Case study: CFO advisory practice goes global with Saasu

One of the first tasks Martyn Dominy faced after setting up a corporate advisory practice in Australia five years ago was to rent an office and buy servers to run his business software.

The business, called MyCFO, found an office in Surry Hills, Sydney and bought three servers, for email, document storage and MYOB, respectively.

The servers cost $5,000 each plus maintenance and upkeep of $1,000 a month. The total cost of ownership over four years (the average life of a primary server) was $63,000.

“It was quite expensive for a small start-up to invest in systems like that,” says Dominy, a former chief financial officer, who has worked for several US technology companies.

However, Dominy found that running a central office did not suit his business model. He had decided early on that he wanted his staff to be very mobile; the business brandishes the slogan, “Accounting to your door”, and its employees spend much of their time working in customers’ offices.

“A lot of the work we do is due diligence, systems reviews, M&As (which) has to take place on the clients’ premises because that’s where the documents are,” Dominy says.

The office “didn’t suit our model and wasn’t really necessary. We thought, why are we doing this? We aren’t here that much.”

Dominy handed back the keys to the Surry Hills office and looked for cloud-based applications to replace the three servers.

The need to find an alternative to MYOB was pressing. MyCFO used MYOB to open client accounts rather than run the practice itself. The program could not cope with multiple users – “the moment you had three or four users using MYOB the system just died” – and the MYOB database would frequently collapse when someone tried to export information.

The only solution was to run it on a dedicated server, which was quite an expensive solution, Dominy says.

MyCFO had to purchase extra MYOB licences for users and clients and the cost was creeping up. Within eight months of starting the business, licence fees were between $7,000 to $8,000, Dominy says. “We could see that the costs were going to escalate based on the number of users,” he says, which was less than ideal for the fast-growing business.

Next page: How a cloud-based program took the company global.