4th June, 2025
Barossa Accounting & Tax has been operating for more than four decades. The South Australia-based practice built a thriving business in that time, with a 10-12 person team delivering tax, accounting and financial planning services to clients in the region. More recently, it has purchased another business, which will merge with the main practice and grow Barossa’s reach.
Thanks to that growth, a future-focused strategy, and an increasing awareness of work-life balance for employees, Barossa Accounting & Tax needed to shift operations to the cloud. As long-term MYOB users, MYOB Practice Management was the obvious choice.
Barossa Accounting & Tax has been an MYOB customer for a very long time. The practice started using MYOB back in 1993, when accounting software was just coming into its own. The team used the on-premise desktop version for 30 years before a combination of factors prompted a move.
During the COVID lockdowns, the Barossa team realised that being able to work remotely was a real benefit, both for employees and the practice.
Post-lockdown, employees continued to work from home or on hybrid schedules, and the leadership team could see the positive impact this had on their work-life balance and general well-being.
The problem? With on-premise software, working from home wasn’t as simple as it could have been, and some employees — particularly admin staff — couldn’t work remotely at all. This, along with a broader business strategy focused on cloud adoption and future-proofing, triggered a shift to a new software solution.
“For us, a big focus was overall staff wellbeing,” Practice Manager Emma Kroehn explains. “One of the biggest changes that the workforce saw, particularly in Australia, was the embracing of work-life balance and the work-from-home model. So to allow us to scale that out for our team, we needed a software solution that would let us work consistently and fluently in a remote environment.”
Barossa Accounting & Tax went live with the cloud version of Nimbus Document Manager in 2024, using the cloud-based technology for document management and storage. Once the implemented Nimbus, the team started working on the transition to MYOB Practice Management shortly afterwards. The core implementation was completed in March 2025.
As Emma explains, the shift was the most significant change process in Barossa’s history, involving months of work and collaboration with the entire team. The practice had a dedicated project manager at the helm, and buy-in from employees before and during implementation. That buy-in and understanding from staff was crucial.
“We actively sought to engage the staff in every step of the process, right from the operational planning stage before we even started to launch into the project itself. So the staff were aware that this was what we were going to do,” she explains.
This involved regular meetings where employees could ask questions, share concerns, and work through potential workflow changes together. All employees were involved in these meetings and in the training sessions that followed. The goal was to ensure that all end-users had a chance to share their perspectives and understand the benefits of the new software, rather than management forcing a change on the team.
As Emma puts it, the MYOB team was also closely involved throughout the change process.
“While we had that collaborative process and everybody involved in the training, testing and the setting up of workflows, it filtered back up the funnel to me as the project manager, and then I liaised directly with MYOB so that we didn’t have any miscommunication. And I think that funnel process worked exceptionally well for us.”
The transition to MYOB Practice Management (MPM) has enhanced the practices capabilities and the Barossa Accounting & Tax team is already seeing benefits, including productivity gains and time savings across the practice.
Emma explains that billing and invoicing processes in MPM have been a significant time-saver for the practice’s admin team, as the old manual process involved printing out a draft bill and then entering it into the system. For the accountants, the drag-and-drop functionality, digital document sign-off, auto-reminders and web forms are making compliance simpler and less time-consuming.
“The digital signing is definitely a big one. The audit trail is another big one that we rely on quite heavily from a compliance perspective,” she says. “But you know, the game changer was the drop and drag, the drag and drop. We just love that in this office.”
While the new functions seem relatively small and simple, they add up to ‘huge’ time efficiencies for a busy practice.
MPM is also helping Barossa streamline its client service, with a client portal, online document signing and smoother service delivery in general. While some clients are still getting their heads around the system update, Emma says that she has had positive feedback from others.
“We’re getting positive feedback from some clients who are loving the new system. So that’s definitely a positive,” she says.
Clients can now access their tax returns through a personalised MYOB portal, sign them off, and send them back to Barossa in seconds. The Barossa team can also send reminders and updates through the MPM system and request documents or missing details from clients.
All these small time savings add up to smoother, quicker service for clients – and more time for personalised financial advice and other business-building services from the Barossa team.
Shifting work to the cloud has made a real difference for the Barossa Accounting & Tax team — particularly employees in admin roles. Previously, accountants could do most of their work remotely if needed, but the admin team had to be in the office. Now, everyone has equal flexibility, which means some full-time work-from-home schedules, some hybrid and some sticking to the office.
“So there are definite business benefits for us to be migrating off the server and have that cloud environment, being able to operate from a hybrid work environment and see continuity across the staff,” says Emma.
“To provide admin staff the opportunity to work remotely and continue to do their jobs without compromising the face-to-face business has been phenomenal. We would not have been able to achieve that with a traditional solution, without going to the cloud. So that’s definitely fantastic.”
Cloud access has also helped the team work with businesses in other parts of Australia without putting data security at risk. One of Barossa’s biggest pre-MPM challenges was getting sign-off on tax returns from agents working in different states. With MPM, it can manage that part of the process quickly and securely, without compromising compliance. As Emma puts it, “That, from a business perspective, was a big tick point for us.”
The Barossa Accounting & Tax team is looking forward to ticking more boxes as its MYOB Practice Management implementation continues — and as the practice continues to grow.
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