, we moved focus away from traditional businesses to technology SMEs and investment start-ups. Blu Sky transitioned to cloud-based software so that we can help clients from anywhere, and we found it is a lot easier to work with those who are already tech-minded.”
The Blu Sky team tests all new software internally before introducing it to clients, a process that highlighted just how much time they’d save with Telleroo. “We used Blu Sky as a guinea pig before rolling out to clients, first for payroll and then our supplier payments. Just on Blu Sky alone, we saved about 3 hours per week, just by clicking a couple of buttons in the morning.”
Before finding Telleroo, Blu Sky’s co-founder Jon used to pay Blu Sky staff manually via bank transfer.
Paula explains “It would take 2 people a whole week of focus time to process internal payroll. I would send the payroll file to Jon, and he would manually upload it into the bank account. Understandably, Jon used to sit and panic about making sure everything was correct. That and time saving were the two reasons we were looking for a solution, and Telleroo ticked both those boxes.”
Seeing the impact Telleroo had on their payroll helped the team to identify the opportunity to add value to clients. The Blu Sky team processes payroll for 220 clients each month, some with up to 100 employees. Paula says that when it comes to the time savings vs cost of Telleroo it’s a no-brainer, as the value is in the ability to make their clients’ lives easier and provide real value around their payroll process.
With Telleroo’s flexible approvals feature, Paula can now implement workflows that fit the needs of each individual client, while ensuring all pay runs go through an internal review stage. This means that for some clients, the Blu Sky team creates and approves pay runs, and for others, Blu Sky suggests pay runs which are then sent to the client for approval.
Like many accounting firms, Blu Sky has had to shift its focus away from compliance and onto value-add services to stay competitive and adapt to changing client needs. Paula and the team found success using payroll as a route into upselling additional services, thanks to Telleroo.
“Compliance is now a given and does not demonstrate real value to clients. We’ve found that it’s easy to show the value to clients of using Telleroo for payroll payments because everyone has their panic around paying employees correctly and on time. Once onboarded with payroll we then introduce supplier payments through Telleroo. From there it’s easy to bring on additional value-added packages such as expenses and credit control.”
“When payroll becomes easy, and they just have to press ‘Approve' in Telleroo, they then ask what else we can do for them.”
Thanks to the partnership with Telleroo, Blu Sky has been able to help take the stress out of payments for 30% of their client base.
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