Tony Kenon is the founder of Kenon Group Consultants, a provider of back-office, technical accounting, and financial reporting services for the renewable energy sector. He understands the value of providing holistic and efficient services to fast-growing clients and shares how BILL allows the firm to sustain a trusting relationship and provide the highest level of service.

Tell us about Kenon Group Consultants. What sets you apart?

We prioritize establishing a sense of trust by taking on projects we can execute fearlessly and hold ourselves—and our work—to the highest standards. Working with the booming renewable energy sector of the economy, we are averse to saying “no” when projects are outside of our scope. Instead, we’ll work to figure things out in collaboration with our partners. Most of our clients prefer to be hands off when it comes to the back office, so we take ownership of all the back office, accounting, financial reporting and some FPNA.

We view our relationships with clients very holistically and function as an extension of our clients’ team. We’re willing to go above and beyond to invest in the relationship.

A hands-on point of view

Aksana Curtis, Operations Supervisor, joined the Kenon Group Consultants team after the implementation of BILL. She came from an environment with manual back-office processes -- and now uses BILL regularly.

What were some challenges before working with BILL?

Before partnering with BILL, we struggled with inefficient, paper-based processes, and we were missing out on opportunities to add more value to our clients.

Like so many others in our industry, we dealt with a lot of manual, time consuming data entry. We used spreadsheets to keep track of payables which was a tedious experience. As one can imagine, it was an ordeal scanning and keeping track of all the bills and saving them in different folders. We even saved paper documents and had filing cabinets in storage. It was especially inefficient and time-consuming during audits when we had to track down invoices and find copies of documents to provide to auditors.

How did using BILL’s integration with Microsoft Dynamics help your business?

It created a more efficient and streamlined experience. We were able to stop manually exporting the data from BILL and importing into Business Central. That alone saves about eight hours especially towards the end of the month when every minute counts. It also eliminates any human error that can occur with manual transfer information. For instance, if we have a new general ledger (GL) account, it needed to be added into BILL and we had to ensure the manual import/export worked. Now, with the sync feature, new GL accounts, new vendors, new project codes, and all additional data sync worry free.

The biggest benefit, however, has been for our clients who are now able to view data live in Business Central as opposed to at the end of the month.

What other benefits did using BILL unlock for your clients?

BILL creates flexibility for clients as they often have multiple entities and projects which require separate books. Using BILL makes it easy to create and maintain all their separate lines of business budgets in one place.

We can now sync every day after bills are processed to allow clients to incorporate live data in their reporting and decision making. Also, when it comes to payables, we want it to be very easy for clients. The ability to approve or pay with the click of a button works great for them.

The renewable energy industry is so important to our future. How does your work help further that industry?

If you’re working to provide energy to the world, the back-office can be a distraction. Our goal is to free up these innovators, engineers, and leaders to focus on what matters most to their business. In the process, we play a small part in building a more sustainable world.

Many of our clients are newer startups or private equity investors, so it’s more efficient for them to outsource their back-office operations, including payables, receivables and more to us.

We also know that the market changes fast and so do opportunities. That’s why it’s critical that our clients have access to near real-time data rather than a static report at the end of the month. Our energy clients may need to evaluate budgets, secure additional funding or simply make a fast decision to adjust spending on a dime.

Ultimately, our mission is to offer our clients peace of mind and potential to capture opportunity.

That’s how we define excellence.

Working with BILL enables both our team and our clients to harness the flexibility, real-time information, and synchronized data that it takes to meet our standards of excellence for clients.