Helping accountants switch from poking through shoeboxes for receipts to advisers who make their clients successful gets Richard Francis out of bed in the morning.
And after a $3 million capital injection this year, his business has rapidly grown to being on the cusp of seven-figure turnover, as it looks to become the number one toolset in the Xero ecosystem.
Spotlight Reporting was established in 2010 because chief executive Richard Francis’ own accounting practice, Francis Consulting, needed cloud-based software to provide good business intelligence to its clients.
“I’d always been interested in software and really I was looking for a cloud product that could produce reports, forecasts, dashboards, quickly and effectively at the push of a button using Xero’s API (application programming interface).
“There was nothing out there so I started developing my own product, got together a really good team and next thing I knew we were really getting demand from a lot of other accounting practices.” Spotlight Reporting’s four products include an application of the same name that creates performance reports.
Spotlight Forecasting, meanwhile, builds simple cashflow forecasts and scenario budgets, and is being redeveloped to a fully featured desktop product, where Francis said there was a big gap in the market.
Spotlight Dashboard tracks key business metrics, and Spotlight Multi is aimed at franchises and not-for-profit organisations which can import, analyse and compare up to 1000 Xero organisations.
Prices range from about $69 a month to $229, depending on the tools required and size of the user.
