Azets
, the international accounting, tax, audit, advisory and business services group, has announced a strategic partnership with Dext, the leading provider of pre-accounting automation software. Both firms are backed by Hg and form part of its Tax and Accounting portfolio. The partnership makes sense, and both companies share a goal of digitising the accounting workflow to benefit customers.
The partnership will see Azets leverage the Dext solutions for its customers. Dext is one of several companies with accounting technology it uses to service clients. Azets also works with other technology vendors, such as Fluidly and Xero.
Dext has recently helped train the Azets team. Sending its technical staff to 60 training centres where Azets’ teams learnt how to use the Dext solutions for its customers. This is a significant investment for Azets. This shows that it is serious about deploying the Dext applications across its customer portfolio.
Russell Frayne, Head of UK Digital Accounting Solutions at Azets, added, “Embedding into the business trusted technologies wrapped around best practice and processes is key to driving our digital adoption. Having the Dext team onsite supporting and training our people alongside our Digital Delivery team has really made a difference in allowing us to get the most from the technology itself.”
Enhancing the Azets business accounting service
The assumption is that the Dext solutions will become part of the Azets offering.
Dext solutions now include:
- Dext Prepare: Collects and extracts accounting data from paperwork with 99% accuracy, then automatically processes it to your accountancy software
- Dext Commerce: Fetches itemised transactions from retailers, marketplaces, e-commerce platforms, point-of-sale systems, and payment providers and then exports to accounting solutions
- Dext Precision: Analyses data in your accounting solution and alerts the user about discrepancies, helping to improve data quality
However, it is unclear whether Azets will use the whole portfolio or not.
Fraser Campbell, UK Head of Accounts and Business Advisory at Azets commented, “Our partnership with Dext deepens the already successful collaborative relationship between Azets and Dext. Our intention is to fully leverage and embed the benefits key technologies like Dext bring to us and more importantly our clients in our role as the advisor of choice for UK SMEs.”
Adding the Dext portfolio will allow Azets to offer additional and valuable services to clients with a simpler onboarding process than if they were not outsourcing their business services.
Sabby Gill, CEO of Dext, commented, “As two companies joined by an ethos of helping SMEs with their accounting processes and showcasing the benefits of software, Dext and Azets’ strategic partnership is the perfect fit. By establishing a unified way of working across the company and marketing collaboratively, this partnership can help strengthen Azets’ place at the forefront of the accounting and business advisory sector.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
For Azets, this will allow it to improve its clients’ services. With trained staff, it should be relatively easy to prove the value of the new services it can offer. For Dext, this is a significant boost, assuming that the Azets customers take up the new services.
The big question is whether it will pass on the charges to customers for the additional services or will look to take the cost savings itself. For Dext Prepare and Dext Commerce, it may charge something extra. However, for Dext Precision, there is an argument that improving the data accuracy of client data may make the outsourcing job easier. It will be interesting to see how these new services are charged.
