SANDTON ACCOUNTANT

Financial management post-graduate Hanno Coetzee completed his tertiary studies at the University of Pretoria in 2011, before joining Logista in 2012 where he finished his accounting articles. In 2015, as a qualified professional accountant, Hanno took on the role of financial controller at Publicis Africa Group and was responsible for digital advertising agencies in sub-Saharan Africa.

During 2016 he joined Swanepoel and Partners as a senior accounting manager, and later started his own venture Digital CFO in 2017 offering chief financial officer services on a digital platform to small-medium enterprises.

Our DigitalCFO™ outsourced financial department, empowers you to effectively manage your business so you can save time and money. #futureofaccounting

Digital CFO is a holistic approach to managing your finances. Every business, from start-up to well-established, needs to take care of financial administration, but very few entrepreneurs have the time or expertise to do so. Digital CFO can offer you the full services of a Chief Financial Officer, tailored to your business needs.

Our business model is based on scalable and customised packages where we take into account what you need to optimise your business operations. We analyse your business and set up a plan to suit your budget and needs. This is all paid on a monthly retainer basis, so you know exactly what your monthly running costs will be.

When starting a new business, we tend to do everything ourselves and place too much emphasis on our bottom line. In the starting phases of your business, it is less important to worry too much about your bottom line and more so, to focus on building a solid roadmap and foundation for your new venture. You have that great idea, you’ve done the research and you know that it’s working because the clients are rolling in.

Now, you should focus more on growing your sales, and keeping your expenses at bay. This strategy will ensure stable growth over the long run. But as business owners we try to do everything ourselves at this stage, and unfortunately there are only so many hours in a day to be productive. You need to sleep. You need to exercise. You need to keep your life balanced. But you are not making the time.

We have seen that at this stage value can be added to your business when you outsource some tasks to professionals. Spending that late night hours to figure out how to implement a new system or how to allocate your transactions or even how to set up a website, is time spent not generating an income. Focus on the tasks that make you money. You should do the math on how much money you could have made if you spent your time differently.

We advise our clients to rather pass these challenges on to the experts, instead of wasting time figuring it out themselves, and then sometimes having to pay a web designer or accountant to redo it anyway. If you follow this advice, you will end up freeing time in your schedule to focus on the aspects in your business that matter more. 

I’ll give you an example, when we started with our first client, they had 12 employees and they were growing fast. The business owner did not have the knowledge on accounting or tax and decided to make us a part of their business. Over the past couple of years, we have helped them hire key experts to grow and scale their businesses in a sustainable manner. Now employing over 90 people their business is booming, and they keep growing every month. But they feel they have the foundation and support of professionals in the right areas. Their model is scalable and they can run operations in the UK and Australia from their digital home base right here in South Africa.

You should also remember that hiring an expert can sometimes also be tricky. You need to find the right fit to suit your company not only in a professional but in a personal capacity as well. We would suggest that you start by listing out all the shortfalls in your business, this can be due to lack of knowledge or time. Start here, take that list and start building up your dream resume. It would be ideal to find one candidate to outsource these tasks to, but sometimes more people are required to manage the load. They should also fit into the culture of your business and believe in your product or service.

We have seen weekly Zoom or Google Hangout sessions, a central working drive like Google Drive or OneDrive. A Google calendar, project management tool like Trello and communication channels like Slack or even WhatsApp can take your operations to the next level when outsourcing some aspects of your business. Using integrated digital tools like these will still enable you to be in control of your operations, no matter where your outsourced service providers are.

We specialise in migrating business accounting processes to the cloud. We guide you and custom build processes that help you streamline and digitise your whole financial department. We utilise software like Xero and SageOne that can give you an overview of what is going on in your business finance, in real time. We teach you how to understand your balance sheet, income and expenses. How to plan for that provisional tax payment or VAT that was due, but not in your budget.

We are more than an accounting firm, we can be your outsourced Digital CFO. Expert knowledge and advice at the click of a button, but a fraction of the cost of hiring an in house accountant or Chief Financial Officer.