Rise Accounting: The power of integration
The accountants who live inside their clients' businesses.
There's a quiet shift happening in a lot of small businesses. The person who used to turn up with a spreadsheet and some questions at year-end is now in the Slack channel. They know the vendors, they're across the payments, they understand the burn. The accountant, it turns out, is becoming something else entirely.
At Rise Accounting, that shift is already well underway.
Rise specialises in venture-backed technology businesses, with a growing foothold in hospitality. They partner with founders from incorporation through to Series B and C.
Co-founder Matt and Senior Client Manager Fatjeta have spent the past year deepening what that partnership actually looks like in practice. And Apron has been central to the change.
Inside the business
Matt reflects on what Rise has become for many clients.
“We've definitely made a shift from being just like an accountant advisory firm; quite traditional, to now being almost like an outsourced finance function, effectively running finance operations for a lot of our clients.”
It's a significant repositioning. Fatjeta, who has around 70% of clients on Apron, explains the day to day changes.
“We feel more involved, me and the team are speaking to clients daily now, in Slack and Teams; helping on things like payment runs but also just getting closer to them and their daily goings on, which helps out a lot with being their accountants.”
The onboarding advantage
That closeness starts early. The Apron onboarding flow is designed to take the pressure off the client and place it on the accountant. It’s a set-up that suits Rise’s model well as Matt explains, “As their accountant we have to do the heavy lifting when setting them up on Apron and that's fair, as it's part of the service we're providing. It ultimately means our clients spend less time setting tools up for themselves and only have to validate what we're doing at the end of their onboarding.”
The result is that all new Rise clients now have Apron folded seamlessly into the onboarding process.
More revenue, same clients
For VC-backed clients in growth mode, speed and agility are key parts of the game. Getting embedded from day one means Rise can move fast on what actually matters.
“The relationships we get to build from day one simply because we're more integrated into their business is amazing,” Fatjeta says. “We quickly get across how their finance operations are running and where we can bring value.”
That operational depth has opened up something unexpected. “More and more we're selling vendor payments as a service to our clients using Apron; which is great for them, taking things off their plate, but it's also a whole new revenue stream for us and something the team is upselling quite often,” Fatjeta adds.
The compounding effect
What Rise keeps coming back to is simple: the longer you're inside a client's business, the more useful you become.
As Matt says, “All of a sudden we have more touch points. Clients rely on us more. They come to us asking for more advice, knowing we naturally know a lot about their businesses. Apron gives us that right off the bat, from day one.”
That's not a feature. That's a new kind of practice.
