Hamish Mexted is the Director of iif, a group of specialist Chartered Accountants helping business owners and property investors with proactive, forward looking advice. From traditional accounting services, to coaching and workshops, this Wellington-based practice collaborates with businesses throughout New Zealand to help them achieve their goals.
Looking for a simple SharePoint Solution
Even in the early days of iif, Hamish Mexted knew he wanted something more than simple file storage. "In my mind I wanted growth. I was looking for something that would scale with the growth that we've gone through, starting out as a one man band four years ago to now being six of us."
After considering various cloud options, Hamish finally chose Office 365 and its document management system, SharePoint Online, particularly because it came with Microsoft Office. As a cloud-based option, it could not only grow with the business and provide remote file access, but it would also enable them to operate completely without paper - "We didn't want to store everything just because, even electronically."
After setting up SharePoint himself, which Hamish found "tricky," he quickly ran into problems. "SharePoint was a nightmare. Once you get it working it's kind of OK, but I found you've got to operate through Windows Explorer rather than using the web app."
It was at this point that Hamish had a chance meeting with Suite General Manager, Andrew Sims, which saw him jump onto SuiteFiles soon after.
"SuiteFiles makes SharePoint easy. You don't have to understand technical processes or anything like that."
"It lets us do the whole cloud thing in a way that SharePoint doesn't let us. SharePoint lets us do it but in a really cumbersome and clunky way that is hard for staff to understand. It's hard for me to make work all the time, and it causes a lot of back-end support that I don't want to be doing."
SuiteFiles is responsive to your needs
It's also "much easier to get new people using SuiteFiles than it is SharePoint. The interface feels familiar to them, which means they're able to pick it up much quicker than they'd otherwise be able to."
"SuiteFiles lets us do business the way we want to be doing it. It gives us the cloud, it gives us access to files remotely, it manages our emails. It manages everything on the document front."
"I like the fact that it's being changed and it's getting better all the time. And sort of the responsiveness that comes along with that. SuiteFiles does what it should."
Hamish also loves the support he gets from Suite - "The support is really responsive. If there's an issue, it's fixed. If there's a feature that's needed, it's quite often built."
After implementing SuiteFiles, Hamish and his team can now work from anywhere, even the local café! With a document management system that can grow with them, iif can truly do business how they want to do it.