Overview

pBrookson is a technology led financial services business, offering accountancy, legal, tax, payroll and back office services to a flexible workforce. Brookson has two main service lines: Brookson One offers a range of technology enabled accountancy, legal and payroll services to freelance workers and independent, professional contractors, and Plus-Us provides vendor management services to the UK National Health Service, facilitating locum doctor engagement. Brookson offers a unique, all-inclusive service to ensure all clients’ financial affairs are taken care of in one place giving clients enhanced control and oversight of their finances. /p

Supernova Award Category

AI and Augmented Humanity

The Problem

pAccountancy services require a lot of bookkeeping, but the market has lacked innovative automation techniques that don’t require tens of data analysts to set up and operate. Consequently, Brookson was operating using clunky spreadsheet-based processes that were labor intensive and required many employees to pull together data sets from multiple sources to manually shape, combine and analyze. This meant the company was forced to operate as a largely transactional business with accountants’ days consumed with tasks that diverted time away from customer advisory and creative problem solving./p

The Solution

pBrookson set out to find suitable data and analytics solutions and noncoding development platforms and discovered that the Alteryx analytic process automation (APA) Platform enabled them to unlock data and automate processes at an affordable cost./p pUsing Alteryx capabilities, Brookson implemented a range of complex algorithms to underpin their core services by providing a full health check and personal tax advice to customers. They now automate the financial and tax advice being provided by accountants, effectively providing real-time advice, a capability beyond the reach of traditional accountants. Brookson can now engage with more customers more frequently, with their accountants focused on advice delivery, not the underlying creation of advice. /p

The results

pUntil now, the accountancy market has been dominated by businesses that sell services on the basis of face-to-face meetings, but this does not include support and advice when it comes to a customer’s year-round financial position. Brookson has provided a disruptive service that delivers daily updated financial information and advice on demand. This way, customers have an improved experience because they are better informed, they’re kept safe from falling into financial difficulty, and the administrative burden of running a business is lessened./p pAt the same time, the Brookson employee journey has also changed for the better. By automating away arduous bookkeeping tasks and the creation of advisory information, Brookson accountants can spend more time engaging directly with customers. Automation has also allowed Brookson to scale efficiently, creating a flat, non-siloed organizational structure in which managers and employees across different functions work together to solve business problems. /p

Metrics

pBrookson has been able to automate hundreds of processes, in many cases taking tasks that previously consumed 30 minutes or more of an accountant’s time and reducing them to mere seconds. In all, Brookson has flipped its workers’ time allocation from 80% transactional and 20% advisory to 20% transactional and 80% advisory, which has materially increased customer satisfaction. The increased bandwidth allows Brookson One to serve 15,000 customers. They have become a market leading player in the premier technology offering sector and seen notable year-over-year growth in revenue./p pDigital transformation powered by the Alteryx Platform has also helped Brookson’s PlusUs grow from a startup to £6 million in revenue within just three years./p

The Technology

pBrookson had to seek out advanced technologies that could connect and adapt to the existing data ecosystems with the right licensing models as well as options for accessible adoption for workers without data backgrounds. Brookson now relies on the Alteryx APA Platform, specifically Alteryx Designer, Alteryx Server and Alteryx Connect, to consolidate and streamline its entire end-to-end data analytics process and to continue to leverage capabilities to create new business lines./p

Disruptive Factor

pBrookson shook the traditional financial services structure by connecting ecosystems and eliminating silos to provide personalized, real-time services to its customers. As Brookson continues to innovate and utilize more Alteryx features, they continue to push the traditional accountancy model to the next phase of its evolution./p pUltimately, Brookson believes "the future app is no app" and technology will allow the service to center on proactive calls to customers from accountants, with no need to check a portal for information or spend time inputting data that can be accessed by connecting to another ecosystem. With AI driven efficiency through an APA platform like Alteryx and the adoption of video conferencing technologies like Zoom, a more personal service than ever will be delivered remotely./p pWith Alteryx, Brookson is unlocking technology designed for larger businesses and demonstrating its huge potential for the far wider SMB market, effectively creating the blueprint for others to follow. The proof rests on the fact that Brookson adopted AI and driven digital transformation with existing legacy systems and existing talent that were not originally data experts. This opens the door to digital transformation for all./p

Shining Moment

pBrookson took an entrepreneurial gamble when incorporating Alteryx into their workstream. Scaling is critical to successful digital transformation and it is rare for midsize enterprises to risk revamping functional workstreams to innovate. In order to update and evolve traditional workstreams, Brookson created an environment that was open and trusting of learning, experimentation and potential failure, but the results exceeded the company’s expectations./p