Story of Pisces
Pisces was formed in January 2005 by Alan Oakes. He was working from home in his conservatory with just a computer and a printer.
The company’s first website was launched in April that year and was by today’s standard was very basic, but still contained the essence of what makes Pisces unique today: the intention to create an accountancy practice that uses technology to give a great customer service and does the complex accountancy and tax work easy to understand.
Over the next few years the business grew rapidly, and Alan moved out of the conservatory into an office and began to take on staff to help with the increased workload. The business also became a limited company in September 2008 as Pisces Accounts Limited.
The website was re-designed, and Pisces started to use online bookkeeping software such as the very early cashbook from Iris Software to manage clients accounts. The cashbook did not allow bank statements to be imported, every transaction had to be entered manually and then download into the Iris practice management software to gain access.
We then started to migrate clients over to Xero as is started to gain popularity in UK. At this point we started to see the efficiencies of online software that allowed bank statements to be imported and matched using custom based rules.
Over the next few years we started to see continued growth and saw our client numbers grow to over 300 active businesses that we dealt with their accounts, tax returns and vat. This growth was all by word of mouth and referrals, from 2009 to 2016 Pisces did not do any advertising at all. In fact, the client numbers grew from 50 in 2009 to over 300 in 2016 all through referrals.
We were obviously doing something right during that time!
The software we used in the practice also became a lot more sophisticated during that time. We started to use Receipt Bank for managing the expenses and data extraction, Gocardless for collecting payments by Direct Debit and Practice Ignition for preparing engagement letters and onboarding all those clients. In 2019 we also migrated to TaxCalc for our practice management software.
“The change in the software has been dramatic since we started and as enabled us to offer more services to our clients”
The change in the software has been dramatic since we started and as enabled us to offer more services to our clients. We have been very keen users of software like Futrli that will enable us to give even more value to our clients and to progress from being accountants, into someone who can actually help you and advise you how to grow your business.
At the start of 2019 we again decided to redesign our website and to also broaden the scope of the services that we offer to our clients. This was just reflecting the services that we had been offering to our clients for the past few years informally and to make them more widely available to all our clients.
At the end of 2019 we moved our office to their current location in Sheffield at Aizlewood’s Mill.
We are looking forward to you being a part of our success story and as we have built a successful business, we want to use the knowledge and experience that we have to help you build one as well.
“We are looking forward to you being a part of our success story and as we have built a successful business, we want to use the knowledge and experience that we have to help you build one as well”