How consultants are accounting for Rico in their business

Planners use Rico for similar reasons Accountants use Xero - it removes manual work not worth a professional consultant's time.

In the planning industry it’s common to charge by the hour though, which raises the question, if Rico saves me time does it lower my revenue and/or profit?

A similar problem arose in the accounting industry with Xero, as discussed here. However, this turned out to be shortsighted in the end as the benefits of technology were shared between accountants and their clients.

We are already seeing a similar dynamic play out in the planning industry with Rico.

Rico creates value for consultants by:

• Increasing the value that can be delivered by each planner by removing repetitive manual work.

• Reducing difficult-to-recover costs created by existing processes such as additional training and review (particularly from senior staff), and time spent developing and maintaining templates

Further to this Rico increases the value to clients (as we advertise here) by:

• Optimising the quality of applications through better systems

• Minimising processing times through Council

• Delivering better value for money

Given the additional value, we see the cost of Rico being accounted for in the following ways:

• Including the per-application cost of Rico as a line item/disbursement

• Charging a fixed-priced for reports/assessments, such as an assessment of environmental effects report and achieving better profit margins on these.

Overall, Rico creates a robust repeatable system for removing low-value work allowing you to deliver more value per person and improve your business in other areas. This may require slight adjustments at first, but these are increasingly common where value delivered and increased productivity ultimately win out in the long run.