Bol Adviseurs makes knowledge more accessible with iManage

Dutch accountancy firm Bol Adviseurs supports entrepreneurs with a full range of financial services. Following rapid growth, the firm needed to make knowledge sharing easier and more consistent throughout the organization. The company partnered with IRIS to migrate to iManage in the Cloud and upgrade to Work 10. Now, the company has laid a solid foundation to enhance security, transform the employee experience, and attract the best talent — and has ensured that company growth won’t outstrip demand.

Bol Adviseurs is an accountancy firm helping entrepreneurs bring their ambitions to life across the Netherlands. The firm provides financial services, accounting, audits, and review, as well as supporting security, privacy, and HR to help clients focus on developing their businesses. With offices based in the south of the country, it has many international clients that operate across Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands, as well as serving the Dutch branches of American companies.

The business challenge

Sharing knowledge securely at scale

Bol Adviseurs’ three main drivers are: getting closer to clients, being courageous, and focusing on the future. Following rapid growth, the firm needed to provide 220 employees with fast access to secure data — to help them build strong client relationships and continue winning more business.

“Our people are our biggest asset. There’s a real shortage of talent in the industry, so empowering our staff to be the best they can gives us an edge on the competition,” explained Roy Verbroekken, Partner at Bol Adviseurs. “It’s not just about giving them the right data, we needed to make it easier to share knowledge throughout the organization and tap into that wealth of expertise.”

Focusing on the future, the firm decided to adopt a cloud-first strategy to outsource maintenance, updates, and security to third-party vendors. This required a document management platform in the cloud with the functionality to support a Zero Trust policy and ISO-27001 compliance, and which also had excellent search capabilities.

The solution

Upgrading, migrating, and implementing seamlessly

Working with implementation partner, IRIS, Bol Adviseurs upgraded its on-premises iManage solution to iManage Work 10 and migrated to the cloud. Even working remotely, the team completed the project on time and to budget with minimal disruption to users.

“Whenever we needed support, iManage and IRIS were there for us right away, even if it was out of hours,” said Ruud Hofmans, IT Manager at Bol Adviseurs. “The implementation went so smoothly our users didn’t even realize we’d migrated to the cloud.”

What employees did notice, however, was the enhanced functionality of Work 10 and a custom application that Hofmans integrated using iManage APIs. The digital signing solution means documents in iManage can be shared with the right stakeholders and the latest version is automatically saved when completed. With 25,000+ documents needing a signature every year, this time saving is equivalent to the work of two full-time employees per year.

Bol Adviseurs ran both virtual and in-person training sessions to get employees up to speed on the new system. Ongoing support was also available to provide fast answers to questions. Verbroekken told us the adoption went seamlessly: “iManage is so intuitive we didn’t get much feedback from users — and that’s a good thing! You soon hear about it if they don’t like a new system.”

The integration of Work 10 with Microsoft Outlook, which helps employees work from a single interface rather than having to switch between applications, has been a large contributing factor to the success of the upgrade.

Business outcomes

Increasing productivity and employee satisfaction

By upgrading from iManage Work 9.5 to Work 10 — a solution staff were already familiar with — the firm streamlined adoption and is now ready to “wow” users with new functionality to help them work smarter and faster. Automated workflows have increased productivity, and even help the firm work towards sustainability goals by reducing the need for physical contracts.

Moving document management to the cloud has also empowered Bol Adviseurs’ employees with a modern workspace they’ll be able to access securely from anywhere.

The team is confident this will help the company attract and retain the best talent in a competitive market. Bol Adviseurs is enjoying higher levels of security with the adoption of a “need to know” strategy. “Not many accounting firms can implement this level of security, but our staff don’t need access to every client’s documents,” explained Verbroekken. The firm is also using iManage Threat Manager to monitor the environment for any suspicious behavior.

Meanwhile, by handing much of the maintenance over to iManage, the IT team is free to focus on more satisfying and innovative tasks. “We used to spend hours maintaining the on-premises environment. Now, on iManage Work 10 in the Cloud, I can sleep well knowing the latest version is always available,” said Hofmans.

Looking ahead

Simplifying data security

The iManage migration is just one piece of cloud strategy at Bol Adviseurs. The firm plans to continue innovating and improving its security posture, including the addition of iManage Security Policy Manager to help with setting up ethical walls. “I’m really proud of what we’ve achieved so far”, says Hofmans, “and I’m excited for the next steps.”

"IRIS is pleased to be playing a significant role in BOL Adviseurs’ ongoing digital transformation, they were early and eager in moving to the cloud,” said Rob van der Drift, Account Manager Accountancy, IRIS Nederland. "Whilst the clients of accountants are at ease in the cloud, it is no surprise that accountancy firms themselves are also reaching for the cloud in how they securely store, organize, and retrieve their business-critical knowledge.’’