Iridium supports the growth of South African SMEs with cloud-based accounting

Home Customer stories Iridium supports the growth of South African SMEs with cloud-based accounting

Case study

Learn how South African accounting business Iridium solves problems for its clients with automated approvals via ApprovalMax.

Iridium is an accounting, advisory and automation firm that is passionate about making a difference. They’re a team of financial professionals who love partnering with their clients to support their business growth.

Iridium believes in integrating technology with accounting best practices to achieve the highest level of efficiency. They’re experts in cloud solutions and simply love using Xero and its app ecosystem. The Iridium team is always pursuing the latest technologies to help entrepreneurs and accountants to achieve their business goals. For more information, visit https://iridium.co.za/

60+

Employees

Xero

Accounting Platform

Accounting

Industry

South Africa

Location

ApprovalMax allows us to provide a quick win for a lot of clients without over-complicating the structure because it's so simple to set up and manage. It solves a big problem, saves them time and streamlines things, but it's not hard to implement – it just starts working seamlessly.

Peter Sean Magner

Sales & Marketing Director at Iridium

Iridium first came to life sitting around a dining table in 2013 with the idea of supporting small and medium sized businesses in South Africa with their accounting. Since then, the business has only grown, expanding to a team of 60, working in multiple offices across the country to support more than 200 clients.

Iridium’s values are central to this growth. It’s an accounting business that cares for its clients and is invested in partnering with them to support their businesses as best they can. These values underpin what Iridium calls its ‘BHAG’: big hairy audacious goal. By 2030, the team aims to have a team of 150, serving 1,000 clients who in turn employ 10,000 people.

“While it’s a numerical goal, it's actually all about people. For us, it's the people and how we're supporting the growth of SMEs in South Africa that we really love and get excited about,” says Peter Sean Magner, Sales & Marketing Director at Iridium.

Building the right tech stack

Technology plays a critical role in this. Iridium primarily works with growing businesses looking to put in the right systems and processes – it supports their accounting needs and helps them scale over the coming years. The business now has an official automation department, alongside its accounting one, to help clients with complex technology implementations like inventory management systems.

“Even among our accounting team we have an innate love and passion for building a solid tech stack for our clients. As a business, what makes us unique is always asking ‘how can we use tech to make our clients’ lives more efficient?’” says Magner. “Over time we’ve built up this tech stack by finding the best software solutions for various business needs that plug into the Xero ecosystem.”

One of these tools is ApprovalMax. The team first used the tool in 2016 when looking for a solution for its client Yoco, a fintech startup, which was previously using Jira tickets to manage approvals and needed a better way to automate and integrate approvals to its accounting system. “Off the back of implementing ApprovalMax to replace Jira, we thought ‘hey, this thing works quite nicely.’ When another similar business came along we knew we had a solution for them,” says Magner.

Making approvals a dream

Since then, Iridium has implemented ApprovalMax for more than 70 clients to automate approval processes across accounts payable and receivable. This has massively streamlined how these clients manage approvals. “Most of them were paper-based or email-based and this has just taken the paperwork away,” says Magner.

“There are still a lot of business owners who print out all their invoices and stack them on their desk, then store them all in a big filing cabinet,” says Magner. “When they hear they can digitise everything in the cloud and streamline their approvals, it’s like a dream. It was a dream 10 years ago and it’s still a dream now – it feels great.”

Along with automating approval processes for financial documents like purchase orders and bills, the Iridium team often sees ApprovalMax help its clients crystalise their financial controls. “When we ask clients ‘who approves what’ they suddenly realise their processes are flawed. It's a good wake-up call for a lot of clients to consider what structure they actually need,” says Magner.

Quick and easy set up

The Iridium team can get clients up and running with ApprovalMax in as little as a few days to see the benefits of automated approvals fast.

Integrates with the Xero ecosystem

ApprovalMax connects straight into Xero and other apps within the ecosystem, making it a very complementary tech stack to add on to Xero’s functionality.

Complex approvals for industry-specific needs

With ApprovalMax, the Iridium team can easily automate sophisticated approval workflows, no matter the industry a client is in.

Paperless workflows

Iridium uses ApprovalMax to move its clients entirely to the cloud, allowing them to manage their accounts payable and receivable function entirely online and say goodbye to piles of paper – forever.