Naked Accounting
Last week, we sat down with Oliver Browne-Wilkinson from Staplebarn Limited to learn how he and his team use Brixx.
What is Naked Accounting
Naked Accounting is a cloud accounting firm based in the Midlands but with clients around the UK, and in some other parts of the world too. They’ve been using Brixx for their clients for a considerable amount of time. We sat down with their Director Malcolm Veall to discuss why they’ve found Brixx so beneficial for their client base.
As a 100% Xero integrated business, Malcolm says that there are a few advantages to embedding Brixx into his process.
Start for free
Brixx is much more efficient for my clients than spreadsheets
How did Naked Accounting benefit from using Brixx?
Creating a forecast or scenarios that replicate your business
Firstly, Malcom says that “you build the forecast based on activities, the structure of what your business does – literally physically does – as opposed to starting with a chart of accounts”.
The issue with most tools is that they force you to start with a chart of accounts which means you are always restricted to start with. Therefore, it doesn’t allow you to think about or visualise your business in the same way that Brixx does.
Forecast 
Testing scenarios and identifying drivers on the fly
Secondly, Malcom considers that the ability to “just hit a few buttons and move things in and out of the forecast” means that you can identify the impact of this income stream or that project in moments.
You can switch everything else off, and there the effect of that project or income stream is immediately displayed in the profit loss, cash flow, and balance sheet.
He goes on to say, “if you forecast in Excel or any spreadsheet, a huge amount of effort goes into trying to work out what are the drivers, costs and profits and so on and then duplicating those via formulae. So you end up with an intensely complicated model. Then, the Chief Executive or Board want to see various scenarios from the spreadsheet with the balance sheet and the cash flow, which can be hours and hours if not days of work, depending on the complexity. With Brixx, the effort, time, accuracy and ease of generating reports is much more efficient for my clients”.
Scenarios 
The use case for Brixx at Naked Accounting
Naked Accounting work with a range of clients. Right through from solopreneurs to highly complex mature businesses and VC funded startups with funding in the millions. Malcolm says, “we’re really using Brixx primarily as a really flexible forecasting tool”.
For example, they use Brixx for one of the highly innovative engineering companies they work alongside. This particular organisation requires a complex backend to run their numbers. Malcolm can copy and paste this data into Brixx so that the client can then play around with the variables and test various scenarios out.
They also use Brixx with various funded startups whose needs change extraordinarily fast.
Hence, using Brixx allows them to create new charts and funding projections quickly. If they were doing it in Excel, it would be a huge job. Because of the manual untemplated nature of Excel, you could also actually get it wrong. Malcolm says, “There isn’t anything you can’t do in Excel, but on the other hand, you could also buy the parts and build a car, but why would you?”
Use case The ongoing journey with Brixx
Naked Accounting was a very early adopter of cloud technologies, using nothing but cloud technologies as part of its business. They were also an early adopter of Brixx.
They used us long before our integration with Xero was in place. To that end, they are not yet fully integrated across all their client accounts, but that’s a project for the future.
Journey 
