After founding his own accounting practice in York in 2000, Peter Atkinson was an early convert to cloud accounting as the way to help clients develop their businesses and grow.

Atkinson, who runs Atkinsons Chartered Accountants with his son, Chris, and a team of seven, was one of the first firms in the north of England to embrace cloud technology through Xero accounting software.

“The writing was on the wall,” he said. “Effectively it changes the way that we do accounting and our relationship with clients.”

Atkinson decided early on that he wanted his firm to take more dynamic approach to dealing with clients, rather than following the more traditional route of bringing clients financial records up to date at the end of the year.

“With cloud accounting you are up-to-date all of the time,” he said. “You’re always up to date with knowing how the business is doing because of the way the accounting system works and we’ve got the same access as the clients to those records and results,” Atkinson added.

“You can say to the clients we know how you are doing but let’s see if we can improve it… it’s much more dynamic and you’re very much working as part of their team, in partnership with them to drive it forward.”

Having access to the same data and accounting systems as their clients meant that “we can help make their businesses grow and it leaves the entrepreneur free to do what they are good at which is the front-facing stuff,” he argued.

“We can help them to spot opportunities and capitalise on the good things.”

Since launching his own practice, Atkinson has always been concerned that traditional methods of historical accounting reports are as useful to clients as “an ashtray on a motorbike.”

“The day to day stuff is what is really important,” he said. “We wanted to help [clients] run the business rather than just produce this historical piece of information which was not much good to anyone,” he said.

“Cloud accounting is about management information, it’s about producing real important key performance indicators for the business and bringing to the fore the sort [of] things that businesses need to improve things.”

The real-time accounting system helps Atkinson offer strategic business advice. “You’re almost like a finance director for them. It leads into the provision of value added services.”

One client who benefitted from Atkinson’s more hands-on approach is Rana Harvey, the founder of the Monster Group, an online retail business near York that supplies customers worldwide with products including catering equipment, weighing scales and retail display equipment.

Harvey’s experience with Atkinsons features in Inspirational Accountants, a book by Steve Pipe.

As a promising local businesswoman, Harvey took part in the Goldman Sachs 10, 000 Small Businesses Programme where she realised that a good accountant was essential to business growth, prompting her to hire Atkinson’s services.

Atkinson first sat down with her to identify her business needs. He discovered that she had opted for the more traditional route of running the business and catching up on financial information afterwards.

“[Rana] had a really good handle on a lot of the metrics of the business and key things that drive it, but not a full picture. By moving into the cloud we were able to give her a better picture of how the business was performing… which really helped her to drive the business forward,” he said.

“We looked at where she was first of all and then we formulated a plan to say ‘we can move you to where you want to be on the cloud’. We pointed out the benefits about more up to date, better and dynamic information in terms of how the business was performing,” he said.

“And she grasped that straight away because it was something that she recognised the need for…  She’s a very dynamic person who wants to grow the business quickly and this helped her to do it.”

The positive results of switching to cloud accounting were quickly apparent for Harvey’s business, allowing her to give high quality information to her financial supporters, boosting their confidence.

“She got better information so she could highlight products and processes that she was making real money on,” said Atkinson. “It helped give her sustained growth, better cash flow, and then really cemented into her plans the sort of rigour needed to underpin it.”

Making full use of tax breaks was also key to Atkinson’s strategy for helping the Monster Group to grow. With a warehouse full of goods, Harvey qualified for an embedded plant and machinery allowance that was often missed by regular accountants.

Her research and development role also made her eligible for certain incentives.

Atkinson said a holistic approach underpinned his work with clients. “We’re going to help you to grow and develop your business but you’ve got to think about your own personal balance sheet first,” he said.

“That’s equally key really – saying where does the business want to be and how do we get it there but also where do you want to go in terms of your personal balance sheet… in terms of how to extract properly, how to build your wealth in terms of investments, pensions, or in property,” he said.

“It’s very much a two-pronged approach to say we can help to build the business but we can also help to build your wealth as part of that profile.”

In Harvey’s case, Atkinson’s efforts not only helped her Monster Group to grow, but allowed her to buy her dream family home and car.

Atkinson has also recently reaped the benefits of embracing cloud technology. In early May he signed a merger with BHP, another Yorkshire accountancy firm.

He believes the merger will help his business develop more success stories.

“It’s just great news in terms of the staff and the clients because there is no real change but an opportunity to work with bigger and better clients and add to the resource pool using the good offices of BHP,” he said.

It was a chance encounter with an accountant in a Nairobi desert that saved the Rustenberg family wine business in South Africa from bankruptcy.

The story of how Coenie Middel travelled 1,600 km to restructure the failing farm and vineyard is told in Inspirational Accountants, a book by Steve Pipe.

In an interview, Middel, who runs a ten partner accountancy practice with a team of 150, based out of Centurion in South Africa, described how it was one of the most fulfilling tasks he had ever taken on as an accountant.

Not only did he save the business within two years to make it one of the most successful wine exporters in South Africa, but he helped to persuade the distressed owners, the Barlow family, not to throw in the towel when the going was tough.

Middel’s passion for creating business began in childhood when he drew inspiration from his entrepreneur parents.

“I knew that becoming an auditor and accountant, the biggest contribution that I could make would be to make businesses better and to get them to grow,” he said. “Through that growth I would do a lot of charity by the fact that people would have jobs.”

He met Simon Barlow, the owner of Rustenberg Wines, a family-run wine estate in the Stellenbosch region, while on a group road trip through the Namibian desert.

After the two men hit it off, Barlow asked Middel to look through the farm accounts as the business, which had been in the family since 1941, and that he had personally run since 1987, was struggling.

After Barlow had taken control of the farm he spent the next 20 years bringing the business up to date, investing more than £10 million building a new winery and importing modern, virus-free grape varieties.

But he left much of the running of the farm to a management team.

“He came from the kind of environment where his father was a rich guy and everything was done by management and you had boards and you had people that were advisers,” said Middel.

“They [managers] said ‘look we have problems in the financial field’, they had a lot of debt, it was tough times in the wine industry and they had been trying to sell the land. I immediately realised in the first meeting that the management was a problem,” he said.

The estate was making losses of about £500,000 a year, and had bank loans in excess of £3.5 million.

“They were on the verge of bankruptcy. The winery was full of wine that was not sold. The harvest would come and they would bottle it and sell but they didn’t sell enough. The management were paying themselves exorbitant amounts of money,” said Middel.

The Barlows were devastated and angry with themselves to learn that their business was on the brink of collapse, they were about to lose their family fortune, and that the bank was on the verge of foreclosure.

They called their son, Murray, back from Australia, where he was doing a wine course, and were ready to cut their losses and give up.

Middel’s first major job was to convince them that the business could be saved.

“I realised that I had to help these people and I started working with the owner’s wife, Rozanne Barlow. She was a strong woman and I said to her, listen, we must work with the men and convince them that we can turn this ship around,” he said.

“So I involved the whole family and I started chipping away and made them believe that they could change things around.”

Middel worked out a plan where much of the major restructuring was carried out in the first year.

He spent time winning back the confidence of the bank, setting achievement milestones and giving the bankers constant feedback on progress.

First of all he cut back on unnecessary staff, saving 145 jobs by getting rid of some senior management positions and reducing the salary bill by about 50%.

Middel also reduced inventory holdings by restricting production and discounting slow-moving stock.

He then took a more considered approach to taxation, with better budget forecasting for different business units and making use of tax advantages in foreign jurisdictions that would reflect the fact that 80-90% of Rustenberg wines were exported.

In addition, he encouraged the Barlows to rent out unused grazing facilities, buildings and houses, generating £80,000, and also using the property for film shoots, which earned a further £40,000.

“We originally took the low-hanging fruit and so even though we cut costs to all operations, we made sure that we were spending enough money on marketing,” he said.

Within the first 12 months of his action plan, Middel had reduced the estate’s overall costs by 32%.

“It is now one of most successful wineries in South Africa, with more than 90% of the wine being exported, and they bank no debt whatsoever,” he said. “The family has regained control and taken ownership of what belongs to them and it’s making some of the top wines.”

Middel admits that one of the biggest challenges of the job was to transform the family’s despondency into a determination to get the business back on its feet.

“When it came down to the fact that they could lose everything it created a lot of tension,” he said.

“I had to not only provide financial advice but also work with the wife, work with the husband, and get everyone on board. That was for me extremely interesting because that is not something as an accountant that I am trained to do,” Middel added.

“I spent many days with them in their kitchen, eating supper with them and talking to the wife on her own and then to the husband and then to the son.”

After initially despairing at the state of his family business, Murray Barlow was last year crowned new winemaker of the year and is now the farm’s “biggest evangelist”, said Middel, who remains a firm family friend.

“It has become a real family business,” he said. “It’s thriving.”

In 2013, Gavin Esberger was at a low ebb.

His painting and decorating business, GME, was failing, threatening not only his ambition to successfully run his own company, but his dream to have a family.

Esberger and his wife Nikki were desperate to adopt a child, but were not in a financial position to do so.

Disillusioned, and on the brink of walking away from his own firm and returning to work for a former employer, Esberger and his business partner went to Phil Ellerby from Northern Accountants in Yorkshire for help.

Within just two years, with careful accounting and strategic advice, Ellerby managed to turn GME around to the point where the Esbergers could afford a big enough house and be financially secure enough to adopt their first baby, George.

The heart-warming tale is just one of 62 case studies in The World’s Most Inspiring Accountants, a collection by Steve Pipe, Susan Clegg and Shane Lukas, which is dedicated to documenting how accountants are uniquely placed to improve not only their clients businesses but their quality of life.

In an interview, Pipe, a chartered accountant and trainer, said he was inspired to research and write the book because he wanted to tackle the “crisis of confidence” that constantly undermined the accountancy industry.

“I’ve always had this belief that accountants do something really worthwhile and can make a profound difference,” he said.

“We do not believe in ourselves sufficiently, we do not believe in the value that we bring,” he added.

“Consequently at a dinner party when somebody says ‘what do you do?’ we say ‘I’m an accountant’ and we hope they haven’t noticed. We try to move the conversation on for fear that they will tar us with all those Monty Python brushes.”

Pipe decided that the best way to tackle this lack of belief in the positive power of accountancy was to gather a “body of evidence” as a starting point for accountants to feel proud and understand their value.

“It is a noble profession, we are changing people’s lives. Using our skills with numbers as accountants we are making a profound difference,” he said.

In the Esbergers’ case, their accountant Phil Ellerby’s help manifested itself in two major ways.

Firstly, he saved the business from collapse, transforming it into one of the most successful painting and decorating companies in Yorkshire.

“They simply lacked clarity of vision and solid structured advice on how to get to their end goal,” Ellerby explains in the book.

He began by completing a personal balance sheet for them, helping to articulate their personal goals, looking at their incomes, personal wealth, work life balance and retirement plans. Then he mapped their business goals to deliver their personal goals.

As a result, between 2012 and 2014 the business increased turnover by 99% and net profit by 81%.

Ellerby helped the businessmen to shift their priorities into new markets, particularly repaints in the housing, retail and commercial sectors, creating a strategic marketing plan for them.

“They have grown from a small company to a medium-sized company,” said Ellerby in the case study. “The perception in the market is that they are one of the big boys..they are on the road to being recognised as one of the top three painting and decorating companies in Yorkshire.”

The success of the business allowed Esberger and his wife to forge ahead with their adoption plans, but they were almost derailed by an unexpected twist just one week before being granted custody of a baby.

Someone tried to blackmail the company, threatening to report VAT fraud and tax evasion, claims which were completely fabricated.

The blackmailer took the allegations to the adoption agency, who then launched an urgent investigation into their finances. Northern Accountants were called to an emergency meeting, but they were able to prove that the complaints were unfounded.

“The end result was that the adoption went through, the accountant became the godparent to baby George and Gav and his wife were deliriously happy,” said Pipe.

“Also, wonderfully, a little bit further down the line after many years of trying, Gav and his wife naturally had a second child,” he added.

“Phil [Ellerby] has told me that ‘I don’t think I will ever do anything more important in my career than what we did for Gav and his wife. That family exists because as an accountant I was able to help’.”

It’s stories like the Esbergers, or others like family business owner, Chris Holt, also from Yorkshire, whose accountant remodelled his events management company so well that he was able to build his dream villa on a Greek island, that Pipe believes the industry needs to hear.

“If you can take someone who is feeling scared witless at the beginning and turn them into someone who feels that a weight has been lifted off their shoulders, that they are able to dream big again, and they are calm, confident and happy, then that emotional contribution is profoundly valuable,” he said.

“Most of the difference that we are able to make comes from using our core skills with numbers,” he said. “I really don’t think that the accounting profession has ever woken up to or been made aware of the contribution that it can make.”

Realising their full potential is also key to an accountants’ professional success, argued Pipe. Too many accountants undervalued their own skills and sold themselves short.

“Most accountants do not earn enough money. They work stupidly hard for stupidly little, here in the UK at least,” he said.

“I am passionate about the profession, about helping accountants understand their value, be more valuable, and then helping accountants use the value that they contribute to others to earn a better and fairer living for themselves.”