Managing HR in an accountancy firm, with Evans & Partners

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Managing HR in an accountancy firm, with Evans & Partners

Olly Evans is the Managing Director of Evans & Partners, a chartered accountancy firm based in Bristol.

Olly joined as MD over 15 years ago, and during the last five years, Evans & Partners have been making some big changes to modernise the company and move away from more traditional ways of working, including paper-based HR.

He explained, “We were going through a big transformation as a business, modernising how we work and were early adapters of Xero. At the time we had very decentralised HR, it was very scattered, and it took me twice as long to do all the work.

“I knew citrus HR’s CEO personally, so knew about the HR system, which meant it was an obvious choice for me – I knew the software could do everything we would need it to. We were up and running straight away because it’s on the cloud, so we went from spreadsheets for holiday and sick pay to online really quickly. It was a simple ‘lift and shift’.”

Gaining momentum

Olly is very hands-on with running HR in the accountancy firm so having everything in one place really helps to keep organised. But he also talked about how the software is a big hit with his staff,

“The team are using the software all the time and I’ve never heard they are having any issues with it. It just works, it is gaining momentum as the team use it more and more and use more of the tools. It has been especially good for holiday tracking and requests.

“It’s great to have shared responsibility with different user controls too. It makes such a big difference as we can distribute the work. Things like alerts really help as you can set them to the appropriate employees.”

Easy communication

“I really like the way citrus communicates with us through monthly email updates. They have a truly human feel and aren’t corporate at all – they speak our language. It’s also great to get a roadmap of what has already changed in the software or what is coming up soon.

“Having these has really helped us improve our HR procedures and knowing what tools are available and how we can use them is very valuable. It has also helped us understand how we are looking after our staff. I would highly recommend citrus HR – in fact, I have and have even helped implement it in other companies.”

Find out more about Evans & Partners accountancy firm here.