Virtual Finance Team & Grant Admin: Our Journey With the Smart Finance Team

"We have been working with The Smart Finance Team for 6 months now."

I initially started to talk to Tracy at The Smart Finance Team, because I needed to free up my time.

We had been successful in winning several grant claims, and the administrative burden was becoming more and more difficult to manage on top of my other responsibilities as Operations Director.

I already had someone helping me with the bookkeeping, but I was spending more and more time reviewing their work and correcting errors, so it was becoming clear that they didn’t understand our business.

I was worried about investing in The Smart Finance Team because as a start-up, we need to be careful about how we spent our money. Getting value for money was and is very important to us. There are many people out there saying they can help, and we had already been stung by some who said they could help us but had turned out to be a disappointment.

I am a naturally sceptical person, and I wanted to be confident that I could trust them to take things off my hands.

Tracy offered a break in our contract after the first phase, the Initial Business Health Check, where they recommended improvements to our finance processes and laid out what that would mean for us.

This gave me the opportunity to put them to the test, understand what it would be like to work with them and how they could make my life easier. I could make sure they understood our issues and it became clear that their experience meant they knew better ways to do things.”

“Setting up the financial control processes took a few months, but I guess it is important to do this properly and it is now foundational to how we do things here.

We encouraged adherence to the new processes by making sure that everyone was fully trained before we went live. There are a few cases where we need to remind people but that is to be expected when you change how things are done, and the exceptions are always for small amounts and approved verbally anyway.

It’s great to have Janet, Sarah and Caroline dedicated to the finance and grant admin work, bringing their experience, improving efficiencies, and completing the work as the main purpose of their role. It would have been impossible for me to manage everything without them, given the increase in the volume of transactions as our R&D has accelerated.

It took a few months to get everything bedded in with the new financial control processes, and I’m now keen to leverage Janet’s experience as a Finance Director further. She is very proactive in offering ways to help us, and I really like the way the team are so responsive and eager to solve issues for us.

If you are a start up company needing to add financial expertise and grant admin to your team, I would have no hesitation in recommending them. Its clear that they have the relevant experience and can stand back and see if the figures “look right”. What they offer is more than a bookkeeper just turning the handle.

For the next steps, I want to leverage their experience further. We have our year end which we want to complete quickly so we can claim our R&D tax credits, and I’m looking forward to getting their help with forecasting and cashflows for the next 12 months.”

Dr Holt Wong – COO Qdot