APH Accountants has been serving clients for over 15 years, growing to a team of 11 and supporting more than 650 clients. APH has been praised for clear, transparent pricing and awarded multiple times for customer satisfaction. Their success lies in their straightforward, supportive approach. From compliance to handling payroll and supplier payments, Director Paul White and his team focus on simplicity and clarity, avoiding jargon and buzzwords.
When APH Accountants began handling client payments, they relied on Barclay’s group payment facility. However, managing large volumes of payments through clients’ online banking soon proved challenging:
"We were limited on how many payees we could include in the group, and they needed to be in the same order as your payroll, so that you could run them consecutively. We ended up faffing about, jumping between different groups, editing and saving them, and facing even more issues when we had new starters and leavers."
Direct access to client bank accounts also brought significant risks, compounded by the heavy reliance on manual data entry and processes prone to human error. This prompted Paul to seek a more efficient and reliable payment solution.
"Our number one priority was reducing all human error. You only have to type an extra zero on a payment for us to be liable for mistakes. Our second priority was having the ability to approve supplier pay runs properly."
Paul found Telleroo, a bulk payments platform that connects with Xero for quick and easy supplier pay runs and accepts file imports from BrightPay, APH’s payroll software. Telleroo offers multiple layers of approval that can be customised to suit clients' specific needs.
"It's so much easier downloading the bank file from BrightPay and uploading it straight into Telleroo. It really reduces the risk of error by taking the data straight from another system. And Telleroo has a nice approval process, it works really well when we need the client to sign off on pay runs first."
Accounting firms and their clients are often targeted by scams. As these become more advanced, spotting them is getting harder, and mistakes are usually noticed too late. This is one area where human error is still likely to happen:
"I received an email from my employee asking to update their bank details. We get requests like that all the time, so I changed the details and filed the email. Later, this employee messaged saying she had not been paid, and when I asked, said she never requested the update."
"The email was incredible. I looked back at it and realised there was just one small letter change in the email address. Otherwise, it looked completely legit. I still can't believe it, things like this don't normally get past us."
This payment was included in a pay run created in Telleroo. Telleroo has built-in safety checks, including flags on new and updated payees and verifying that the payee name matches the name on the recipient’s bank account. Behind the scenes, the Telleroo compliance team monitors all transactions to spot any suspicious payments or activity. The team suspected fraud while reviewing this payment, so they put it on hold and emailed Paul.
"Telleroo emailed literally as I was looking into the payment. It was a great catch by the team. They detected that it was fraudulent, and they flagged it to me, and they stopped the payment from being sent. A bank has never even come back to me saying you've made a payment to a dodgy bank account, Telleroo gives us that extra layer of security that you don’t get with a bank.”
Telleroo customers almost always say they appreciate how it speeds up their payment process. From saving 10 hours a week to running payroll for teams of 100+ with just a few clicks, it’s a clear favourite. But Paul thinks security is a big benefit that’s often missed.
"I love how Telleroo saves time, but the security features are just as important to me. And it's only because of the experience I had when they stopped a fraudulent payment. You can be using Telleroo for years without really appreciating the security, or knowing you need it. Until something happens, and that's when you think, thank God they checked that."
“I can't think of anything where I'd feel worried about paying it through Telleroo. I think it's very secure and robust. It’s a fabulous system that I always recommend to clients."
🚀 De-risk client payments with Telleroo, sign up as a partner today 🚀
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