Maslins Chartered Tax Advisers

No more “scary” spreadsheets

Maslins Chartered Tax Advisers is a specialist accounting firm for IT contractors and freelancers. It was founded in 2008 by Chris Maslin and today employs 18 people, turns over a million pounds and has around 1,000 clients. In 2021 it also became employee owned.

“We assist clients with the financial and tax aspects of their businesses, helping them focus on the other day-to-day runnings of the business,” said Chris.

Software has been a major boost for Maslins in this regard, particularly integrating payments from GoCardless with its FreeAgent accounting package. This has helped the company to crush a tonne of admin so it can focus resources on providing clients with consistently easy access to qualified expertise, all for a competitive fixed monthly fee.

A nerve-racking job

Maslins’ previous Direct Debit provider didn’t integrate directly with FreeAgent, so its payment runs revolved around manually updating a spreadsheet for upload into the platform.

This process wasn’t scalable and eventually developed into a nerve-racking job for the senior person handling the upload.

“80-90% of our income comes from Direct Debit and there was an element of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’” said Chris. “But it's amazingly easy for human error to creep in and, the more clients we got, the scarier that whopping great spreadsheet became. A client might leave and we’d forget to take them off. Or prices change and the sheet isn’t amended.”

Once the money did come in, it then used to be a painful job for whichever junior member of staff was tasked with manually allocating payments across hundreds of invoices.

Integrated and automated

The integration between GoCardless and FreeAgent means that when an invoice is issued the corresponding collection is automatically scheduled by GoCardless and then reconciled in FreeAgent.

Risk of human error is massively reduced, and so is stress for the senior staff member who doesn’t have to worry about that spreadsheet anymore.

“Everything is joined up now,” said Chris. “Changing the amount on an invoice automatically changes the amount collected, which is then automatically assigned back to that invoice once received. The scope for human error is dramatically reduced.”

Paid, in a couple of clicks

Also reduced is the time spent on, in Chris’ words, the “donkey work” of allocating payments across invoices each month.

“GoCardless integrated with FreeAgent has saved a day a month of payments admin,” said Chris. “That junior member of staff is now free to do something a bit more constructive towards their development.”

Maslins has scored further time savings when it comes to setting clients up for their monthly payments, which can be actioned directly from the FreeAgent platform.

“We get quite a few new clients each month and setting them up between FreeAgent and GoCardless works beautifully,” said Oliver Enticknap, Senior Accountant, Maslins.

Smooth implementation

GoCardless and FreeAgent worked closely together to ensure the implementation went smoothly.

This was especially comforting for Chris when it came to transferring clients’ existing Direct Debit mandates from the incumbent provider to GoCardless.

“I was a bit terrified that we might have a month where we didn't get paid or we took all kinds of random amounts from clients,” he said. “But it was reassuring that we had access to an actual GoCardless developer on the tech side and, overall, our hand was held throughout. It always felt like a one-to-one exchange.”

Confidence to grow

All told, Maslins hasn’t looked back since integrating GoCardless with FreeAgent.

“We were definitely getting too big for our processes and the benefits of GoCardless and FreeAgent have proved to be worth taking the leap,” said Chris. “We are confident that we can grow without fear of getting too big for GoCardless. If we could get every customer to pay this way, I'd be very happy with that.”