‘One of my best decisions in 33 years’: Why Insight Associates partnered with iplicit

Insight Associates had one big challenge when providing outsourced FD and bookkeeping services to ambitious businesses. There was no ideal software for the job. 

It was using Exchequer, an on-premises system which had become “a pain in the neck”, according to Insight Associates founder Garry Mumford. 

“Apart from the entry-level systems like Xero and QuickBooks, there was nothing that would improve things,” he says. “Everything else in the market had the same issues as Exchequer.” 

iplicit entered the picture at the right time – and now Insight Associates uses it for all its clients.  

“One of the best decisions I’ve made in 33 years was moving from Exchequer to iplicit,” says Garry. 

“That remains true today. My whole team are raving fans of it and the clients that we introduce to iplicit all see the benefits.” 

About Insight Associates  

Garry Mumford founded Insight Associates in 1992 after years in industry. 

“In my last two or three senior financial roles in smaller businesses, I’d identified that those businesses were growing without access to good financial skills,” he says. 

Insight Associates aims to provide the expertise that a client would get from having its own FD and finance team. Garry soon discovered that many businesses’ accounting was a “complete mess”, so Insight Associates also does the bookkeeping work that provides a solid foundation for those big decisions. 

The typical Insight Associates client will be an entrepreneurial, owner-managed business with a turnover between £1m and £10m. 

“We’re looking for ‘adolescent’ businesses – the ones that have been around a little while, whose leaders see that their business model has potential but who recognise that they don’t have a handle on everything they need to, especially when it comes to finance,” he says. 

‘The challenge is to look out the window’ 

The biggest challenge facing many clients is that of staying alert to new threats and opportunities, Garry says. 

“After the financial crash of 2008-09, we lived through a very artificial environment – a period of 10 years or so with very low interest rates, moderate growth and everything being OK.  

“Then we were hit by the pandemic and we’ve come out of that with very high inflation, growth issues across the world, political unrest and a lack of good leadership in many countries,” he adds. 

“Business people are good at just getting on with their day job and running their businesses. But they need to be more aware now of what’s going on around them, what’s happening to their supply chain, their customers, the environment in which they’re operating – much more so than they might have been in the past.  

“You might not be able to change some of those things but you need to make sure your business is agile enough to deal with it.” 

‘You’re digging a hole with a kitchen knife’  

Garry could see a big gap in the software market when it came to serving those growing businesses. “A lot of investment has gone into the lower-end products, like Xero and QuickBooks and they’re superb – brilliant products designed for small businesses,” he says. 

“But when you come across a business with a £20m turnover that’s still using Sage 50 software, you think ‘My goodness, what’s going on? You’re digging a hole with a kitchen knife!’”  

He was “increasingly frustrated” with the Exchequer software his business had relied on. The software’s owner “clearly wasn’t investing in it” and he had no personal relationships with the company.  

So when he was approached by some of the team that had pioneered Exchequer in the 1990s and were now involved with iplicit, Garry was keen to hear more. 

“iplicit was brand new and written from the bottom up. It was a cloud product, it was good and it was obviously still developing rapidly,” he says. 

Insight Associates became the first iplicit partner in 2020. “We always migrate our new clients off whatever they're using onto iplicit. We're exclusively, right across the board, using iplicit,” says Garry.

iplicit ‘does a better job than anyone else’ 

Insight Associates’ clients tend to be “smaller than the typical iplicit customer”, Garry says. “For us, it’s about providing a platform which the business is going to grow into, rather than something they’ll grow out of,” he says. 

But he has seen a wide range of clients impressed by the software. 

“A while ago, we helped an interim FD who was working on a project to extract a £40m-£50m media business out of Sony Entertainment after it was bought back by its founders,” he says. 

“We won that work because of iplicit – and when we’d got everything running, a lot of people in his operational team were saying the system was better than the SAP enterprise-level system they’d been used to. 

“So while iplicit might sit in the middle market, it’s doing a better job than anybody else, not just the midmarket products. The Oracles and SAPs have become outrageously complacent because their market seems sewn up. After all, what can big multinationals use other than their products?” 

‘There’s a huge opportunity’ 

Garry’s experience with businesses and nonprofits alike suggests iplicit is the answer to many organisations’ needs. 

“I think there’s a huge opportunity there,” he says. 

“In our experience, there’s a massive number of organisations that are either using very old legacy systems or – perhaps more importantly – have outgrown what they’re using but haven’t taken the plunge to change. 

“We still come across businesses that are using products like Sage 50 and should have stopped using it 20 years ago. The problem is that they don’t know how to change, they don’t know what’s out there and they don’t know the benefits of change.” 

He is happy that he committed so completely to iplicit. “Because iplicit is such an integral part of everything we do, we need to feel we've got a partnership with our software vendor. And despite the monumental growth of iplicit, we still feel looked after,” he says. 

“We felt we were really part of the adventure when we joined forces with iplicit and we’ve never regretted it.” 

• Ready to learn more about how iplicit helps accountants to better serve their clients?  Read on to learn about iplicit’s accountancy partner channel.