Opening 400 letters from the ATO (the Australian tax department) every morning was pretty hectic, especially during the busy July, August, and September months. We’d have to read them, work out who the manager was and whether they needed to be assessed by that client’s accountant. For some documents like statements of accounts, we’d have to leave them on the accountant’s desk or scan them through if that person was based in a different office.  

It’s a stressful time as is but having documents physically sitting in front of you, it makes you feel like you’ve got more work than you actually do. It’d mess with people, so some accountants would try and deal with them on the spot by ringing clients to notify them of instalment notices. 

We’d also have to either scan documents or download them from the ATO depending on what it was and how we’d received it. Then we’d type up an email ourselves, find the client’s email address and send it off.  

It was difficult keeping track of everything. I know I was guilty of putting documents on my desk and not looking at them until weeks later when I realized they were overdue.  

ATOmate is an incredibly simple app, you don’t have to know your way around much. It’ll read the document and then format an email or letter which pulls information like the amount payable or refundable and the assigned due date. We can send through that email and clients get a summary as well as the actual document attached. It saves us having to work out how much is refundable, recording that in an email and risking data entry errors. All of those steps now happen with one click. It flows through so we’re saving a few minutes for every email that we send out, which is huge.  

All of our documents then end up in SuiteFiles organized under clients and groups including information about how and when we’ve sent them. If a client says, “we never got it”, we can say we emailed it on ‘x’ date so we’ve got that extra bit of security.   

The integration has made it much easier to keep track of things, and we lose fewer documents. Our admin team can see the status of each document and look at what’s outstanding so we can chase people up.  

Being less reliant on the ATO portal allows us to pick up on client issues faster. For instance, we had a client whose income had changed after we’d lodged their tax return which meant our version didn’t match the ATO’s version. Instead of having to spend time investigating, we already had a notification waiting to tell us what happened.  

With ATOmate and SuiteFiles we can be confident in our processes. We’ve got everything in one spot in the cloud instead of taking up space on our desks.