Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the GetBusy office here in Cambridge, one of our three offices. We're really excited to have you here today, and it's great to see so many old and familiar faces as well as some new people as well. The aim of today is really to give you a deep dive into GetBusy, particularly about our products, but also, of course, about our people and culture, because we feel these are such critical elements of our company and what makes us a success. I always think in sessions like this that it's great to actually start with a bit of a history lesson to figure out where we've come from and what we've achieved in the recent years.
It was nearly 5 years ago that we IPO'd here on the AIM, and since then, we've had over 120% ARR compound growth, which is good for a technology stock, and we're heading in the right direction. We also have more than 73,000 customers and a 94% recurring revenue base, which is fantastic actually, and it puts us in the top 6% of AIM-listed companies in terms of being able to have that recurring revenue, annuity style business. We're also really proud to say that we have over 34% of UK's top accounting firms using our products in one way shape, or the other. Our total addressable market has broadened threefold since listing, primarily because of the way that we've added new features and functionality, but also in terms of new product sets as well.
We've actually taken our products, our software products, from 2 on listing to 7 now. In the next 12 months, almost all of those will be fully integrated across the suite, so that the cross-sell and the upsell opportunities and the technology debt that comes with maintaining a bigger stable is easier to manage. What does that look like in reality? I thought we'd share some statistics here just to show you of what we actually do as a business. In any given year, we've got about 3 million people in our ecosystem. They're customers of our customers who are using our platform or sharing the data between those platforms. We now have over 4 PB under management. That's, that's a big number.
To put it into context, one of our scholars, i.e., Paul, said that's more than 750 million complete works of Shakespeare, for what it's worth. We have more than a billion unique objects inside that system as well. Obviously, version control, you have a number of versions, but we have more than a billion unique objects that we're managing through our lifecycle and our systems. In the last 12 months, we've used digital signatures 3 million times, or our customers have, which just makes it so much easier to do work in a digital workspace, particularly during COVID, when it's so hard getting wet signatures around.
There's a little folded-out bit here that you can't quite see, but it says, "Instrumental to a material component of U.S. and U.K. tax take." We've not done the specific math, but we think we're probably more than 30% of our customers using the product to collect tax and to show governments what their citizenry are doing and to make it all honest and fair. If our software didn't work and support those customers, then governments would actually be quite challenged in their revenue collection. That's the history lesson. Now let's look forward, because we're very much focused on delivering shareholder value and delivering a plan that is sustainable through the future. Our plan for the next five years, broadly, is to continue the journey and to double our ARR again. That's it. Simple. How do we do that?
Well, obviously, we focus on our team and the products, but we also focus on our cash and our margins. We've not done a raise since IPO, so we've really much lived within our means. I think in the current market, that's a very sensible strategy, and it's something that we will continue to foster going forward. We don't just throw money away. We make very considered investments with the small amount of dollars that we have. Our aim ultimately, is to get to a 30% EBITDA margin business. In the short term, we won't be there, because our aim is to take all of the capital that we're raising and to reinvest it into our products and our people so that we can continue to grow the business.
Ultimately in five years, that's where our plan sees us being, doubled in ARR and a 30% EBITDA margin. We split this afternoon into two sessions. In the first session, a general overview of GetBusy in our markets, and then we'll drill down specifically on SmartVault and Virtual Cabinet, and then open the floor to a Q&A session on everything in that session. Then we'll move into session two, which provides a bit more into some of our newer product and platforms, which you might not have seen previously. Specifically around Workiro, Certified Vault, and our people and our cultures, which, as I mentioned earlier, we feel are a real unique differentiator between us and many other companies. Last but not least, we'll encapsulate some of our specifics on where we're going to go in those five years.
Okay, that's enough chat from me. I'll now hand over to the person who knows what he's talking about, which is our CEO, Daniel Rabie.
First of all, I just wanna echo Miles's welcome. For us, it's exciting to be able to showcase our team, our culture, our capabilities. We are very excited about this session and look forward to going through our business in a lot of detail. As you would have seen, hopefully this morning, we announced to the market, and we're very proud to have ARR of GBP 18.8 million. We announced the integrations of DocDown and Quoters into our SmartVault product, and that will now be sold into the SmartVault base. We have a very healthy list of beta clients, about 100, testing and trialing both of those products, which was great take-up. We also announced two material partners.
Right Networks in the US is the leading IT provider for accounting firms, about 8,000 accountants are part of its customer base. It's natural synergies with what we do. Here in the UK, we announced a partnership with Turnkey, and we're very lucky to have Turnkey presenting today. They’ll do a much better job than I will of showcasing the opportunity that that partnership brings. This to me is really important, and the team will know that. Our mission to make people productive and happy has tangible meaning within our business. I remember at the time of IPO, this very much felt like words on a piece of paper. Now it feels like the fabric and DNA of our company. Making people productive and happy is a simple framework to make decisions.
Let's use COVID as an example, as a simple framework for us to enable our teams to be successful. More importantly, it's the headline in front of a deep culture that has a methodology, a process, a way of working that enables us to be as successful as we've been. It is people who build our software. It is people who sell our software. It is people who support our software. People are the key to our success. Our culture, which I look forward to going into later in the presentation, really enables us to be who we are, and hence why we're looking forward to showcase that today. In terms of what we are trying to achieve here, well, we are trying to achieve substantial shareholder returns. That's our primary goal.
We're very confident in terms of our ability to do that because we've got a very predictable business model. We've got a very scalable business model. As we continue to scale as a result of our predictability, we will be, and are, I believe today, very valuable. This is not new to the success of SaaS businesses. This is a proven path that we are following. We are confident that we are doing the right things to be predictable, be data-driven, make sure we got that clear path to cash generation. We are scalable. We are growing our addressable markets. We are growing our product suite within our existing client base. We are managing our churn appropriately so that we can continue to build.
As a result of that, we're gonna own a big space of a very material market, and that will make us in itself, usually valuable. This remains core to who we are and is ultimately what we're trying to achieve. How we're achieving that is a pretty clear and simple strategy. We provide productivity software on top of core business applications. Core business applications are CRM, are financial software, are tax, practice management. Those software solutions, a lot of them named here, are very good at what they do. Turnkey, great example, the best practice manager for an insolvency firm. On top of that, they've identified that they need a layer of productivity. Support in the way in which they get a document signed or get a proposal out or be able to manage documents through a workflow.
That's where we come in. How we build unique competitive advantage over anyone else doing that is we deeply embed ourselves within these applications, so that's a seamless workflow. When we do that, we win 9 out of 10 times because generic applications cannot provide the same value in which we can. The markets in which, and the integrations in which we're going into, are huge markets. If you can create significant competitive advantage in those markets, because of the size of them, and you get the authentication and the approval of the key provider within that market, you have a high likelihood of being successful.
That is giving us our continued confidence that we can continue to grow through the channels, expand our channels, and that this strategy of providing productivity software on top of core business application is the right approach today and for tomorrow. Practically, what does that mean? Well, we really do improve the lives of our customers, and we've got lots of statistics of how we do that, and I think the team will go into that in more detail later. But you know, just pulling a couple out here, I'm sure that everyone in this audience has needed to have a document signed before, right? You have needed to find a document easily or file the document. They've needed to discuss the context of the document. Well, that's what we do.
We deal with practical business problems in the day-to-day life of our customers. We're not an application they use once a week or once a month or once a year. We are an application which they live in, right? That's why you see the gross churn levels that we get. That's why we're so valuable to our customers and ultimately will be a valuable business in the future. This is a quick summary of our product suite. I'm gonna let the team go through this in more detail 'cause they do a much better job than I do in talking through the respective products. As I'm sure most of you are aware, SmartVault is a cloud-based document management solution predominantly sold in the U.S., but also has a great presence here in the U.K.
It very much is a document and workflow client portal in nature. Virtual Cabinet, as Dave will show later, is a more enterprise version of SmartVault. It is a desktop hosted and cloud solution predominantly here in the UK. However, we have a big client base in Australia and New Zealand as well. Our emerging products Workiro and Certified Vault will go into after the break. They're exciting innovations moving into similar markets that we're very familiar with that will open greater addressable markets and make sure we got long-term sustainable growth. We're very excited to showcase those today.
Finally, you will see pieces of our new technology which are getting embedded within our existing applications and our emerging applications to add additional value to our existing customers. Hence enabling upsell and also giving us great opportunity to sell into new customers because we solve more problems. We look forward to going through all of this today, and I'm gonna hand it over to the team to go through that in a lot more detail. Before we do, I think it's appropriate to hand over to Paul to go through the markets in which we serve, and why from a macro sense, especially in this current climate, we're confident that we're in the right space with the right business model.
I'm gonna talk us through our markets and the sort of customers that we serve. Really, there are four common challenges that our clients experience that our products help to solve. First of all, if you look at who our clients are, and they're predominantly professional and financial services, they're often trusted advisors to their clients. Trust is really important in their businesses themselves, but in their relationships with their clients. Part of trust is exemplified in the way they serve their clients, the quality of service that they're giving to their clients. Our software helps provide part of, if you like, the technological interface that they have with their customers. It's a really important part of providing an efficient and easy-to-use service for our clients, for their customers.
The clients we serve generally are knowledge workers, so often they'll be very highly qualified individuals, some very highly paid individuals for whom time is critical. Effectively, their commodity is their time. So optimizing that time and making them more productive is absolutely key. That's even more important over the last few years, where we've seen a real talent crisis in a lot of these professional markets. Accountants, you know, a lot of the larger accountants are really struggling to bring on the volumes of staff that they want to bring on during this recruiting season. So making the people they've got more productive and making the best use of their time is absolutely critical.
It's also critical in making sure those people feel like they're being productive and don't feel burnt out, because retaining the people they've got is also really important. These are markets which also specialize in navigating complex legislation for their clients. Tax advisors, for example, and we've got one in the room today, will help their clients to navigate some quite complex regulation. They also operate in highly complex regulatory environments, all sorts of different money laundering regulations and compliance regulations that our clients have to adhere to. Our software helps them to deal with that from some of the most basic generic legislation like GDPR, right through to some more complex country-specific regulations, and that's where our integrations with our practice management partners comes in, as well.
Finally, as part of being a trusted advisor, you can't be trusted if you can't keep your clients' sensitive documents and data safe. Security is really important to these people as well. It's a market that is really warming up to the idea of technological disruption. Very nearly 80% of accounting firms expect the cloud or expect technologies to have a material impact on their business over the next 10 years. These are large markets, and they're relatively unpenetrated.
The numbers on this slide, they're all very large, and you might say, "Well, what's the point of that, Paul, in the context of a business that's approaching GBP 20 million of ARR?" The point is these, we're barely touching the sides of these markets, and it's a relatively benign competitive landscape compared to a lot of other markets, so we've got a long way in each of these markets to grow. Even diving down to some very specifics, SmartVault dominates the SME accounting sector in the U.S. That sector on its own is about GBP 200 million of ARR opportunity, and we're roughly 5% of that in SmartVault in the U.S. There's a huge opportunity for us to continue to grow. These markets also have some very compelling tailwinds, which are very beneficial to us.
Digital transformation is all around making people more productive. There are various iterations of how that is demonstrated in different pieces of software. Fundamentally, our products help people to manage their document workflows a lot more efficiently than through old paper-based or Windows network-based systems. That can typically provide the average size accounting firm about a 10% uplift in their profitability versus using things like Windows networks. Privacy legislation like GDPR that we talked about earlier has hardened significantly in Europe and is hardening very much so on a state-by-state basis in the U.S. at the moment. That provides effectively a tailwind for us as awareness increases around the need to keep sensitive documents and data safe and secure and to know who has accessed what and when and for how long.
Our products help with that. We don't solve the whole piece, but we help solve parts of it. More and more people are working from anywhere. Our products for years have helped people to work from anywhere, from any device securely and productively. This isn't a new trend for us, but it's very much been accelerated during COVID. Security in any enterprise is becoming more important. We saw just a couple of weeks ago, an intrusion into the Uber networks. Even large companies struggle with this. We help smaller companies solve parts of their cybersecurity puzzle. Yeah, we're not a firewall, we're not things like that, but we do at least help solve some of these sort of first line of defense issues that these smaller businesses struggle with.
We help businesses cut down on their paper use, cut down on the amount of energy they have to spend shredding documents and things like that. That helps with their ESG credentials. Increasingly, as the auditability of decisions and things like that in businesses become more important, having that audit trail helps with the governance side of these businesses, as well. We generally find the markets we sell to are recession resilient. That's not to say they're completely insulated, but they're sort of one stage removed from what's going on in the broader economy. When things are tough, their clients will come to them and ask them for help. How can we restructure our business? How can we make ourselves more tax efficient?
The need to file a tax return doesn't go away just because the number on that tax return is smaller. We're very fortunate to sell into these relatively resilient markets. I'll now hand over to Dania, who's gonna be joining us from Houston via video, and she'll talk through the SmartVault business.
Hello, Cambridge. I'm sorry I can't be with you in person today. I'm Dania Buchanan. I am a proud founding member of the SmartVault team, and today I serve as the company's president. I am responsible for strategy and our growth objectives. I am responsible for day-to-day operations, as well as enabling an environment where our teams can do the best and most vibrant work of their careers. Happy to be talking to you today about SmartVault. I have spent 30 years, my whole career in tech, and starting way back in the late 1990s all the way through 2022. I have worked for large enterprise and publicly backed companies, as well as small startups that were VC backed. I've got quite a bit of experience in tech.
I came to SmartVault in 2008 because I thought we could build an application that could materially impact our customers' lives. That is something that as I sit here today, 14 years later, I have borne witness to. As you'll see in the data that I'm about to present, we have built a substantial base of users, and they get value out of this application that we had a vision for back in 2008. They get value out of it every day. For me, that has been career defining. It is what got me to SmartVault as a founding team member, and it is what keeps me here today.
I can honestly tell you, I am as excited about the opportunity for SmartVault in this next phase of growth as we enter the scaling phase of growth, as I was back in 2008 when we got our first customer, our first 100 customers, crossed those massive thresholds as a startup that you celebrate your first $100,000 in revenue, your first $1 million in revenue. It's intoxicating. Right now, we have such an opportunity to take everything that we've worked on for 14 years and continue to grow and scale the business. It's really, really exciting and, thank you for having me to talk to you a little bit about this company that really is my life's work at this point. What you're seeing first is our building in Houston, which I love this picture.
Yeah, we moved into this space about a year ago. Our teams love it. It is in a super vibrant area of Houston. We have a lot of team members that walk or ride their bike to work. It's a lot of fun. If any of you are ever in Houston, please stop by and let us feed you some great Tex-Mex food and maybe take you to a baseball game if the timing works out. All right, that's our building. That's a little bit about me. Let's talk about SmartVault. First of all, we are a pure cloud document management platform, and today we sell primarily, we provide that platform primarily for accounting firms. I'll kinda take you through that journey 'cause that wasn't always the case back in 2008.
Today, most of our customers are accounting firms, and I'll quantify it a little bit more narrowly. They fall in that sort of SME space about somewhere on average of 2 users to about 20-25 users. That wasn't always the case. I've just told you I've been around since 2008, where we had zero revenue. Zero revenue. What defines success for SmartVault? It was quite clearly for us being able to identify a target buyer and building a high-value product for that buyer. Instead of approaching what was a very horizontal market at the time, as cloud document management was just starting to find footing in the SMB space back in 2008-2009, really started to hone in on again that target buyer, that accounting firm buyer.
Why accounting firms? A, they have a very heavy document workflow. We're like, "Hey, we know that we can build a product that's gonna create automation and efficiencies in that document workflow." B, those documents have sensitive data on them, so your accountant handles your most sensitive data, whether you're a business or an individual. Our founding team came from internet security, so we were security first. We not only were cloud first, we were security first. We're like, "Hey, we know that we can provide the controls and mechanisms to secure those documents all the way through the document lifecycle, all the way through archiving those documents." The industries are heavily regulated, so again, security first and compliance first. Once we identified the accounting firm as our target, as sort of our mission, right?
It was very easy to build high-value product capabilities and product features for that target buyer. I really think, when I stand back and sort of think about the superpowers or sort of the X factor differentiator that SmartVault brings to the market, I think about SmartVault in two key areas. First is that area of customization, where you can't really customize your application if you don't understand the needs of your buyer. Like I said, we understood the unique security and workflow needs of our buyers. We were able to add levels of customization within the web application that were very high value to our customers. We were able to add features that created a whole lot of efficiencies in that document-based workflow.
Request list is a great feature that we came out with last year that allows for our accounting firms to automate the way that they collect documents from their clients. If any of you know anything about accounting workflow, they can't start their engagements until they collect information from their clients. That has been just a game changer feature. Like I said, two superpowers, one in this area of customization, the second really is in this area of integrations. We came out with a software developers kit back in 2010. In 2010, we were talking about integration. It was really quite simple, this concept of integrating your document management platform inside applications and workflows that you were already using today.
Not having your document management platform sort of sit alongside your core applications, but be integrated in. An example of that would be printing a tax return directly from TaxCalc or directly from Intuit's Lacerte tax application. Having that tax return automatically create a client folder in SmartVault, automatically file that tax return and then alert the client that they had the tax return ready in the portal. Like, that's massive. That is massive efficiency gains right there. Those were. That's the magic. We identified our target buyer. You will start to see that positively impact our acquisition efforts. We then developed differentiators within the product that allowed SmartVault to accelerate growth. You'll see that we crossed 30,000 users, which is amazing. We did that last year or, I'm sorry, last month.
Over $12 million in revenue now and, you know, starting to see very predictable revenue contribution. Very cool growth journey if you're sitting in my shoes, going from zero to $12 million and we're keeping going. We'll transition now into. We've identified a buyer. We've got this high-value product experience for this buyer. How do we go to market? We really go to market in two key strategies. One is taking those integrations and looking at strategic partnerships with technology applications that have a substantial installed base. We partnered with Intuit back in 2014. They're a market leader in tax and accounting here, globally, and certainly a market leader in the U.S. That materially changed SmartVault's growth trajectory.
We came, and after we became part of the GetBusy family in 2017, we were looking to bring SmartVault into the UK and sort of did a rinse and repeat with TaxCalc. They did not have an embedded document management platform as part of their suite of applications. It's a very great marriage for SmartVault and TaxCalc, a very high-value experience for TaxCalc customers. I know Tracy's gonna talk to you in a few minutes about her SmartVault journey. Then hopefully you have learned as of today about a strategic partnership that we just signed with Right Networks. Right Networks is not an application developer, but they are the largest hosting and managed service provider for accounting firms in the U.S. today. It is a very exciting partnership.
They will be reselling SmartVault, and you'll see that start to break into a launch phase later this year in the November, December timeframe. You can see that by having this integrated high-value experience, it opens up channels for customer adoption, and co-marketing opportunities with our strategic partners. What does the future hold? More of the same. Looking at that best-of-breed tech stack within the accounting ecosystem and looking for other partnerships and channels to market that with partners that have a group of buyers that match our target market. Pretty easy, pretty straightforward. The second component of our go-to-market strategy and what underpins those channel opportunities and channels for adoption is driven by a very efficient inbound sales and marketing machine at this point.
I use machine because we've been at this since 2015. I'm looking at that stat on the slide that says 250 content assets, I think that's been scaled back from 350. Anyway, we have a very robust library of content. Again, when you can identify your buyer, you can write content that is educational based, that is very valuable to our accounting firm customers and helping them understand the value that SmartVault will bring inside their environment. Those leads and opportunities are nurtured, they're scored, and they are eventually passed off to our inbound sales team. Those customers typically start a trial or start a demo or sign up to get a demo of SmartVault. Again, very predictable. We've been doing this a long time now.
My favorite thing to say at our town hall meetings is, "You put a dollar in to the acquisition team, you get four back." You can see from that LTV to CAC ratio, we're quite efficient at this model, and we're constantly optimizing. We just went through a big optimization effort for around our lead management framework and the way we score leads are continuing to drive our average revenue per user up. Very, very efficient model. You can see our close rate at 50%, which is amazing. If you think about the buyer today in 2022, 70% of their decision-making is done before they engage with their tech partners.
They've read our reviews online, they've engaged with their peer network, they've looked on LinkedIn, they've looked on Facebook, they've talked to their member communities about SmartVault. Again, 70% of their decision is made before they get here, so we're able to close those very efficiently. What's next? More of the same. You know, we've spent 14 years figuring this out, so we no longer fortunately we are at a fantastic position to be able to take what works for us and optimize it. A big strategic objective that our roadmap drives is adding features and capabilities for larger firms.
Again, when you can draw a face on your buyer, it's very easy to line up your roadmap 12, 24 months ahead and start to layer in additional features and capabilities that specifically serve the higher end of our customer base. Looking for new channels to market with new high-value integrations and partnerships, which are very important component of our growth strategy because they deliver a very high-value experience to our customers. Then obviously continuing with our direct model of optimizing our lead management framework. Content in market through digital channels and offline channels, where member communities, places where our target customers exist, and then nurturing those leads and opportunities through to drive a very predictable win rate. Complementing our acquisition strategy, we are raising and launching, really for the first time, a true expansion strategy.
We, through the acquisition of some technology we did last year with form-fill and with quoting, we spent about seven months integrating that technology into the SmartVault platform, and we are proudly launching a beta out to the market next week for DocDown and Quoters. We've got a lot of strong appetite within the customer base for form-fill and for the potential to send a quote out to clients, get the quote signed, and that quote be returned into the DMS system, into their SmartVault DMS system. We're really excited about that. As you can see over time, adoption of those features and capabilities will certainly contribute positively to our revenue growth.
I hope in the few minutes that we have spent together, that you not only get a picture of SmartVault and where we've been, because where we've been is really important to understand why I believe so passionately that we have such an opportunity in front of us for increasing the value of the platform to customers, increasing opportunity and value with our team members who are really the heart and soul of SmartVault, who are taking the outcomes and the KPIs that we've given them and creatively putting a path forward for that success, and obviously creating more value for our shareholders along the way. I thank you for giving me the chance to talk to you about SmartVault.
Again, it is my life's work at this point, and I wake up every day as excited about the opportunity ahead of us as I was in 2008 starting this business. With that, I don't think there's any better way to articulate the value of SmartVault than from hearing from one of our customers. I know we've got Tracey Nicholls up next with HFL Accountants. She is a TaxCalc customer and a SmartVault customer. Hello, Tracey, and thank you for participating in this day on behalf of GetBusy and SmartVault. Again, thank you for the opportunity to speak with you, and I hope we have the chance to talk again soon.
Well, hello.
A sea of faces. I know you're from all sorts of different places and it's great to kind of be invited here to talk to you about my journey with SmartVault. I wanted to take you back a little bit to start with to think about what accountancy was like. Now, we're not known for being the most fun people, it has to be said. We are, but we're not known for it. Certainly, our old way of doing things was very much, you know, very data-driven, very time-consuming way of doing things. I came up in quite a large firm. I was trained at Deloitte, and I worked for a couple of other mid-tier firms before I decided I was gonna try and go out there by myself.
One of the reasons I decided to do that is because I was becoming increasingly frustrated by the way we were doing things, and it didn't seem like we could continue to keep doing that, and be able to be successful in the future. Now, accountants very much would work on a billing basis, a time basis. We keep time sheets. You ask any accountant about time sheets, it's the bane of their lives. Yeah, we hate doing them. They don't tell the truth, because the way that a person is judged within an accounting firm is whether they're hitting their targets on time and whether they're, you know, getting a bit of profit on those jobs.
If you've run over time on one job, but you haven't on another, then it's quite tempting to put your time down on the job where you haven't run over, and so it's not really telling the truth. That system for me was broken. It also seemed to reward inefficiencies, because the longer we took on something, the more we got paid. Now, why would clients put up with that? I don't know. I could see a time coming when they weren't going to. Our work was very time-driven, and still is to a certain degree, but slightly better these days. If I was doing a job for a client that only gave me a bag full of receipts and everything else, then it was a very time-consuming job.
I would literally sit down and, on a spreadsheet at least, write out every single item that went through their accounts in that year and allocate it under different headings in order to be able to pull together a set of accounts at the end. Nightmare. A lot of small businesses were still working like this at the time. It's a nightmare. When I set out by myself, I was still doing some of that. But then I went to my first Accountex. Now, has anybody ever been to Accountex? Oh, you don't know what you're missing. This is an accountancy conference, guys. I agree. Yeah. I mean, honestly. Event of the year. You've got to go. I mean. Can I speak? No. Yeah. I mean, when I tell people I'm going to accountancy conference, they go, "What?
What?" Honestly, this completely changed my world and turned my business upside down the very first time I went. All of a sudden, I could see things being done differently. The likes of Xero and AutoEntry was the one that I really picked up on to start with. Were just changing the way that we could do things. Now, AutoEntry, in the start, would read the bank statements and then create that spreadsheet for me. I just, you know, just the time that would wipe off of what I had to do was incredible. Yeah. Nowadays, what AutoEntry does is it reads the receipts that people take. I get my clients taking a picture of their invoices as they come in. AutoEntry reads them. Now, if they're regular items that always come in, I can set AutoEntry up to post it into Xero.
Say you've got your BT bill, they take a picture of it. I don't even touch it, and it gets posted into Xero. We were looking at changing bookkeeping from jobs that would take me probably a day a week, I might charge about GBP 1,000 a month for that. Now, I probably might spend a day a month doing it because most of it's automated, and the fee for the client is also much better. You know, our average fee for bookkeeping for clients these days are more like GBP 200-300, which is much more affordable for more businesses. That meant that I was working for more of my clients in this way. I would say that 80% of our businesses now, we are involved in the day-to-day bookkeeping for those clients.
It's absolutely changed the way we work. Whereas before, I could probably only do one or two of them. Now our relationship has changed as well, 'cause now I'm not just someone that they have to speak to at the end of the year to get their accounts and tax return done. I'm with them all the way through their business, helping them to keep up with their responsibilities. That was my first taste of cloud accounting, and it absolutely blew my mind. Now, the good thing about being a small business is I can make changes like that, something that a bigger business can't do. As soon as I started to catch on to these things, I was making changes pretty much every year. What's happening now?
How can we change things? I started to research for how can I do more stuff that is online. 'Cause at this point in time, we were still using an office server, and although I could sort of download stuff and take it home and work and do stuff like that isn't very safe. We don't like traveling with data around with us. It's not really practical 'cause certainly you're gonna need something that you haven't thought to bring with you. How can I change my practice even more? Every single part of my practice, I started to look at how could we do it better. That's when I discovered TaxCalc. They are fantastic, I think, as far as doing most of our core work. TaxCalc will help us prepare our accounts and our tax returns, in an efficient manner.
I've worked with lots of different packages that do this. I've used Sage, I've used IRIS, I've used Digita. I've used lots of them, and I find TaxCalc the easiest to use, as well as being pretty comprehensive. It doesn't do everything I want it to do, but it's pretty comprehensive. That's important because when you've got other people working for you, yeah, the easier, the quicker they can pick things up and do things reliably, and you know they can see what needs doing, the more chance you've got of getting a good job at the end, and the less I have to worry about it. TaxCalc became a very core part of our business. We were also looking at saving our documents online. Now, don't shoot me, but the first company I came across to do this was a company called ShareFile.
We did use ShareFile for a little while. It was okay. It did the job. Took everything online, so I was saving my documents online. No longer tied to the office. Could work wherever I wanted. The difference for me was when you had the integration of TaxCalc with SmartVault. As soon as we heard that, we were interested in whether we wanted to work with SmartVault. At the next Accountex, we came to talk to SmartVault to check what were these guys like? What were they gonna be able to do? Were they gonna be comparable? If anything, they were better. Almost overnight, we made the decision to switch, and we haven't looked back since. Now, what difference does SmartVault make?
Well, first of all, it is that access to all items of our data from any machine, as long as we've got our logins there. You know, wherever we are, we can do it. I cannot tell you the difference that made to us when COVID hit. I mean, it's just a no-brainer. It made such a difference that we were just overnight thinking, "Well, all I need to do is make sure my staff have got a computer at home, and we can carry on as normal." What a time for your accountant to be able to carry on as normal. Where other firms were furloughing their staff left, right, and center, we've never been so busy. Because we were able to walk straight alongside our clients and say, "What's happening? You know, what are you doing? What help do you need?
What information do you need?" I've never worked so hard during COVID. I really haven't. It's the ability to just switch and work from there instead that allowed us to do that. It was crucial. In today's world, where we're definitely getting more flexible working going on, I'd say you can't cope without something like that in place. I was very grateful that we had done that transition long before, and we were ready. Little did we know what was coming. Also, we talked about recruitment of staff. It is really difficult to find staff at the moment, and one of my members of staff is now in India. Doesn't matter, because all our information can be got from anywhere.
It doesn't matter where our staff are from, and that gives me greater flexibility and the ability to cope with whatever this world is throwing at me as well. Flexible working hours. Now, as the owner, I often work different hours, shall we say. Different hours, particularly during January. Don't talk to me in January. It is the busiest month because that's when tax returns have got to go in. We are flat out during January, and I am working all sorts of hours. That flexibility to be able to at least do it from home is, you know, so important. We're also pretty much almost a paperless office now, and I never thought I would see that. Now, I wouldn't say we're not a paperless office because there'll always be some element of paper there.
It's massive what it's changed. All those files. If you imagine every year we did a set of accounts for a company, you'd have a folder with pages and pages and pages and pages of workings. That's all online now. Yeah. Everything that we do, all copies of tax returns. Whenever a client asks us for something, they're going for a mortgage, it's easy. I can get the admin staff to send over the documents that they need for that. Easy now. That saves us not just in the things you think about, the printing and the paper and stuff like that, but to be honest, it was the storage that was the key pain for us.
Not just the cost, but if you ever wanted to get back to that data, you had to wait a week or so before the storage would bring it back, or off there. Now I've got instant access to whatever I need going back. That's a key thing as well. As a small firm, one of the things I've always aimed for is to provide the same excellent service to my clients, which are all generally small to medium-sized clients, as they would receive in a bigger firm. I don't see why they should receive anything less from me just because I'm now smaller. The tech that I have behind me makes that possible. The portals are really important these days. That ability to share information securely is really absolutely essential. Now, don't get me wrong, not all clients are great at using them.
If I could ask for one thing, if you can find something that helps my individual clients who perhaps only log in once a year to remember their passwords, that I would bow at your feet for that. But you know, it is also about impression of my firm. You know, it shouldn't be any different coming to me as it is should be a bigger firm, and you do that for me. Those integrations, they take away pain points for us. The more you do that, the happier I will be. Because although I've got great tech behind me, because I'm not a firm that could spend thousands and thousands of pounds on the IT system, make it all talk to each other.
One of the pains I have is that they or did have, less so now, is that they weren't talking to each other. When we bring in a new client, I might have to put their details on four or five different pieces of software 'cause they're not talking to each other. The more they talk together, that is what I want. If you want new businesses coming on, those integrations are absolutely key way of doing it. Because if you're working with a key piece of software that I'm using, then I'm interested in finding out more about you and what you're doing. I love the way that SmartVault sets up the folders for us in a set format that we've agreed. It seems simple, doesn't it? It seems like everything.
Systemizing the way that you do things saves time and saves money and makes it much easier for us to find things when we go looking for it. Across the firm, everybody knows that this is how the folders are set up. If I wanna find something on somebody else's file, I know where I'm looking to find it. I love the way it does that. I'm looking forward to the future. The new things sound very exciting. Onboarding is still a time-consuming thing for me. Anything you can do that helps with that.
We're on it.
With the quotes and stuff, I'm well behind you there, and I'm really looking forward to hearing more. SmartVault is really very much at the heart of my business. I use it every single day, probably every single hour of every day. What I'd like you to take away is because it's at the heart of my business, it's also at the heart of many other businesses that probably don't even know it exists. Because it enables me to serve them in a more efficient and more innovative way. It has an impact that's further than you probably think. It doesn't matter, I think, what size the business is. We all strive to do our absolute best, and the only way we can do that is by using the best. I very much look forward to our businesses growing together. Thank you.
Thank you. Thanks very much indeed, Tracy. Tracy is clearly very modest. Her accounting firm does an enormous amount for the local community around here, and I know we're all very, very grateful for that. We heard that SmartVault very much is aimed at the SME accounting market, and it really does very, very well in that space. We'll now hand over to David, who is the global co-head of Virtual Cabinet, who will go into Virtual Cabinet, which is very much aimed at the sort of medium to enterprise space, not just with accountants, but across broader professional services. I'll hand over to David right now.
Thanks very much, Paul. I want you to do something for me a little bit different. I want you to put yourself, and hopefully as an investor, you'll appreciate this, and imagine that you're a billionaire, right? Not a millionaire, but a billionaire. Why? Because billionaires only invest in assets that give them a positive return. That seems really obvious, doesn't it? Really obvious. In today's world, easier said than done. I'm gonna check if you've been listening today. When speaking to a billionaire, what would they say is their most valuable asset that is non-renewable? Anyone for a price?
Time.
Time. Great. Everyone has been listening to you, Paul. That's a good start. Billionaires know that they're not in a race with their competitors. They're in a race with time. What they're actually doing is investing in things that give them automation, give them their time back, and they'll pay a lot of money for it. My name's David Owen, and I'm not a billionaire. Yes. Thank you, Dan. I have been working here for 11 years, and I started literally at the bottom. My job was to cold call people exactly like yourself and try and tell them about the virtues of Virtual Cabinet and how we could make you more money and save you time. I absolutely love my job.
Exactly like Dan, yeah, I absolutely love my job, and that's 'cause it gives me an opportunity to do something about what I'm passionate about, and that is saving people time and money. As part of my job, I still go out on the road. I like to keep my ears close to the ground, to the streets. A recent story of that recently was, I was dealing with a managing partner of an accounting firm, and I've known him for a long time and met at various trade shows, and we've always talked and flirted about the idea of, you know, getting him on document management. This time, you know, we've had COVID, haven't seen him for a long time. Met him again at Accountex. I party with the best as well.
Met him at Accountex and said, "Look, could we have a look at document management?" He said, "Dave, I'm 100% in the cloud." I was like, "Okay, this is interesting." He said, "Yeah, look, I've got Microsoft Azure now, and all my accounting applications are hosted in the cloud. I've got Microsoft Teams, so I can do chat in the cloud now and video conferencing. I've got Dropbox, and I've got DocuSign, and I've got SharePoint. Yep, Dave, I'm 100% in the cloud." I was like, "Okay. Well, look, I've heard this story before." I persisted, and I said, "Look, fair enough.
Can I just come and see you next time I'm in your area, show you Virtual Cabinet and see how we're helping accountants?" We agreed, and sure enough, the time came. When that time did come, I booked in said meeting. I was really looking forward to this. Going to see this new, shiny, progressive office. When I arrived at the office, this is his desk. That's an actual real photo. I took that photo when he wasn't looking. All right? Therein lies the problem that we're talking about. This is the same that we go and see every single business, right? It's not necessarily whether they've got paper or, like you said, whether they've digitalized and moved off the paper file. What they've now got is an acceleration of picking up loads and loads of applications.
It's actually silos of information that's causing the problem. Business information is everywhere. Think about your own lives. Think about your emails. How many emails you probably get every day. Do you file them all? Do you even have time to do that? Let alone if you're an accountant, and you're sitting in your tax application, or you're an insurance IP, and you've got forms popping out left, right and center, and you've got to save those onto the Windows folder, as Paul spoke about. Let alone you have to onboard someone, and you have to do an anti-money laundering and know your customer, and you're using Dropbox to manage that information. Then you have to sign something off somewhere down the process, and you're using a digital signature application that actually you have to do some communication around.
It completely breaks because you've got to do that in an email which is separate to this digital signature process, isn't part of the client file. Imagine now you've got an auditor that rings you up and says, "I need to go and look at the case file. Can you produce that for me?" Pretty terrified at this point, right? You get a GDPR request. Someone says, "Can I have all the information on me in 30 days?" It's all in those silos. Let alone just being productive with your team. That's what Virtual Cabinet solves. We are the glue that brings it all together. We are the single source of truth for your firm. Virtual Cabinet. If I was an investor, I probably would be interested in the technology that I'm invested in, and that's a fair point.
It's a misconception sometimes that because Virtual Cabinet started as an on-premise piece of software, that our only addressable market is businesses that have servers on premise. That's not true because Virtual Cabinet strategically has been what I call cloudified. We can reside in any environment. We're agnostic to the IT infrastructure that's there. Virtual Cabinet can live in a private cloud. Loads of our businesses, and as we've spoken about, a lot of our businesses are in the upper tier of the size of businesses, are still a little bit tentative about, because we don't just deal with accountants, you know, private banks, insurance firms, et cetera. You know, many of the top 100 firms that have, you know, extremely high-profile clients that if it got leaked, it'd be very interesting on the front page of The Sun.
A little bit worried about that. They have their own Azure environment, their own AWS environment, and we live in that environment too. For the smaller firms, we also have a hosted version of Virtual Cabinet. We call that Cloud for VC. If they don't have the IT resources the big firms have, we can install the application locally on the device, and we can host the back end, so it feels exactly like a cloud application. Everything we've ever done in Virtual Cabinet has been cloud first. The portal, if any of you know of the portal, basically, we were the first UK DMS house to build a client-facing, fully branded, with proprietary signature, not needing an integration, already built into the client file.
You could literally right-click on a document or a number of documents, send it to someone securely for a branded experience, like it's an extension of your business, and they could sign their document off. People thought we were nuts when we first brought that out. They were like, "Why would you send a document via a portal, make someone log in when I could just send it on an email?" GDPR came along, and we completely disrupted the whole accountancy marketplace. As you'll see, we've got half the market share there of our base as accountants. We brought out VC Go. That is a mobile app.
We're using the very latest technology where you don't need any VPNs or IT infrastructure, where if you're out on the go and you don't want to have to log in to anything, you can literally have as part of your, you know, your consumer suite applications on your phone or your iPad. You can literally click a button and it will go through syncing via the cloud to Virtual Cabinet, and you'll be able to access your documents and on the train, right in front of your client, be able to get the information that you need. That's Virtual Cabinet as the technology. If that wasn't good enough in terms of where we're going with our future addressable market, if you need a full SaaS application, we have what we call our next generation of Virtual Cabinet in the cloud.
Not just a browser, but built from the mobile app. Not like Salesforce, and then a companion app with it, which is not a great experience. Someone's nodding over there. Thank you. Brown envelope coming to you later. What we've got here is a mobile-built first cloud application. You probably know it as Workiro. Why is that exciting to you as an investor? Well, you saw earlier on Dan and Paul's slides that we've got a number of integrations and channels that we sell to. Pretty much every single one of those are Virtual Cabinet channels and integration with our IP and our API technology that we integrate with, and we'll talk about more and give you an example of that later.
If you think what we're doing currently with Virtual Cabinet and SmartVault, but also apply that to Workiro across those addressable markets, there's a great opportunity there sitting, waiting to be monetized. Quick overview. I'm not gonna read these all out. I'm sure you can read these yourself, but some highlights. Virtual Cabinet as a business has moved from a traditional payment structure in software to a full subscription model now, so nearly every single one of our customers is on subscription. We're marching very heavily towards the GBP 10 million ARR mark. We've got 44,000 users, but the interesting point at that is when we're talking about the portal, we now have 1 million end users. Our clients' clients on the portal. 2.5 million digital signatures took place in the last 12 months.
500 million documents in Virtual Cabinet. 7 million documents transferred in the last 12 months via the portal. That's 1 million zombie users that we haven't monetized yet. That's an opportunity, so just hold that thought for a minute. What is great is net revenue retention. That has now gone above 100%. We're interested in that. We got a third-party company to survey our clients and understand why the churn was low and what they felt about the product and also what they want in terms of the product moving forward. Here are a couple of quotes from our Virtual Cabinet base. I love this one.
Life isn't easy, but Virtual Cabinet sure makes it easier." What I love about these quotes, and this is just a small snapshot, it's all on Capterra and things like that, if you wanna look at it, but what it speaks to is the value of our business around our core proposition, which is to make people more productive and happy, is shining through in those examples. That's what we're delivering, that's why there's low churn, and that's why people feel the way they do about software. Quick overview. Again, if I was an investor, I'd wanna know that what I'm investing in is something that has got some robust marketplace behind it. As you can see, circa 50% of our customer base is in the accounting sector.
We've got a large proportion of that in financial services and IFAs, property and insurance, and in other sectors as well. We wouldn't be able to fit them all in on the pie chart, but basically, we deal with lots of other firms. There's like 20, 30 other verticals that we're in. The key difference is that Virtual Cabinet is customized and integrated into lots of different marketplaces like pension administration, like, manufacturing, legal, we even look after a load of dioceses across England. Who would have thought, right? We've also got our quickest growing market share at the moment in the insolvency market, which we'll talk about in a bit.
We'll also be interested in whether the customer base actually is just a few really large clients, and if we lost those, then we'd be exposed. Virtual Cabinet yes definitely has a sweet spot above 20 users to sort of 200 users, but equally adept in dealing with customers above that 200, 500 users. You know, the likes of the BDOs, the likes of the RSMs, they're our clients across the UK and Australia and some large ones in America as well. Geographically, predominantly across the UK, but we're also able to deal with the lower end of the market as well, especially with stuff like our cloud version of Virtual Cabinet. Really nice, diverse, robust market sector and client splits. Virtual Cabinet continues to be developed all the time. We run agile development.
We bring new modules to the product to expand the feature and the functionalities that our customers ask from us. As you can see, because our customers enjoy what we offer, they are reaching a point where they've taken on quite a lot of all the products and modules that we offer as part of Virtual Cabinet, and that's kind of reached a tipping point for us. Because having surveyed our clients, some of the mid smaller tier of the market were saying, "Hold on a minute. I want everything, but it's starting to creep up in price a little bit." We had a long, hard think about that. We looked around the marketplace, and we saw pretty much most people were doing a similar model. You have to buy the software, and then you can buy additional things on top, and it.
No one was sharing their pricing. Our customers were like, "We just want something that's really transparent." What we did this year is we changed the model of the subscription. Instead of having the main product and then additional things on top, we have bundled it all into one all-inclusive, simplified, transparent subscription called Virtual Cabinet Unlimited, where you can get everything if you need it and if you want it. Regardless of whether you are top ten firm, you can, as a smaller firm, have exactly the same efficiencies as those very large firms that have massive budgets to invest in their firm. If you don't want it, that's no problem. What it also gives us is a real new business differentiator as well. Have a look. Go and google a few document management enterprise solutions, see if you can get a price.
See if you can even get through to a salesperson to get a price. It's not there, and we're really, really hammering this home as a differentiator. One small point. Virtual Cabinet Cloud, i.e. Workiro, is not just a standalone product for us. We've now started to see that, because we've started to build the value that our customers have asked for us in Workiro first, before we do the rest of the document management, there's a load of stuff that we can do in terms of an additional, value add to, Virtual Cabinet. Four percent of our customer base, considering we've only just released it to the base, really have adopted, Workiro on top of the Virtual Cabinet solution integrated together. That's a nice opportunity for us there.
What I'm gonna do is I am going to attempt to give you a demonstration of Virtual Cabinet in about 5 minutes. Normally, this takes me about an hour and a half because there's so much functionality. We'll see how we go. This is Virtual Cabinet. This is what someone would see if you logged in, logged on to the application. The eagle-eyed amongst you would have noticed that we've gone through a bit of a rebranding exercise and changed the iconography to look very close to what Workiro is. You can go make up your own minds about the transition there, the integration. Basically, as you can see, we've also refreshed the product to make it feel like a full cloud application, especially as Workiro runs alongside it.
I'm biased, of course, but I think this is the most beautiful hybrid document management system on the market. In Virtual Cabinet, you can either run it as a standalone application or it can be completely integrated into the key back office software. What I'm gonna do today to change it up from accountancy is I'm gonna talk about insolvency and how it's used with Turnkey IPS. Very much like SmartVault application, when you use Virtual Cabinet alongside case management insolvency, all of the cases are automatically synced to Virtual Cabinet in the integration. If you add a new client on your onboarding process, that's automatically there for you. As soon as you have that integration, you can start to do some really clever stuff with automation around it. The first one being emails.
As you can see, there's a couple of new columns here. There's a tick box and a red color code, and it's telling you that this email has been filed to Virtual Cabinet, and that's gonna happen completely automatically. How does that happen, Dave? I'm gonna open up brand new email here, and what you'll see over the right-hand side is that there's a Virtual Cabinet add-in that's always part of the application, telling the user it's there. Because nothing is happening, there's no email address or anything like that, just assume that this is the first time that you've ever emailed a client or you received an email, and you're gonna file it away. With the integration to that key back office system, you can start to see here in the add-in is your first view of the integration.
At this moment in time, I've got the demo software of IPS, and all the cases are already there straight away. I file it away the first time, and then Virtual Cabinet starts to learn upon itself for you, so you don't have to do this process ever again. If we go through that one more time, open up a brand new email, put in the subject, demo. What we're gonna do is pretend to send it to a fictitious character, Gordon Gilchrist. Straight away over the right-hand side, it knows who I'm talking about. Case 2 in the insolvency software. I've added a few more here, filed it against several cases to show that it understands the relationship of one person to multiple records, et cetera, et cetera. It's very clever like that.
Basically, what's gonna happen from this point is that Virtual Cabinet says, "All future replies and forwards in the email conversation," demo, in this example, "will be automatically captured for you." Imagine. Right? So we've got inbound sent items going onto the case file. Personal emails not being filed away. You know, conversation with your mom, no problem. That's not being filed away. But critical correspondence is definitely going on the file, and you're getting notified in Outlook at all times that that's happening. Also, retrospectively goes around to other people and tells people that's happening, 'cause the other problem we see is when you get Teams, is essentially when other people are involved in the email chain, is you get that situation when you get deferred responsibility. Who's doing the filing? Who else is on there? I'm not gonna do it.
Hopefully, someone else will do it. Or worse, everyone's doing it, and we get multiple copies all over the place. That doesn't matter what vertical market you're in. That happens everywhere, surely. Okay, lots of nods. Great. Okay, so that's the email filing. When we get to the core application itself, this is IPS SQL, and I am in a case, right? I'm in a dummy case at the moment, and an insolvency practitioner has loads of forms down left-hand side, customized forms, which is fantastic, but they've all got to get to a repository in the case file. Normally, you'd be going through a Windows process to save them away. With the integration that Virtual Cabinet and Turnkey have put together, you can now, with one click of a button, save a document automatically.
If, for example, I was looking to file that CT600 away, Virtual Cabinet springs into life and says, "Yep, I'll file that away." Labels it exactly as we spoke about earlier. That systematic filing convention, it's doing it the same way every single time. There's no deviation, no human error there whatsoever. Everything's being done efficiently and from an insolvency perspective, quite a lot of their work is almost quite investigative. They're going to the file over and over and over again, right? If someone puts a document in the wrong place and they go down a Windows folder structure and they can't find it, spend half an hour looking for a document somewhere, it's a massive efficiency drain. Now we can see that we're getting all the documents automatically captured, posts, emails, single source of truth in Virtual Cabinet.
You could, of course, go and search for them in Virtual Cabinet in its proprietary application. The money shot for someone that is in IPS, or this could be IRIS or any other particular bit of software that they might be working as their core application. They've got a button there that says Review Case Documents. By clicking on that, Virtual Cabinet springs into life. I didn't even have to leave the key piece of software that I have invested in in my firm, and Virtual Cabinet brings me back all the documents relating to that case. One click, user adoption, super low. Now, there's loads of stuff you can do in Virtual Cabinet here. You can slice and dice the file up. You can flip it into a pay-per-view. You can content search it.
In the unlikely event someone's put a bit of post away in the wrong place, that sort of thing, then you can actually find the document back by searching on a word within the document, and it will bring it back for you straight away. I haven't got enough time to show you everything, but if I hop back into Virtual Cabinet and go and find another document, so I can do the same search, but through Virtual Cabinet itself. We talked about portals a lot today, but what I'm gonna do is show you next generation of portal software of document management, communication, and work management very, very briefly.
With Workiro being integrated to Virtual Cabinet, you can go into the document or documents, you can right-click it, and you can say, "I wanna send this via Workiro with our new integration." That then jumps Workiro into life and will attach this document as a thread for a signature, 'cause I've requested a signature in this particular example here. I can easily select who I want to send it to with the integration of all my contacts. With all the advanced signature functionality that you expect of my enterprise level, DocuSign, those sorts of things, you can do exactly the same thing here. You can either request a quick sign, which they can't do actually, and you can do an advanced sign. If you want to specifically pull down signatures onto areas within the page. I'm gonna sign this one off myself.
Change that to the client. Add a date there. Off it goes. Critically, though, you'll notice that I can now communicate around this, which you can't do in any other signature application. DocuSign talks about having to buy Slack on top just this morning, as if it was a really good selling point. You can do that all within the Workiro application itself. I'm gonna just go ahead and create that, and off it goes, and it starts to obviously create that thread of communication around the digital signature. As part of the workflow, assuming that I might be a manager within the firm, and I now need to sign off this internally before it goes to the customer, I can do that. I'll finish that particular workflow now. The client now gets a notification.
The beauty of this is if I now go and assume the position of the client is, as you can see, I get a notification fully branded from VC and Workiro telling them that they need to sign this off. All branded business card feels like an extension of their business. Completely secure link. Don't need a password. Don't need to log in and create another account to go and do this process. They can just click the link, view it, and off they go. You set me up too well. I couldn't not do that. And there we are. We're going through the process. I'm not gonna go through the whole thing, but I'm sure you know, you could go through this and sign it, et cetera, et cetera.
It all comes back to within the Virtual Cabinet application, a window of seeing everything in one place. How are we gonna execute on our growth strategy? Well, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. We're gonna continue to double down on what we're doing already. We've got really good brand recognition in our existing markets. What Virtual Cabinet over the years has been sort of quite organically grown business. We get a lot of referrals, we do trade shows, we do a lot of sales one-to-one. We are looking to invest heavily in our marketing and sales operations to really turn that. You heard Dania speaking about that inbound model, so that we can go from one-to-one to one-to-many, to grow into those verticals a bit faster. We're gonna continue to expand on our integration partnerships.
We've obviously got Turnkey here today to give an example of that, how we're gonna do it. I won't steal her thunder. We have been monetizing our customer base. We spoke about the Virtual Cabinet Unlimited around how we're doing stuff within our modularization and making that clear and transparent. For our existing customers, they've got a lot more value 'cause they're able to just take everything now, and they're taking on Virtual Cabinet Unlimited, and we've seen a 25 or circa 25% uplift in our average user price coming through on Virtual Cabinet. Also expansion. Expansion's a big thing. Remember I talked about the portal, talked about those 1 million users, those zombie users that we hadn't necessarily turned into money yet.
With Workiro, there's obviously an opportunity there for those clients' users, because they'll be signing their documents, as you've seen, communicating with us, and hopefully we'll pick that up, themselves. We've also got appointment scheduling with HelloPlan. We've got online form fills with DocDown. We've got quotes with Quoters. There's a real opportunity there, where before, when they were using our portal, they were calling us and saying, "I love the portal, so can I buy that?" Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, 'cause you've gotta buy it with Virtual Cabinet, it's symbiotic. With all these products, they'll be able to buy them independently. Less friction in terms of the sale, but also as an integrated module as well.
Last slide, I'm gonna talk about the insolvency opportunity in not too much detail, but this is just to really give you a tangible example of what we're talking about today. Turnkey are the market leaders in case management software by a country mile, what is it, 80%-90% of the marketplace, which is an amazing achievement. We're obviously helping Turnkey to become much more sticky and offer more value around digital transformation as the document management partner of choice. We're not just doing that, we're really understanding the market.
We're working with their strategic partners, like Postworks, for example, so that we have a trilogy of software houses in that integration, talking about how you can move from the current, what you saw right at the beginning, with paper everywhere or silos of information, to where the utopia is with digital transformation. You can see there's many, many years of experience going into that. As these mutual clients look around the marketplace, these sort of powerhouses of software providers are really giving them that validation, and it should be really a no-brainer for them as to where they move forward. We see that as a minimum opportunity of GBP 1.5 million additional annual recurring revenue just from the Turnkey customer base in the UK alone.
Bear in mind, they also have a presence in Australia already, and they have organic growth in other geographic regions as well. When Jason comes up and talks later on about Workiro and about the integration with NetSuite, which is a fantastic opportunity, it's a huge opportunity, don't forget that everything that he's telling you about, showing you in the functionality, is 10 years worth of our Virtual Cabinet customers telling us what they need in the future direction. All of that information I just showed you, that is being built into Workiro and doubles back down into all the vertical markets that Virtual Cabinet is in. When you go away today and you have a think about Virtual Cabinet, I want you to think back about those quotes. I want you to think about document management that you love.
I want you to think about the passion that this team that has seen it all before and are gonna do it all again and are crazy enough to wanna change the world, that's who you're investing in. Thank you very much. What we're gonna do is hand over to Deborah. Deborah is gonna give us an insight, fascinating insight into the insolvency marketplace. She's come all the way over from Scotland, so we're absolutely delighted to have her.
Hi.
Yeah, thanks a lot.
All right. Thank you. Hi, everyone. I'm Deborah, Debs. I've come down today from Glasgow. I'm the Chief Operating Officer at Turnkey, and we've got a long-winded quote there, which we are in the middle of really pushing out in our social media right now in terms of our joint partnership between ourselves and Virtual Cabinet. In terms of Turnkey, a bit of background on who I am. I joined Turnkey about 2.5 years ago, just right before lockdown, which is really unfortunate. I had been at KPMG for 23 years, working in various parts of their Services from the audit to tax practices. Then I moved into the restructuring part of the business about 12 years ago, and I was Turnkey's biggest client.
I really jumped from gamekeeper to poacher back at that point because I'd spent about maybe eight or nine years in the restructuring practice trying to digitize them. A bit like Tracey said, when I started to look at all the features and functions that a restructuring person did in terms of the life cycle of an insolvency process, they were very much in the mantra of, "We're paid to be inefficient. Don't make us efficient." We started looking at document management, and we started looking at case management and all the things that came around that in terms of banking, et cetera. The innovation that we started to do in KPMG was really freaking the partners out because they were very much looking at it as cannibalizing their fee structure.
It's taken a huge amount of time culturally to try and drive that disruption at KPMG. We invested in it, and we did it really well. Just around that sort of 2019 mark, I thought, "Where do I go from here?" Spent a lot of time at KPMG doing it, working in partnership with Turnkey. I think it's time to jump into the industry. I moved into the industry in that February point in 2020. Yeah, very much the grim reaper of the accounting processes. Pretty much quite hard going when you are effectively making money from a downturn in a sort of recession economic climate, trying to make people more efficient and make their life better, exactly as Tracey said earlier on.
Turnkey are a bit of an enigma. A family-run private business that formed back in 1980, by a chap called Dr. Barry Wood, who had this idea that he could go out and take the super brain, super computer, and turn it into something really useful, and have found a sweet spot in the insolvency sector and thought, "There must be a better way of helping these people manage cases." He went to Arthur Andersen at the time and sold the very first version of IPS, Insolvency Practitioner System, and then it grew from there. And bizarrely, a very small business formed out of that, and they stuck to that marketplace. We now have about 90% of that market share in the UK.
We deal with the whole of the Big Four all the way down to the small one-man bands who deliver insolvency. We have about 50 staff. When I joined back in February, they were running at around 22 staff with a huge portfolio of clients. Far too much, to be truthful. We were really overwhelmed with work, and we were beginning the journey to move our 40-year-old legacy platform to a SaaS cloud version. That has been a huge transformation for us over the last couple of years. Really tough transformation. Because we are the only market player in that industry, we've been able to do that over the last 2-3 years at a slow pace because that demographic of insolvency practitioner is not in a hurry to transform.
There's a lot of shifts occurring in the market. That pale, stale, male, if you like, profile of an insolvency practitioner is moving because they're all moving into retirement to a degree, and the youth are coming through, and they want to use mobile, and they want to not write checks with a pen, and they don't want to sign a document with a biro. That's helping shift the. I mean, you're probably in that sort of disruptive space, Tracy, because you've been in it for the last few years. For that insolvency practitioner, they didn't want to move. They're on that cusp now. That disruption, we're really seeing that coming through now because they're desperately keen to be more efficient.
A number of the boutique firms now are creeping out because they are setting out and realizing that actually we can compete with the Big Four 'cause we can do something like a CVA for a fixed fee. As soon as you introduce fixed fee into it, then you have to be super efficient. That's a big, game-changing model for us. We have a wholly owned subsidiary in Australia, and we have about a 45% market share there too. But in the last maybe 6-12 months have really seen huge organic growth coming through from regions that we've never really been involved in, like the UAE and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which have traditionally not had insolvency processes. In every economic cycle, you have to have insolvency.
It's definitely driving and going forward for us. In terms of the market, obviously it's been incredibly volatile for the insolvency process over the last couple of years, particularly where we've seen a massive downturn in the number of insolvencies given the government funding around the Bounce Back Loans and the Breathing Space legislative processes that came in. Again, for our practitioners, the life cycle of an insolvency can take 3-5 years. Even in a downward cycle where there's not much insolvencies coming through, we're still rolling out cases from years gone by previously. We're starting to see that move up now as those government-funded processes have come to an end. This SME market, particularly in construction, we're seeing a hugely volatile space where there's a number of problems occurring in that area.
We're seeing that our clients are having to start going back into becoming a much more efficient and a much more process driven than they've been before. I would say that they're fairly niche. There's around 1,500 professionally qualified insolvency practitioners in the UK that are authorized to obviously do provide that process around the insolvency case from cradle to grave. Arguably now they're really struggling to bring through some of that talent to drive some of that new process forward. I think that some of the work that we are doing to try and digitize and disrupt will help them hopefully attract the standard accountant into that process because as I say, it's arguably been fairly old-fashioned and old hat.
We are certainly seeing a lot more interest in CVLs, in the creditors' voluntary liquidation process. That's much more favored as a route to insolvency now. We're also seeing some of the volume increasing being fairly poor in terms of the quality because a lot of the assets in the process are fairly low, so therefore again, the fee income's been really squeezed. So again, coming back to the fact that we're trying to make them efficient is driving some of that change and disruption in our market. We have three products: IPS Cloud and the old legacy product, IPS SQL, it sits on the desktop, and a piece in the middle, which is our portal, which is essentially a self-service product that allows a creditor to go in and lodge a claim.
That has been hugely unpopular and hugely helpful to the insolvency practitioner during COVID as well. Again, back to the point that Tracy made that movement away from the office was really painful for IPs because most of them are sitting there still with filing cabinets. That move away really pushed and propelled the adoption of the portal as well. We have around 304 firms in the UK processing around 140,000 cases, half of which are going through our portal in terms of that creditor access, in terms of the stakeholders involved in that. During 2020, we've seen a huge rise in the number of downloads, circa around 3.9 million, and around GBP 1.5 billion worth of paperless claims going in to the portal at that period of time.
We've had around 95% retention over the last 20 years because as I say, we're in a very odd position where we're in a monopoly and there's nowhere else to go for the time being. We have around 70 firms in our Australian practice, around 1,500 users in that region too, across Asia-Pacific. We have a number of, as I say, the large from the top, Big Four, right the way down to the one-man bands and segmented from the 1-5 users up to the 50+. We have a big cohort, a bit like Virtual Cabinet in that 6-20 region as well. Our ecosystem is quite vast. We have integration points with all of the High Street banks, given the huge reliance on the banking process in an insolvency.
We have a huge amount of integration with government, from the Redundancy Payments Service to HMRC to Companies House. We obviously operate a number of stakeholders in this space from a debtor to a creditor to employee to a shareholder, right down to the directors of a company. We're very involved in the regulators as well because they obviously hugely govern the insolvency process. There's a number of industry experts that sit around it as well from people who help drive the employee redundancy process. Moving on to our alliances and partners, we have a number of our partners in the robotics field. We talked about Postworks, but critically and importantly, we have built a very strong partnership with document management with Virtual Cabinet. It's been around now for about eight years or so.
Kind of organically started with a shared client realizing that there was huge potential to integrate our products with Virtual Cabinet, and it really grew from there. Over the last couple of years, we've spent a lot of time investing in that deep integration that Dave showed you there in terms of the two products talking to each other. As our cloud proposition grows and Workiro proposition grows, that's only going to get deeper and more meaningful and more helpful for the insolvency practitioner. In terms of the credentials and the work that's gone through our portal, we've done all the big engagements from Lehman Brothers to Thomas Cook.
Our portal's facilitated all of the claims around that process, as has Virtual Cabinet, because ultimately all the documents that are produced, our clients that are using both Workiro and IPS effectively file all their documents into Workiro Virtual Cabinet at the end of that process. We have a huge portfolio of work that we're dealing with, and both products obviously complementing each other to drive that particularly seamless process for the insolvency practitioner. We have at the moment around 67 shared clients, but we see the huge addressable market in terms of the prospective 200 clients that are out there that we're working with today that we could convert to drive that very seamless, more integrated approach to how they drive case management and the case life cycle from cradle to grave.
We're very much in a shared sales and marketing collaborative effort at the moment with both teams working jointly to drive a lot of collateral both on social and even just for our clients to understand how we can help embed some of that process and functionality into their day-to-day life. We've obviously done the deep integration work to both the on-premise version and working on the cloud version. Our vision, and we've articulated that in terms of our roadmap and where we see much more of that disruption coming, is hugely and closely aligned to where Workiro is moving. We have a huge aspiration to drive more of our clients towards Virtual Cabinet and can really see massive benefits for them in doing that.
We're trying to change the conversation and the narrative with our clients in terms of talking to them about not just case management, but back to the original point around digital transformation, what does that mean and how can we help you do that? Our clients are much more open to that than they were pre-COVID because COVID has really changed their whole ethos and their whole style around managing their huge case loads that they have in terms of not just the documents that are kept within that, but trying to ensure that their staff are not doing repetitive manual processing when they could be doing much more qualitative work.
That's a key part of this, is really trying to entice the insolvency practitioner away from that old mantra of the past that we're being paid to be inefficient, to how can we make better use of our staff? How can we give them more qualitative work and get the tools to do the job for them, rather than using really highly skilled staff to do some fairly manual process work? In terms of the value of the partnership, it goes without saying, huge time efficiencies for our clients. A lot less administrative tasks, more time to spend on value-add tasks. Huge cost savings, which is now becoming a much more relevant point. Paper reduction, I mean, it goes without saying, when we walk into.
Dave showed the picture of the huge paper-based thing that still happens, and that is happening all over today in terms of some of our smaller SMEs, and even the larger clients. They're still heavily paper-driven, particularly in relation to some of the workload that they have on the high volume work that they do in the IVA space. There's huge inefficiencies in that area. Reducing that paper, making them more efficient is our joint initiative in terms of driving that strategy. Really just enhancing the collaboration between us in terms of increasing productivity and making life much easier for that shared client base. That's me. I'm gonna hand back to Miles.
Fantastic. Thank you very much. Well, ladies and gentlemen, very conscious it's been a one-way affair so far. Now is your opportunity to ask any specific questions you have regarding the material so far.
Hi. Thank you very much for the presentation so far. Can I ask a question about SmartVault and Right Networks? In terms of their existing customers, how many are already your customers? What's the overlap?
Great question. In total, Right Networks has about 8,500 accountants. We estimate we've got somewhere between 300 and 500 of those already. You know, we are already familiar with that Right Networks ecosystem. We've been part of it for a while, but we've never had this formalized channel arrangement until now.
Great question. I can think of another vertical which is even more inefficient than accounting and tax practitioners. That's the law industry. I trained as a lawyer. It's intensely paper, you know, focused. Lawyers are in many ways like accountants, operate as sole practitioners. They're not very good at, you know, acting in a collegiate sort of way. I mean, the opportunities in that industry, I would have thought are enormous. The, you know, analogy with insolvency in terms of court cases and, you know, improving the paperwork, paper flows, paper storage, document retention, discovery. You know, you still see people going through all courts of justice, you know, with wheelie files of, you know, boxes of papers, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
I mean, it's crying out for you to crack that.
Agreed. Well, I think what's clear is that the document workflow problems within legal firms are consistent with those in accounting firms. As we just went through, to be successful in those markets, you need to understand their client base extremely well. Arguably more importantly, you need direct integrations into channels that you can talk to those clients. Otherwise, the cost per acquisition just gets very, very high. The legal market is quite competitive in the document management space. For us to build a unique proposition through an integration of one of the practice management is a lot harder for us than going into other verticals or other markets.
When you see the emerging products that we talk about later in the presentations, they're very thoughtfully being done to align both the problem that users are having with our ability to talk to those users and the integration requirements into their core mission-critical software. Unfortunately, the latter two in legal are more difficult than the other markets we've chosen.
Focus is absolutely critical here.
It definitely
In order to succeed in the vote.
We got large enough addressable markets to grow into, grow a substantial business in the markets we're in.
Yeah.
I. I've got. Actually one for Tracy. Hi. Just, I wonder if you could just comment on the onboarding process. Like, how easy is it to pick up all of your documents from various other things and then push them all through, well, into one system or here with GetBusy? Just, is that easy? Is it a sticking point where I'd love you said, "Oh, overnight, I'll move it," but how difficult is that process?
There's still space for improvement there, for sure. I've recently started using Ignition to help with the onboarding process 'cause I could, in the past, probably spend half a day getting ready to bring a client into the firm. You get to the point where you think, "I don't want any more clients," which is crazy, really. That's in, you know, you've got to fill out all these different places of the information for that client. You've got to prepare an engagement letter and go through quotes and everything else and set them up on the billing system. It is a bit sort of crazy. Ignition has helped a lot, and I'm hoping that the stuff that you're doing with the quotes and stuff will actually just bring all those things together.
Ideally, what I wanna be able to do is send out a quote. They say yes, and then the rest happens. That would just be fantastic.
Absolutely. I think DocDown and Quoters will really help in that regard. There is still a part of onboarding that we don't solve. We're looking at it, but the know your customer bit, where you're doing your verification of identities and entities is still a really complicated space that we're staying away from just for the moment. Let's get our other bits right, and then we'll come back to that part of the onboarding later.
Sure. Thank you. I've got a second one that's actually for Deborah. GetBusy, you've spoken about the depth of the integrations with yourselves and other partners, but how much of a heavy lift is it from your own perspective? Like, do you guys need to get involved? How do you need to tailor to make sure that actually you guys are happy with the quality of the end product that is being well, 'cause you've got mutual clients.
Yeah, I mean, it's a bit of a joint initiative between us. Our developers work with their developers, both sides, to build that integration. It's not a one-sided thing. Then we go through a quite rigorous test process to make sure that the workflow makes sense from our end user's perspective. Yeah, it's quite a co-joined effort, wouldn't you say, David?
Yeah.
It's not done in isolation. We've got our dev teams working together quite closely, both on the on-premise integration and what's coming ahead in terms of the cloud integration. Yeah, so we work closely, not just at this level, but down to the UX/UI, down to the development side of it and the test cycles as well.
That I think right there is a difference and the competitive advantage you build up through tightly integrated partnerships as opposed to just generic API integrations. You can build an app store of thousands of different apps that you integrate with, and Zapier is a perfect example of that. That's a very different outcome for a customer than what we're very focused on doing through TaxCalc or through IPS.
Okay.
Does it make sense for Turnkey and GetBusy to be the same company?
Good question.
You need some cash, though.
Yeah.
I guess to answer that initially, they're a core ERP system and some productivity suites. We do the wrap. If we were to get together with Turnkey, we'd then be in that core ERP space and other practice managers, you know, we'd have to move more broadly into that. It's an interesting question, but not one where we're ready to go just yet.
Yeah.
It's a different space.
If you look at our background from Reckon, it was that we were integrated document management into practice management and tax applications, and we saw the limitations that had in terms of your addressable market, and that to be honest, document management was a decimal place on Reckon's P&L, so there just wasn't the focus in it that we've been able to do through having a sole company that's own identity and its own capital. So yeah, I think as Miles rightly said, sticking to the productivity layer is probably where we're best gonna create value.
Can I ask just 2 quick questions? On the Virtual Cabinet presentation, you talked about how I think 4% of the user base are now using Virtual Cabinet Cloud. Do you have any feel as to where that could be or in terms of penetration? 4% seems like a great job off the bat.
I'll take that, William. I mean, if you look at where we got to with the portal. The portal is probably the most innovative part of the or was the biggest step change in the innovation of Virtual Cabinet, and that's got through to about 55%-60% penetration among the customer base. Ultimately, we expect that to be substantially greater. You know, there will be nobody exchanging sensitive information via email in ten years' time. If they do, they'll probably be out of a job. This will become a core part of functionality. We expect the same journey ultimately with VC Cloud. How long that journey takes is anybody's guess.
I mean, we're obviously pushing it to people 'cause we think it's a fantastic user experience. You know, these things take time.
The other question was on SmartVault. Do you have any sort of feel? I guess it may be too early 'cause you're just launching it, the two new products in terms of penetration into the customer base there.
I'll tell you a lot more in a year.
Thank you. I was hoping Paul wasn't gonna answer either of those questions.
The beta is out with SmartVault next week, and I think we've got 80 customers on the beta.
Yeah.
We're going very hard with making sure we get it right. When we get their feedback, then we'll be more comfortable with a hard launch.
I think it's worth remembering why we chose those pieces of functionality is because they were the core things our customers were asking for, particularly the DocDown capability, so the form fill capability. You know, we didn't just go out and find something shiny and think, "Let's try and sell that to our customers." It was something they wanted. That gives us confidence that penetration should be strong over time. Thank you.
Hi there. Can you just talk about SmartVault? So as you run the US and you've got the whole team there doing the development, and then you've got Virtual Cabinet and Workiro here. Is there a like an idea to like have one kind of... You know, especially as Workiro moves into Virtual Cabinet, is there a possibility of kind of having one ultimate product that... Or like is there any efficiency there for like developing together? Like are you duplicating things? That kind of thing.
Yeah. Understood the question. There's lots of knowledge sharing and there's a lot of joint experiences and customer feedback that across the two businesses are shared regularly. Where they differ is in their direct integrations and the specific workflows that they provide for their respective clients. You know, Tracy's requirements are quite specific and so we wanna make sure we cater adequately for her. Then, you know, Deborah's clients are pretty specific as well, and we wanna make sure we cater adequately for them. If you start to merge the two products too much just for the cost synergies that you may get for that, you'll dilute the experience of those users. Moving all their data into one platform is extremely difficult and complicated and risky.
You know, I think there's ample opportunity, and I think we accelerate growth quicker by having very focused, targeted units where they understand the integrations and the value in which they provide, and therefore can attack those markets in quite an aggressive way, and we don't dilute focus or capabilities of any one of our applications.
Going forward, without a doubt, though, there will be closer, more tighter technology stacks, if that makes sense. Seeing the same features and functionality across both of those stacks. There is some efficiencies to be had, albeit to Dan's point, we wanna keep them very focused on their own markets.
DocDown and Quoters is a great example.
Perfect example.
...where it will be sold through all business units. Workiro and the ability to extend signatures will be extended in all business units. There's lots of sharings in that respect.
Thank you. The two new products, so yeah, DocDown and Quoters, when you talk about Virtual Cabinet Unlimited, would they be part of the bundle or they'd be an addition?
It's a very good question. The honest answer is we don't know. We're gonna work with the clients to understand what the demand is and how much value it provides in terms of reducing churn in our VC base, or how much value it provides as a new sale in an expansion opportunity. Until we do that research and that validation, we won't commit to one or the other way. The second section of our presentation is gonna be very focused on our emerging products and our culture. The idea behind that is to show how we are taking a long-term view to success and how we are confident and why we are confident that we can continue our growth rates well into the future.
I think if you go back to our purpose of scalable, predictable and valuable continuation of high growth levels is a key component of achieving those goals. We get lots of questions like the great question earlier around legal markets and other markets that we can go into within our core products. I think that what we really wanna get across to you today through this slide is that we've put a lot of thought into the deep expertise we have in our markets to determine where we go from here to open additional addressable markets and how we create value for more clients. With Workiro and Certified Vault, they are very purpose-driven applications into markets in which we're confident we can understand.
We're confident that we can build up the integrations required to be successful, but also we can create the competitive advantages necessary to penetrate new markets. In both of these circumstances, the underlying capabilities in tech are stuff that we're very familiar with. It's in our bread and butter, it's in our 20 years of experience. The new bit goes into opening the channels required to make these products successful, as we've done with accounting and insolvency in the past. We're gonna now go into, and I'm gonna hand over to Jason first to go through Workiro. We have absolute belief in both of these products being very successful in the future, and we have absolute belief that these products will continue our growth well, as a long-term vision.
As a result of that, you know, the expertise and the team and the capabilities that they're about to show hopefully resonates considering what we've just talked about. You feel that this is a natural progression of our business given our capabilities and our history. On that note, hand over Jason, who's gonna go through Workiro.
Thanks, Dan. Okay, so I get to turn up just after the break and walk you through the new shiny thing. Now, in all seriousness, Dave, and Dan, you have done a great job in explaining what we do as a business, the problems that we solve, and the challenges and all of the markets that we cover with our existing products. With Workiro, I'm not gonna take too long to go through this. I've got three slides. I'm gonna let the product talk for itself, so I'm gonna give you guys exclusive access to a promo video that has never seen the light of day. By the time this comes out, it'll be too late for me to get in trouble.
I'm also going to just walk through the opportunity rather than the product and the feature set, and just go into detail there. Ultimately, why Workiro? Well, imagine if you gave a bunch of techie guys that have spent their entire lives, working lives, like Dan just said. I mean, I've been working here for over 20 years. If you go out to the toilet and you walk past a desk on the left-hand side, there is not a member of staff out there that hasn't worked here for over 12 years. All of that experience put together with all of the challenges that Dave's talked about, give them a whiteboard and some pens, find out what they can come up with. Well, I'm gonna show you what we did today.
Ultimately, though, based off all of those pain points around email capture and all of those bits and pieces, and the fact that work is harder than it needs to be today. Majority of work happens in email, we know that, or now internal chat, particularly with lots of people taking on Teams and Slack. We're also hearing that those have come with their own challenges around siloed information, as Dave was talking about earlier, and key customer information being stored and locked away in direct messages. People are either taking to apps on their own personal phones and using their own apps and their own local data to store client information, and there has been many cases in the press where that has been the case.
We're here to disturb that market, and bring a tool that has all of the best bits of what we've done before, but it's a spaceship. Looking at this here, this goes through our features and our target personas. Obviously we had a look at that. How do you take this to market? My job with my colleague Ben, who unfortunately isn't here, but he's the guy that held on to the pen on the whiteboard for the longest, by the way. He can be to blame for most of this. We've got some features, but the video will show exactly what those things are. Many other applications have got our features. They've either got them separate or they've got them together in a way that is still copying the way that you communicate in business today.
It is not a reinvention of the way we do work. We have built a tool that will be used by generations to come, and completely reinvents the way that you communicate with customers, vendors, and unfortunately Tracy's gone without the need for an account. There's a lot of people that it works for, right? A lot of teams that can use this product, whether you're in finance, whether you're in procurement, HR teams, accounts payable, brilliant. How on earth do you start talking to those people and across the entire globe, with no sort of starting point or industry? What we've did, is we've taken our Virtual Cabinet strategy that Dave's already spoken about. We looked at opportunities.
We were actually approached by Oracle NetSuite, which I'm gonna spend the rest of this presentation talking about, because we are a customer of Oracle NetSuite, and we were doing a case study on stage, and we were basically approached afterwards and gone, "It'd be really cool if you could actually integrate that with us because we don't do any of that." We went, "Okay, let's take a look." What we've done is we've spent a long time looking at Oracle NetSuite as an opportunity, and we've built our own integration. In answer to your question about what's involved in working with Teams, that's all done by us. There is an entire ecosystem around Oracle NetSuite that allows you to develop and build your own integration. We've been working with customers. We've won our first early customers.
We've been speaking to, building up an entire ecosystem and looking at ultimately making decisions, is this an opportunity that we can look to take Workiro into through integration and through relationships and partnerships like you've seen in the past of how we do it? Because that's how we do things, that's what we're good at doing, and that's what we know. Now, the NetSuite opportunity itself is quite staggering. NetSuite, if you don't know, is owned by Oracle. They are currently sitting at 32,000 companies. That was 29,000 a year ago. There is a huge ecosystem. They fit our geographical spaces, so they are in the U.K., quite a lot actually in Malaga now, but there's a European side, a huge amount of customers in the U.S. of course, and also Australia, APAC as well.
We can see some of the numbers that we're talking about at the top here, but most importantly, this is a multifaceted approach. What do I mean by that? Well, there's the direct element where we stumble across people at a trade show, where they're looking to improve what they do with NetSuite and their ERP market. There are integration partners with Oracle themselves. They have their own direct customers that want to do the right thing by the customers and give them a decent solution. There are value-added resellers. CloudTamers is an example. Just so you're aware, CloudTamers provide an add-on to NetSuite if you own a shopping center or anything that you need to lease out as business units. Guess what? They produce contracts, but they've got no way of getting contracts signed.
When the customer said to them, "How do I sign my contract?" They went, "Nah, you're gonna have to find electronic signature," and then they left it. Now, they've partnered with us. They've built a button into their application, which you're gonna see today. It does work. It's not either, and these things are real, and people are using it. We've got our first customer of it as well this month. We have those, and we also have implementation consultants. Now, to give you an idea, there's around about 300 of those in the U.S. alone, just simply to serve the NetSuite market. There's a huge amount of those around, mainly reselling NetSuite to make money off the recurring revenue, but also consulting services. Lots of people to talk to. Therefore we are.
We've been building toward that. Our integration, which again you will see in a minute, which is voiced over by Ben. Any Top of the Pops fans are gonna be in for a right treat. The Oracle NetSuite integration was basically we dipped our toe in the water this time last year at SuiteWorld because you could only do it remotely because of COVID. We worked with our customers. We looked through our integration. We learned from them. We built a brand-new SuiteApp, which you'll see today. That SuiteApp, which is the integration with NetSuite, is embedded inside of NetSuite. It's an alternative to some functionality which is very difficult to use currently in NetSuite.
I'm very happy to announce, unfortunately Tracy's not here, so I don't need to be ashamed, but we are gonna be doing a hard launch of that next week at SuiteWorld. The timing of this is perfect for me. There will be 5,000 people getting eyes on what you're about to see next week, 3,000 of them end users, 2,000 of them from the partners. That will all be gone. We are exhibiting at that event, and the next video will show you exactly what we'll be exhibiting to them and showing them, and we'll also be available online to all of their teams. Right. This promo video has a small safe harbor at the start statement because we've basically taken it from our NetSuite presentation.
This bit will give you an idea of the application's functionality and the things that we do that you cannot do inside NetSuite, and there are big frustrations, particularly around email capture and Word.
Welcome to this quick fire compilation of NetSuite extensions that supercharge your experience and make everyday tasks so much easier. Number one, get to work quickly. NetSuite Relationships can provide integrated access to all tasks, communication, and documents with a powerful overview of your active work. Every action and message logged, the ability to navigate to documents and their history, access and check in on the work of others, filter and drill down to what's most important and much, much more, helping you get the information you need faster and more easily than ever. Number two, drag and drop. Every click matters. Drag documents directly onto NetSuite records, making it far easier to capture and organize work or evidence, helping to ensure critical information gets logged in the right place. Number three, save to NetSuite. Save documents from your favorite apps like Microsoft Office and Google G Suite.
In this case, a document from Microsoft Word, uploaded with a single click, then intuitively tagged against any number of NetSuite records or relevant filing areas, all to provide a secure, organized copy of important information that's only ever a click away in NetSuite. Number four, collaborate live. Collaborate and communicate with others to achieve anything, including everyday stuff like requesting review and approval of documents, decisions, purchases, payments, you name it. Create tasks to help ensure that work gets done and gets done well from pretty much anywhere, including Microsoft Word. Add the people involved, assign responsibility, comment, and tag against NetSuite records, all of which creates a secure, collaborative thread that provides ultimate clarity and control with a consumer-grade messaging experience. A messaging experience that's real-time, updates automatically, and is embedded in NetSuite. Number five, log emails.
Reclaim visibility, control, and compliance when it comes to both internal and external communication that's happening in the black box that is email. Capture emails and their attachments from within Outlook or Gmail to store against NetSuite records so that everyone has access to the latest information and no one is left in the dark. Number six, track approvals. Turn an email into actionable, trackable work. From customer inquiries and sales order queries, all the way to vendor bill approvals. Create clearly assigned tasks that help ensure work gets seen and done. Emails in Outlook and Gmail can be converted directly into tasks. Templates can be used for standard processes. You can add anyone that needs to be involved, assign responsibility, and organize it against NetSuite records. Tasks provide real-time, secure messaging that appears live against NetSuite records and keeps everyone up to date and in the know.
Number 7, action transactions. Create tasks, communicate, and collaborate on NetSuite transactions, both inside and outside of your organization with status and progress visible in NetSuite. At the click of a button on a quote transaction, in this case, create a new signature request and apply a pre-configured signing template. Once you've selected the people that need to sign the quote, they'll be notified immediately and invited to a secure, branded signing experience that's super simple to use and even provides real-time messaging for questions and queries. You're notified of all customer activity and interaction, and it's all accessible directly in NetSuite, including final signed versions of documents, which of course are stored in the right place automatically. Number 8, never miss a thing. Knowing what's happened, what's happening, and what needs to happen in NetSuite via your dashboard is critical to ensuring the right things get done.
Use a portlet to embed your tasks, communication, and documents into your NetSuite dashboard and provide powerful views to prioritize and schedule your work, as well as provide live push notifications and a smart inbox that helps you stay on top of everything that's going on. Nearly there with 9. Stay in the know when you're on the go. As well as creating and managing work from within your NetSuite dashboard, entities, and transactions, you can control all of your work anytime, anywhere on any Windows, Mac, Android, or iOS device. With native apps for your phone and tablet, you can achieve anything on the move. Whether you're buzzing around the office or out and about seeing customers. With everything you do on the go, all accessible and visible from within NetSuite. Number 10, work on the move. Hi, Gavin. Just a quick one.
It was great to meet you earlier on in the week. The team are working on your proposal. Just wanted to drop you a note before the week's out to let you know I'll be with you Monday. Have a great weekend. Speak to you then. Use your camera to take photos, scan documents, or record a video message. From items in your camera roll, to email attachments, to documents created in other apps or stored in services like Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox. You can capture and send information and documents to anyone securely. As ever, everything you do is organized and accessible from within NetSuite, giving you and your team total clarity, complete control, and helping to deliver incredible service with less effort. All of that is just the start.
To find out more, come and meet the team at SuiteWorld 2022 or book a personalized demo at workiro.com.
Right. Before I pass over to that. I didn't have a slide at the end. The only other thing to mention is, I think it was a question on adoption and onboarding earlier, I think from a SmartVault perspective. We have also learned our lesson on how to bring people on. You saw all of that opportunity there, right? How do you get to it, and how long does it take to get to it, even if everyone says they wanna buy it? 'Cause that can take time. What we've done is we've built our application using the latest technology. We have deployed sites that are at three-figure users. They're based in London, they've got over 100 staff. We have managed to turn that around.
We turned it around relatively quickly from our availability perspective, but it only takes, like, a 1-hour remote session to implement. Then we did a train the trainer for a second hour, so it's 2 hours. For NetSuite, that's unheard of. You can install it from the marketplace, so we're available on there. That's pretty much everything. Cheers.
Thanks very much, Jason. I don't have any walk-on music like Jason has, so I feel a bit bad for that. I'm gonna talk about Certified Vault, which is our other major emerging product. Certified Vault, for those that don't know, is a concept that was birthed out of our core SmartVault application last year. We took a prototype to market, and we were absolutely delighted with the early uptake of that prototype product. What does it actually do? Certified Vault enables us as a technology business to act as a custodian in an asset finance transaction. Let me give you a real-life example of that. Within the U.S., there's about 80,000 security alarm dealers, so building alarm dealers.
A lot of those dealers enter into asset finance transactions to fund the equipment that they then put out into their customers in order to have security alarm contracts behind it. They don't sell the equipment to their customers, they effectively lease those pieces of equipment to their customers. They need the capital to buy that equipment from the OEMs in the first place. Often you'll have a bank or a club of banks that sits behind that transaction, effectively funding those security alarms in a secured way, and that security is typically over the security alarm subscription contracts themselves. It's not over the equipment, it's over the revenue stream that is associated with that equipment.
Now, if you consider with over 80,000 alarm dealers out there and the volume of transactions that typically these sorts of people do, that can be an administrative nightmare, and the default position in the U.S. is still for paper-based, paper-executed asset finance agreements. We sit in between the bank and the, in this case, the security alarm dealer, effectively housing their security alarm contracts in a very controlled way, which if you think managing documents in a very controlled way is pretty much what SmartVault's been doing for the last 14 years. We enable then that bank to securitize those assets. If the security alarm dealer defaults on their loan, we enable that bank to take control of those assets just with a click of a switch. Obviously, that's done in a very controlled way.
Rather than having paper going from safe to safe and having to be transported from safe to safe, these contracts are now housed entirely digitally. They're executed digitally, which enhances the customer experience at the other end 'cause people do wanna get away from paper, even though that's the default in the U.S., and enables a much more efficient process for them to be able to securitize those debts. This market really only started to emerge less than a decade ago, and it's been very, very slow-moving since. COVID has definitely accelerated awareness that this is the way people want to do business. What's driving that?
First of all, the legal framework around which people can look after documents in a custodian capacity has only really been able to harden over the last few years, and it's still very much in development. This is a new area for banks, it's a new area for technology companies. Increasingly, companies want to, as with every other business we're seeing, integrate a lot of their applications and ideally have digital end-to-end processes. Banks are some way behind that, a lot of these dealerships are some way behind that, but it's something they're looking to move towards. The securitization of debts, the packaging up of these debts and selling on to other parties to get them off a particular bank's balance sheet, has traditionally been quite a cumbersome process.
This enables them to package them in a much slicker way and potentially create a marketplace for these debts in a much slicker way than has previously been the case. Also what we're seeing is a lot of alarm dealers or, for example, auto dealers, are having or trying to create digital-first consumer-facing operations. In the U.K., for example, we've got the likes of Carwow, people like that. I mean, who actually goes to a dealer now when they actually think about, you know, having to execute a transaction of buying a car? That's something which is happening increasingly in the U.S. as well, and the technology base that sits behind it needs to catch up, and Certified Vault helps with that. What does that market look like?
I've mentioned two specific verticals within the broader equipment finance space there. Auto sales. There's about 160,000 car dealers in the U.S. when you combine both new and used cars. It's very typical in the U.S. for cars to be financed, of course, whether they're new or whether they're used. Each of those potentially looks to take out loans in order to fund those transactions. Each of those is a potential customer of Certified Vault. The security alarm business, there's nearly 85,000 dealers across the U.S. Now, security alarms tend to be high volume, low value transactions.
The more you can automate that process, the more profitable those businesses become, the fewer people they need to do very simple transactional work, and the more potential money the banks can make by securitizing those assets and selling them on. As Dan was saying earlier, for us, the market itself is just a little bit to the left and a little bit to the right of the people we currently serve. The technology, the problem we're trying to solve is pretty much exactly what SmartVault has solved throughout its life. What's particularly exciting about Certified Vault as well is the typical deal size. We're early days in it so far, but typically we're seeing deals at least four or five times larger than typical SmartVault deals.
We've been having conversations about our first six-figure deals for SmartVault. Conceivably this moves SmartVault, with effectively the same product, slightly different front and back ends, into the enterprise space, into a market which we can really start to get some traction in. What do the next few years look like for SmartVault? As I said, we launched it as a prototype late last year. We were frankly a bit blown away with how quickly we started generating interest. Rather than bring customers on at any cost, we decided to take a step back and make sure that we were credible in this marketplace.
That we fully understood exactly what the customers needed, that the product met those requirements, that we're dealing with all the complex regulatory and compliance burden behind it, and that we were able to then go to market on the front foot with a very credible product that can stand up when we go and speak, not just to the auto dealers, but crucially to the lending parties. Because there'll be nothing better for us than having a channel that is one of these secured lenders that says, "Well, if you wanna take out a loan with us, you need to use Certified Vault to transact the business." That gives us an awful lot of reach and breadth in this market and is ultimately what we're looking for. As we move into 2023, we'll look to turning on those customer acquisition taps again.
To be honest, I can't wait. Seeing what we're able to achieve with almost no marketing budget, with salespeople who are sort of making this up as we were going along, was tremendously exciting. You know, we will have had about 12 months to start honing that and start getting it right. We're expecting that to be fairly significant. That will give us a chance to refine our pricing. We'll be working as well on our security certification. The security requirements of an SME bookkeeper or accountant are very different to the security requirements of, say, Investec or Lombard or someone like that. Some of these asset finance providers. We want to make sure that we're not knocked back the moment we're going to start speaking to these people or certainly speaking to their tech teams.
Again, security is something we've done as a business all our life. This doesn't scare us. It's just certifications we've never needed in the past that we're just gonna go through and get. We then start building some meaningful ARR traction. I know a question from William later will be, "What do you mean by meaningful?" I'll ask the same back to him. The aim of this business is then to develop as we have with our existing business, as we've had to do with SmartVault, as we've had to do with Virtual Cabinet, is to build a predictable, reliable customer acquisition model and find channels, in this case, through the asset finance providers, that give us a broader access to a market without every sale having to be transacted through an individual salesperson who sits in this room.
That will then be the next few years. Now, this whole timetable can shift to the left, it can shift to the right. This is the journey that all of our products, without exception, have gone on. Workiro is on the same journey as we speak. What we're confident around is that there is comfortably a big enough market here, that we have the products and we have the capabilities and we have the people to deliver a business through Certified Vault, which has the potential to be at least as big as SmartVault is today. eOriginal have already validated that for us, and we believe we can repeat that. I'll now hand over to Dan to talk about people and culture.
Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Jase. Hopefully you can see through our emerging products, we are replicating the success we've had in the industries we're very successful in. The methodology, the approach, the problems that need to be solved, and targeting those and focusing those capabilities into new addressable markets where we can increase the value of our business by increasing our addressable markets. These products don't take away these new products from our existing businesses. They just add additional value too. We're not capital constrained in any way. We can do all of this in a methodical, calculated way. The opportunity here is, as Paul rightly said, each one of these businesses can be as big, if not bigger than our current businesses over the next couple of years. What does success look like?
In 12 months' time, Jason will hopefully be presenting in the first section of this presentation with a partner or a customer or NetSuite themselves, talking about customer success stories and abundance of those. We understand what it takes to make this successful, these markets, especially considering NetSuite is accountants, which is something we've been spending lots of years in. We understand how we need to talk to them, what we need to do to make it successful. We are very confident that these emerging products over the next couple of years are gonna add substantial scale to our business. Now I'm gonna move on to something I'm very passionate about, people and culture.
I really appreciate Miles's guidance he's given me over the years, and one thing sticks in my mind more so than anything else is, as you scale, don't lose your culture. Humor me for a second. Let's play a game. Let's assume that the products that we've got, we all agree, are the right products for the right market. The integrations we've got are the right integrations, that the opportunity is clearly there, and that we can build a substantially bigger business, right? Strategically, we've ticked all the necessary boxes to give us what we need to be very successful. We've adequately got the capital and investment required to go and scale these organizations. Assuming all those things are in place, what makes you successful? It comes down to execution.
Execution is reliant on people. Our people code, our people sell, our people support, our people create relationships. Our people are our business. You can't truly care about your customer if your company doesn't truly care about you. You can't continue to be successful and getting them in every day to be better if you don't have a purpose or a meaning. All of that is our secret sauce. It's cultural values which aren't just words on the piece of paper. They're the fabric and the DNA of our company, which we live by every single day, which is why so many people within this organization has been here for so many years. It's why people come in to be happy. It's why they come in to be productive.
If you ask me, assuming that all the strategic opportunity is there, what my biggest job is over the next couple of years is creating an environment that enables very clever people to be successful. That's it. If we let these great people and give them the space to be successful, then as a business, we're gonna be significantly bigger than we are today. I've got a strong view on this. I remember seeing in a presentation not long ago where they were talking about why U.K. SaaS companies or tech companies don't do as well as U.S., and the whole focus was on investment. There's not enough money in the U.K. market. You know, I think that's a small reason, small percentage of the reason why it doesn't happen. It's culture. It's the ability to fail.
It's the need to show grit. It's the, you know, there's a depth, and I can go on for hours about this, around what makes a tech company successful and what it takes to give people true purpose and meaning. That is something unique we believe we have in the UK tech space. It's not just the fancy office or the free drink or the lunch we give people. That stuff is superficial. That stuff comes and goes. It's much deeper than that. It's the understanding each single person's professional development plan, being very clear on what success looks like at each level. What my job takes is transparent to anyone in this organization. It's being accountable as a leader. It's being human as a leader. It's understanding strengths of people and developing their strengths, not focusing on their weaknesses, right?
Way too often that happens in businesses, right? It's caring, first and foremost, and not treating the 150 people as a number. I know every single one of their names, what their career progression looks like, where their strengths are, where their weaknesses are, and all we are focused on is getting the best out of them, right? When you start to build that kind of. You authentically build that mentality within the way in which you work internally, you start thinking of how that translates to customers. All of a sudden they start thinking about how they can improve the lives of their customers. This is our success, right? More so than anything else.
What gives me the confidence that we will continue to drive growth is because we're battle-tested in the methodology and approaches and the values that we are as an organization. As long as we stay true to that, we find a path to success. We make it work 'cause we know how, and we've got the unity required to get us there. Some validation points. We've got 730 years of collective experience. You can see how we're spread out across the globe. I love that you used rock stars. 144 rock stars within the organization. U.S. and the U.K. cultures are different, but they have the same intrinsic value. You cannot run a U.K. and a U.S. company exactly the same way. Does not work. Motivations are different, culture's different.
How you define success criteria and so on is very different. There is different dynamics within the U.S. team as there is in the U.K. team. However, the methodology, process, the values, all of that remains core to the way in which the U.S. runs a business and the U.K. runs its business. If you can see, we've got one in three staff over longer than five years. If you can see, as Jase rightly said, you go out there, please, we've all, you know, we welcome you going to speak to the team. You know, they're our biggest assets. We wanna showcase them. You will see there's a lot of people in there that's been there five years or longer. Some of them sitting with us today. Unfortunately, Gail couldn't be with us today.
She's our Head of People and Culture, but her awesome team is at the back, over there, Kaylee and Kelly. She's gonna present through a video. Her and her team are really
It take the ideas I have and embed them in practice within people. Their value to this organization is as big as anyone's. I think as long as we continue to live by this way of working, we can have absolute confidence that the great products and the ideas and the opportunities that these people have presented to you will be able to bring to fruition.
Hi, I'm Gail, and I'm the Chief People and Culture Officer at GetBusy. I am so sorry I can't be with you today, but I hope you find the time with us interesting and informative. My role at GetBusy is to be able to sustain our fantastic culture, a taste of which I hope you have seen and heard today. A key part of our focus as a management team is making sure that we are recruiting and retaining an engaged, motivated group of talented people, and that we are offering them the opportunity to make an impact on society in their roles. As a software business, we wouldn't be anything or anywhere without our high caliber creative people. We have changed our hiring focus and our promotion focus for our people leaders, choosing to promote people for their talent, people leadership, and also their empathy.
We strive to be a company of outstanding ethics. We are very proud of our successful CSR projects. Our global green team have made great efforts to improve our carbon footprint. Finally, this year, we are incredibly proud to launch our newest project that Dan and I are incredibly proud of. It's the GetBusy Academy, where we hope to give back to the community at large by working with schools and local authorities in disadvantaged areas to mentor and coach young people who want to get into roles such as development, finance, HR, operations. We will support and guide them to make it happen, not only from the time when they walk in through the door at 16, but hopefully past that and with the best intentions, mentor them all the way till they hopefully have careers with us at GetBusy. This is only the beginning.
We continue to improve what we do at GetBusy. My team's main aim is to be an employer of choice by Q4 2023. The way we're going, we think we're on target to achieve that goal. We're incredibly proud of what we've achieved at GetBusy in the last three years.
We are both consultants at Virtual Cabinet.
What am I looking for?
I live originally from Bristol.
I was invited for an interview with Alison in her kitchen 20 years ago.
I work in marketing manager. I've been in finance now for around about 35 years.
I'm a developer/Scrum master for GetBusy.
I am originally from Brazil.
I'm now an account manager, so I was given the opportunity to move from the Australian office over to the U.K. office.
We do training, we make sure the client's happy, and we do implementations, project planning, all of those types of things.
Accounts receivable and accounts payable specialist. I deal with cash. Money.
Yeah, I do the web development per se, so I program pretty much.
My main role is to make sure that the team is heading in the right direction. It's very difficult. We have lots of different people, lots of very talented, clever people, all with strong opinions.
I co-manage the delivery team with Alex, and that involves looking after consultants and making sure they get out and about doing installations for our customers.
What do I love about Virtual Cabinet? I love the people mostly. That's my number one.
Well, the talent that we have in the team is amazing. It's like we have experts in so many different areas.
The people, the culture.
Yeah.
The general attitude.
Made lots of friends working at the company over the years.
Yeah.
Anytime you ever need to ask a question, there's always someone there to help, and they're always, you know, willing to help as well.
I think the attitude is very much roll your sleeves up and get on with it, no matter what level of management or level in the company.
There is always this open channel to get things sorted.
I've seen the company grow and get bigger and bigger from being a family firm with about 100,000 employees when it first started to the company that it is now.
My first day with Virtual Cabinet, a long time ago.
Wow!
A little bit nervous because obviously I didn't know anyone in the office. No, it was brilliant. Everyone was really friendly. It was nice to go into a team of like-minded people.
Ooh, what is my fondest memory? Apart from meeting this lovely guy next to me.
Both my manager and my director made all the way to Hungary during the wedding, and that was quite something.
When I was given the opportunity to go and see a client face to face, yeah, that was what initially got me to kind of love my job, really.
I think, again, you can really see some of these sites that we do, but we do make their lives genuinely easier after we leave.
I feel very proud to work for GetBusy. They really believe in the product, and they want it to do well, and everybody supports each other.
We provide products that, you know, help people.
It feels like, you know, this is my baby, and I'm more of like, I don't know, half-embarrassed just by using that product every year.
Parties have been good. I've had a few.
You know, we've had a few memorable Christmas parties.
Yeah.
I would say.
You're flexing your muscles.
Of course, you get to know people that you would never have spoken to before in different departments.
Especially the size of the company is now.
Yeah.
Is probably the best time to meet all of the new people.
Recently, the most exciting project that I've worked on was specifically rebranding the website and learning a lot about how that worked, how things were constructed, what the process is.
Recently, I've been involved in something we call Project First Class, which is where we've got the department heads and discuss how we can offer a better service to our clients.
Actually, no, probably the most exciting one I did wasn't just one client, it was a few different clients when I went to Australia for a month.
It's helped me develop in my career personally, but also, assisting our clients along the way as well.
One of the best clients I've worked with is in America, large accountants there, and they decided they would take me away for a ski weekend as well. It's very memorable clients.
We're not just friends at work. We do things outside of work as well.
I feel it's the kind of company that you can grow with. Obviously been very fortunate to end up in the job that I'm in that uses skills from my university degree. Yeah, I just, I really enjoy the nature of what I do and the people that I'm working with.
Yeah, you're always developing your career. Never stagnating.
No, your skill set's always expanding.
Yeah.
Yeah, 100%.
Virtual Cabinet has helped me in my career path by putting me on various training courses. I say I didn't start off working in marketing when I joined the company. Anything really that I've said I've got an interest in, they're happy to support me and see if that's something that they can offer me.
It's just a great place to work. You know, you can see that the company are actively making an effort to make your life working there better.
I think anybody that enjoys their job, enjoys job satisfaction, yeah, can't go wrong.
It's everything that you want from a job.
Yeah.
-really.
Yeah.
We are always trying new things. It's the right tool for the job, not the job to fit the tool.
I don't feel like we're missing anything.
No.
Excellent. I think a lot of that team is out there today, so you're welcome to have a conversation with them before you leave. I think we're very conscious life's not a rehearsal, and we understand and are not shying away from our responsibility to create an environment that gets the best out of our people and maximizes the potential and captures the opportunity in which we've got over the next couple of years. As a team, and I can speak for the team 'cause I know them inside out, we're very determined and confident that everything we've presented to you over the last couple of hours, we will give 150% to over the next couple of years.
As you can see, the approach we take from a people perspective and a working, an execution perspective is very thoughtful. There's methodology, there's processes, it's by design rather than accident. What we do is we overlay our financial understanding of our businesses and the key leading indicators on top of that to produce really clear KPIs of how each element within our operational cycle is performing. On that note, I'm gonna hand over to Paul, who's gonna talk at a high level around ambitions and from a financial metrics perspective, how we can get to the growth that we have presented to you today. As I said, we have a very calculated, formulated and scientific approach to achieving these goals.
Thanks, Dan. As I think most of you all probably know, last year we announced our ambition to at least double our ARR within five years. Practically speaking, what we're aiming for there is GBP 30 million in 2026. I think hopefully from what you've heard today, you'll appreciate there is, you know, significant potential from a number of areas in the business, for us to exceed that. Naturally, that's what we're aiming for. With our NOMAD in the room, I will be taken out in handcuffs if I walk through what those ultimate ambitions look like. This is what we've been comfortable going to market with. Hopefully, all of you are very familiar with the fact that we have never, ever as a business had a downgrade. We've only ever upgraded the market.
We've always guided the market sensibly and conservatively because any of you who have run a business before will know, you know, there's always a ton of things that can go wrong as well as go right in business, and we believe that's a responsible approach. What does that business look like, you know, 5-10 years hence? It will continue to grow. It will continue to see sustained double-digit ARR growth. We've proven within our existing businesses, specifically in Virtual Cabinet, that these sorts of businesses can get into 30%-40% EBITDA margins over time. Now, naturally, as a management team, we would like to see that sort of EBITDA margin on a GBP 30-40 million ARR number than the GBP 18 million that we're at today.
We're fortunate that a product of our business model and the products of the U.K. tax environment is that we've been able to do that since IPO in an essentially cash neutral basis, and that's how we expect to continue to grow. The power of having more than 65% of your customer base paying you annually in advance cannot be understated for a software business like ours, particularly one with high gross margins where the cost of delivery is very minimal once you've got a customer on board. What does that growth look like? Hopefully, because each of the presenters so far today has said it's kind of doing what we've been doing before but doing it better every day. Anyone who's followed us will be familiar with these ARR bridges that we show.
I've been forbidden from making these arrows anything other than identical in size. If you've got your ruler or your tape measure, put it away. Fundamentally, you've seen from what we've presented today that there is significant growth opportunity within the SmartVault business, both through what we've been doing in the past but also through the new channels that we've opened up. It is the same with Virtual Cabinet, with the partnership that we announced today with Turnkey and the other partnerships and integrations that we have, and also through the direct sales team. These guys have been tremendously successful in that. We've also presented to you today two additional businesses, which we believe have the potential ultimately to get to a similar scale that the whole group is at today.
That will take time, but we expect those to contribute meaningfully to our ARR growth over the next few years. You'll be aware that we've recently repriced or repackaged our products. That is a process that is ongoing in the Virtual Cabinet business and is largely now complete within the SmartVault business. We'll continue to look at how we can package the capabilities we have to encourage customers to move up the value chain with us and essentially increase our ARPU. The new capabilities we brought into the business, DocDown, Quoters, HelloPlan, and Workiro for Virtual Cabinet, provides a great expansion path. We've got nearly 75,000 paying users around the group now. Selling more to those people. You heard Tracy talking about onboarding earlier and the ways we can help there with DocDown.
We expect to deliver more value to our customers, which again, will help to propel our growth. Managing our churn has always been something we've focused on. The exercise we've been going through on monetization has helped us to engage with an enormous number of our customers. Some really interesting conversations about how they're using the products, why they're using the products, and why they want to continue using the products. We anticipate, you know, churn to be at least consistent where we've seen it in the past. The potential for upside there as we have gone through a process the last 18 months of really making sure that the customers we have are sticky customers who have made an active choice to continue using our products. All this is underpinned with a tremendous quality of revenue.
You've seen our recurring revenue numbers. You've perhaps not seen before the split of our ARR by contract size and the split of our customer base by contract size. I've been in businesses before where 15, 20% of our revenues come through one channel or one customer. That's a terrifying place to be in. Any one of our customers disappears, obviously, we're always sad when that happens, but it is not going to impact our growth. We have an enormous amount of diversification amongst our customers with no credit concentration. Typically, our customers stay with us for 9 years or so. More than that, we've got plenty of customers who have been with us for over 15 years. We expect the longevity of these products to be significant. Fundamentally, why do we believe in this business?
Well, first of all, as hopefully you've seen today, we are a clear leader in this space. The people out there and the people in Houston make that happen. There is an enormous amount of experience, both in the industries we serve, but also in the technology we provide, in this space. Cloud productivity is here to stay, and we've been a leader in it for some time. The quality of revenues we have enable us to have an enormous level of predictability, of transparency in our revenue base, and enables us to invest, intelligently, to fund, future growth. We're able to drop down a significant volume of our incremental revenues back into growing the business on the back of our LTV to CAC ratios.
We're fortunate that the markets we're in at these times are extremely resilient, but they're also growing, and they have structural drivers behind them. We find that when we win customers, as Debs would find with Turnkey, they are extraordinarily sticky. Our products become part of the way our customers do business, and they don't wanna change that operating model lightly. Our business is extremely scalable. You heard Dania talking earlier about the way we acquire customers in SmartVault. That's through the direct channel. Start layering on the channels either through the likes of Turnkey or through the likes of Right Networks. That increases the scalability of those channels to help us grow these strategically valuable ARR streams. We've got what we believe is a significant runway for growth. We're not a two-product business.
We're a business that ultimately can become significantly bigger than where we are now. We've both proven existing products and new innovations solving very specific problems for very specific and well identified bunches of people. We believe ultimately we're building a very valuable business. We've shown how ultimately over time, these sorts of revenues can drop through to the bottom line. We also see just through transactions in the marketplace, just how much people want to get their hands on our customers, and that's tremendously exciting for us as well. I hope today's been helpful to you. We'll open up the Q&A now, which Miles will chair.
Ladies and gentlemen, the floor is open. Any questions on the second session or on the day in general that you'd like more information on?
You've publicly talked about you've got a fairly big program to sort of bring some of your older customers up to speed, so to speak. I know you kicked that off at the end of last year. Can you talk about whether or not there's been any. I mean, we're now coming up to sort of renewals and things like that. Can you comment on that, whether or not there's been any sort of sticking points there? 'Cause that's. You had a big acceleration there, and that's probably a key thing for estimates, certainly in the near term. On a slightly different tack, DocDown Quoters, and it's very interesting to hear about the sort of monetization piece and how you. Is it a reduction in churn or is it bumping up VC unlimited? Is it in unlimited?
It is an interesting question. Is there any other sort of similar kind of technology thing that either you're looking to sort of build out yourself, another sort of nice tuck-in acquisition? Are there sort of additional bits of functionality that you're already looking at?
Shall I take the first one?
You do the first one, I'll do the second one.
It's like-
I'll clean up.
Going through an exercise like we have done with our customer base, you know, definitely sorts out those who are engaged with the product and those who perhaps didn't even realize they're paying for it. In SmartVault, sometimes that's been the case with the sort of single users who wanted a, you know, a generic cloud document management provider, but actually weren't using it. If you looked at our logo churn, so the volume of customers churning, we definitely saw during the early part of that monetization journey a bit of an uplift. That's very much settled down to sort of normal run rates for us, possibly a little bit less than that.
At the revenue churn level, which ultimately is what we care about, we've seen almost nothing in terms of uplift or downgrade. You know, a couple of months that have been a bit spiky and then a couple of months that have been a lot more benign. The theory for us ultimately is that this is an opportunity for us to engage with the vast majority of our customers. You know, we've got our account managers out here who are going through that process right now with people, and some of those conversations have been bruising. Ultimately, nearly all of them have been positive because you get a chance to explain to people what "How are you using Virtual Cabinet or SmartVault? Are you using all the capabilities?
Have you heard about, you know, email capture?" These sorts of things. We've ended up with what we believe is a much more engaged client base. There's nothing in our data at the moment that points to a material increase in churn or anything like that. You know, realistically, these things take one or two cycles to flush through. You know, anecdotally, as someone who pays for software in our own business, I can tell you that if someone like Salesforce came along and next year put our price up by 30%, I'd be really cross on day one. By day two, I'd be speaking to our ops team, say, "Right. That's it. We're done with Salesforce.
Out we go." Then they'll tell me all the reasons we use Salesforce or how it kind of helps automate our business. "Well, that's fine, Paul, but you'll need, you know, five extra sales administrators to do everything." Over time, I'll realize, actually, that's not a practical thing for us to do, and I'll start to remember why I loved Salesforce in the first place and why we used it in our organization. There tends to be a process people go through. It's a very human process.
Yeah. In terms of DocDown and Quoters, as I said, we'll run the process to determine how best to sell those into our client base. Just going through logical approach, VC's monetization is very much in play at the moment. We're getting a lot of responses from our clients, and we're not seeing an uptick in churn. Our gross churn is where it was 12 months ago. To bundling new applications into an application that's already low churn to try and get maybe a little bit more low churn probably isn't gonna add a huge amount of value, right?
Assuming our churn stays low, your question is, are you best to sell it as an add-on, so for an extra $10 a month, those who want it, or are you best to do a pricing and packaging at some stage where you say everyone's going to $10 more and everyone gets DocDown and Quoters? That's decisions to make as we progress and maturity comes into the applications and we get more adoptions.
There may be different monetization between what we do with VC and SmartVault in those additional functionality sets.
Exactly. Agreed. Depending on the client base. In terms of additional products, I think one product that didn't get the limelight today, and that was probably by design, is HelloPlan, which is the evolution of Planner, which we acquired last year. HelloPlan is all about solving the problem of scheduling meetings. Accountants or yourselves, professionals, generally have high value meetings. They don't necessarily have lots of meetings, but they have very high value meetings. Where if you look at, say, sales team, they have lots of meetings, but it doesn't really matter who turns up. The sales process is relatively simple, similar. If you look at Calendly and a lot of those scheduling apps in the market, they're very focused on low value, high volume.
What we're really gonna target is the high value meetings 'cause our professional firms want to know who's coming to the meeting, what documents need to be agreed, what's the agenda. They need purpose around that meeting. Then ultimately, they need an outcome from that meeting that can get pushed into GetBusy and Tasks, for example. HelloPlan is something in which bubbling in the background that, we're getting a lot of feedback from our clients that they desire it, and we're starting to build that path of what success looks like in that market. Scheduling, there's a natural progression from that into onboarding. You know, Tracy spoke to it earlier. Onboarding is a massive pain point for professional services and accountants particularly.
I just can't believe that if I get signed up to a new accountant or a new bank, it can take me weeks, you know. I have to fill out forms and hand it to someone else to sign and verify, and then I verified it the wrong way and it. If I go to get signed up to a digital bank these days, Monzo, for example, takes me 30 minutes. Why does the digital bank take 30 minutes to onboard a new client and a bank or lawyer or accountant takes 6 weeks? We can solve that, right? I think HelloPlan is potentially, if you're looking into the future of what additional modules, we can bring out, HelloPlan's evolution into onboarding to me is a natural progression. As we've done with everything, it will be methodical, calculated.
We will understand the return on investment. It will be within our capital constraints. These are all processes which we just need to let evolve in the time in which they take. Once they become more clear, that's the time in which we'll showcase HelloPlan in the same way we've just done our other products.
Thanks very much. Cheeky follow-up. Have you said anything on when you're bringing that to market, that last part?
No. As I said, that's still early days in the process.
Sure.
So let's, um, uh-
We'll wait to know.
Yeah. Yeah.
Thanks very much.
Let's wait for that, and there's enough we've got at the moment to create real value.
I think the last question you had there was around gaps in the functionality set that we still don't have yet, and I think the comment around KYC earlier is something that we need to consider as partnering or building as part of onboarding.
I have a quick one from me if I may. You've been very clear on the need, you don't need more capital, and you put out the GBP 30 million target there. Sort of hypothetical one, if you did have more capital, could you grow quicker? You know, could you make it GBP 40 million rather than GBP 30 million, or could you move the GBP 30 million forward? Just in terms of.
I don't-
Sort of stretching the barriers on growth.
Not with confidence in the return on investment. Obviously, theoretically, if you increase the amount going into your funnel and you decrease your efficiency rate, you could probably get more certainty towards that result. You know, within our understanding of returning capital and the efficiencies in which we currently run, scale is not limited by funding. We can even stretch our efficiency rate beyond what we're currently doing, and we've got adequate capital to do that to provide more growth. Anything beyond that stretch becomes a hope strategy for us. I think just based on the market we're in and the successful profitable businesses that we've got, we don't need to take this scattergun VC approach where we're flinging capital with every potential opportunity we've got.
We can take a calculated approach and make sure the return on investment's there. As I said, we even have space to decrease our efficiency within the capital we've got within our existing businesses. Fast-forward 5, 10 years, maybe that changes, right? Maybe we will need capital, but I'm not making a decision for that right now. I'm making a decision for where the business is right now, and we're adequately capitalized. Miles, anything you wanna
Yeah. Funding is always nice. We could certainly sequence some things quicker if we had more money, but I don't think that's the blockage. I think it's quality talent to deliver. You can have more money, but that doesn't necessarily guarantee you're gonna get any better talent. They'll always take time to onboard. The old analogy, you know, it takes a lady nine months to have a baby. Nine ladies can't have one in one month. Adding more talent just doesn't help the blockage straight away. You know, we're focusing very much on having the talent pool to execute first and foremost. Then there will come a stage where having additional funding will help, but it's just not yet, and certainly not at the share price we've got at the moment.
Ladies and gents, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it, and I hope you got a good feel for what GetBusy actually is and what we've got under the hood that's coming down range, 'cause I think it's really, really exciting. Thank you once again for making it.