Bruce Morgan
GreatSoft CRM has stepped into the FNB Business Innovation Awards 2015 spotlight with its innovative development of cloud-based solutions for high-performance firms across the globe. The business has been around for a number of years, but foresight and a keen understanding of market trends have resulted in the business reinventing itself and reimagining its deliverables. GreatSoft CRM specialised in profit improvement systems that were desktop and server-based, but the shift into the cloud has taken them from excellent to stratospheric.
“We have been in business for around 28 years supplying profit improvement systems to accountants and auditors. The thing that changed for us is that we took our desktop implementation with everything installed on a server and rebuilt all our products to deploy in the cloud,” says Bruce Morgan, chief executive of GreatSoft CRM. “Now we can open up our products to anyone anywhere in the world. It is so much easier to deploy through a cloud-based infrastructure and that has made a big difference.”
The business originally provided its solutions to around 15 countries prior to the change from desktop to cloud; today their markets have increased significantly, with expansion taking place on a regular basis. The solution can now be deployed across any region as long as there is connectivity and a compatible device.
“Today we have expanded into many new and different markets, including countries such as Yemen and Oman. Currently we are on our way to Singapore and Kuwait,” says Morgan. “We also have trials running in two other new markets — Cyprus and Perth. We would not have been able to do this before with our old desktop product.”
GreatSoft CRM is a specialist provider within its market that employs 32 trained consultants across the three main offices in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban. The decision to transform their product offering into one that is cloud-based has brought about growth both locally and internationally.
“It has made such a difference from the past where we had to implement software onto servers and have a number of people on site to ensure everything was up and running. This is only one aspect of the redesign; we have also added in another rich feature in terms of privacy within the cloud. Many of our client sites such as KPMG Nigeria or Deloitte in Ghana don’t want to use a public cloud solution and so the other unique factor we built into our product is that these clients can implement our solution on a private cloud. We deliver a public cloud to the clients that require it and a private one to those that need it.”
The product catalogue currently on offer from GreatSoft CRM includes Practice Management for the large multi-office and small accounting firm to provide control over their profitability, tax administration and tax return software with calculators for individuals companies and trusts, all directly linked to SARS efiling. These products all provide core time-saving components to save hours and improve profits. The GreatAccounts module is flexible and easy to use, and delivers powerful IFRS-compliant and management reports in any format required by the firm.
In addition to these, GreatSoft helps reduce risk and ensure compliance with the POPI act by providing firms with a secure document exchange product, NIMBUS. This product provides document management, digital signatures and powerful marketing communication tools to the firm. GreatSoft’s Secretarial system e-SEC manages the corporate affairs across three jurisdictions in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana.
Currently GreatSoft CRM is focusing on growth and expansion while maintaining its commitment to improving on its product portfolio.
“We are currently sitting at around 40 000 timesheet users and we plan for that to grow to 100 000 timesheet users over the next three years. We are in discussions with a potential distributor in Australia and we are working with another distributor in the United Kingdom. We are also working closely with our existing suppliers so that we can leverage major growth going forward,” says Morgan.
Another notch in the growth column for the company is that a number of renowned firms in South Africa have chosen to standardise their product offering across the business. This means that every subsidiary and branch of brands such as Grant Thornton and GGI in Africa will install the solution, an impressive win for the organisation.
“This forms part of our long-term plans to leverage our existing client base and we are also appointing distributors in each region that we have identified as a growth opportunity for us,” says Morgan. “We have appointed a managing director, someone who has been with us for 16 years, and each of our roles is now targeted so we can focus exclusively on growing the business and ensuring its sustainability.”
The software provided by GreatSoft is capable of handling an array of functionalities, from the customer relationship management end right through to invoice capture and data management. This portfolio has been expanded recently to include new products that have been tailored to meet the changing needs of the markets. These products include secure document exchange, and the tax return module.
“We are currently looking at investing in two new products, payroll and human resources,” says Morgan. ”Our clients needs these products to manage their core asset: their staff.”
Certainly Morgan’s projections for growth are optimistic and dynamic. It is a business model that’s built on reputation and capability and designed to scale sustainably into the future, and it also captures the organisation’s spirit of innovation.
“Our definition of innovation is to identify areas that we can vastly improve on within our market,” says Morgan. “A great example is the tax return process — your tax return needs to be filled out and you do this on the SARS efiling site one page at a time. This is very time-consuming, especially if you have more than one client. With our software you can do this in bulk, which saves masses of time. Innovation is all about improving processes and reducing the time taken to do mandatory tasks.”
The GreatSoft CRM product stable is designed to reduce time wastage on administrative issues, add value to the client’s core business and improve billing. The powerful tools are easy to use, which reduces the barrier to entry when organisations first install the system, and they are constantly upgraded to ensure they remain relevant and capable.
“Everything we do is developed to provide innovative tools that reduce the time taken to manage the processes in a practice management environment for accountants and auditors,” says Morgan. “We continue to invest more than 20% of our revenue into research and development to ensure that the products we create are the ones that businesses are asking for.”
However, there remains the question as to what changed for the business? What made an already successful organisation shift from their traditional desktop-based bevvy of solutions to the cloud? The answer is simple — growth.
“We decided to make this shift about four years ago because we realised that this was an excellent opportunity for us to really grow the company and take it to the next level. What inspired us was the ability to deploy our products globally. We had always had this negative view where growth needed substantially more people, because we had to implement everything on site. However, the ability to deploy this through the cloud doesn’t need a lot of people on the ground, which makes a huge difference.”
The result is a business that has grown significantly. This year has seen it release GreatSoft CRM 2015, a complete product package that includes an array of solutions in one.
“This new package has been so successful that we are unable to deploy any more solutions until the end of June,” concludes Morgan. “It has been a massive success for us and we are very excited about what the future holds for us and our business.”