ABAB Accountants en Adviseurs

ABAB Accountants and Consultants is an all-round accountancy and consultancy firm. With approximately seven hundred employees, ABAB works from fifteen offices in the Netherlands. The focus is mainly on non-listed companies, institutions, non-profit organisations and private individuals. Within the company there is a very high degree of automation and digitization. ABAB is an independent member of PrimeGlobal, an alliance of more than 300 independent accountancy organisations in 90 countries. ABAB is also a member of IFA (International Fiscal Association) and evofenedex.

In order to carry out the work efficiently, the IT department itself built an application to generate documents. "The application had been working properly for fifteen years. However, the maintenance is labour-intensive and complex. Technology is changing and the programming language with which the application was written is outdated," says Frido Affourtit, head of the ICT department at ABAB Accountants and Consultants.

This led to the desire to implement better support in creating perfect documents, such as correspondence and contracts.

However, technical innovation was not the main driver for this innovation. "In our former application there was a growing lack of flexibility, which meant that users could not be supported to an adequate degree in all situations. The margin to deviate or make mistakes was small. This meant that if you made a wrong choice in the template, you had to start your document all over again. To start a process all over again could lead to more errors and loss of time". ABAB works almost entirely digitally, up to a client portal developed in-house, known as MijnABAB (in English 'My ABAB'). In order to find a new document creation solution, ABAB set out the demand in the market.

Open collaboration pleads for xential

The cooperation with xential is based on mutual trust in each other's capacities. "Contrary to what often happens in such projects, we have not completely clogged up our assignment. We entered the process with xential with clear appointments, also in case the click wouldn't be there. It makes a huge case for xential to be involved in this in this such a manner", says Affourtit.

Gradually the implementation created an interaction between xential and ABAB and they complemented each other. This is how the team from Affourtit built the templates themselves. "First of all, we received training from xential and then started working with the document generator xential. During the process they gave us support." Thanks to the flexibility of xential, specific requirements of ABAB could be provided with the right application. "With us, it is not unusual for documents to be modified or supplemented during a process. Documents can now be built up intermediately, preserving answers to questions from the information tree".

Maximum efficiency with xential

Due to the large number of disciplines covered by ABAB, the company has between five hundred and seven hundred templates at its disposal. It is not directly the goal to reduce this number.

Ultimately, everything revolves around working as efficiently as possible for the user. All letters are checked after delivery and go through the marketing department. "Xential is introduced in phases within various disciplines, where users begin to get used to working with xential. We see the benefits become more visible every day. We are enthusiastic about the software and the possibilities".

Xential is started from a so-called Electronic Dossier, where a template, belonging to a specific process, is selected. The template is filled with data. Other content is filled in by the user using a question and answer wizard. The document is automatically saved under the correct file in the Electronic Dossier. The document is checked internally, signed and sent. Xential is now used for services such as employment law, pension advice and corporate finance. After the development of templates, the rollout to the entire organisation will follow in the short term, including for example the disciplines of tax advice, agricultural advice, legal advice, accountancy, salary & personnel services and estate planning.