Next Dimension Accounting offers AP as a service, without the risk

Prior to founding Next Dimension Accounting, Lucas was looking at managing outsourced accounting services for a client and faced the challenge of how to manage bills. “At that point, we thought ‘well, that’s all going to have to go through Xero – that’s fine’. But what if someone else is meant to approve these bills? That’s going to get messy,” says Lucas.

That’s when Lucas remembered seeing ApprovalMax at Xerocon and decided to test it out. “We threw in ApprovalMax and an OCR tool then thought, ‘You know what? We can actually be an accounts payable department! We can systemise this and make it an attractive offering for our existing tax clients.’"

From there, the opportunity blossomed. When Lucas launched Next Dimension Accounting, he started offering accounts payable as a service – and it took off. 

With ApprovalMax, the team can manage the accounts payable process for its clients. This way, they are freed of old-school processes, like manually signing or stamping a bill, or email approvals. Instead, Next Dimension handles the entire AP process, from automatically importing bills into the system via OCR, routing them for approval via ApprovalMax, then funneling approved documents into Xero before making payments.

Using ApprovalMax as part of this process puts the right controls in place and means every document has gone through the proper approval process, with an automated audit trail, before it enters Xero. “It helps me sleep better at night,” says Lucas. “Putting this in place reduces risk as the client is the approver, based on their rules. To me that is massive.”

Not only does this allow the team to offer AP as a service, it’s changed the overall structure of the practice and how it works with clients. “Being able to offer more value to one client effectively means I get to have less clients while maintaining the same revenue,” says Lucas. “That makes the business less complicated and simpler to manage than if I was running a more typical practice.”