Top 15 UK accounting firm Saffery Champness moves to 3E

As a key pillar to support its efforts to leverage technology and foster innovation, leading UK accounting firm Saffery Champness LLP is adopting 3E, the first cloud-native financial and practice management solution from Elite.

Founded in 1855, UK-headquartered Saffery Champness is an adviser to private clients, creative enterprises, and innovative businesses, providing market-leading accounting, tax, audit, business advisory, and fiduciary services. It is currently the 15th largest accountancy firm in the UK by fee income, with a team of 85 partners and more than 1,100 staff across 10 offices in the UK and Ireland. The firm is also a member of Nexia International, one of the world’s leading networks of independent accounting and consulting firms.

A move to the cloud was a top priority for the firm as it looked toward the future. Consolidating a disparate legacy data infrastructure and automating several manual internal processes to drive greater efficiency was of utmost importance. In addition, Saffery Champness needed to ensure that its practice management solution offered true scalability as it continued a trajectory of rapid growth.

By choosing 3E, the firm will now benefit from Always-on Time recording, allowing passive time capture to improve its billable time and ensure compliance with client billing arrangements and guidelines. Along with a streamlined billing process driven by new, user-friendly proforma templates, the open API architecture will allow 3E to easily connect to and integrate with the firm’s other key technologies in areas such as document management. In addition, 3E Data Insights tools will provide more powerful performance analytics than ever before.

More widely, Elite will support Saffery Champness with a fully managed service powered by the Microsoft Azure platform that offers cloud confidence with nearly unlimited scale, 24/7 monitoring, and advanced security that is unmatched in the industry.

“I have worked with 3E before and know well the breadth of its capabilities, which are even more impactful in the context of its evolution into a true cloud solution,” said David Fazakerley, IT director at Saffery Champness. “The architecture of 3E is vastly superior to alternatives in the market and will provide a powerful platform to drive significant efficiencies within the firm, as well as support our future growth and innovation.”