How Excellence Singapore Manages 300+ bookkeeping clients with a 12 person Team

Carton boxes, plastic bags, and a dozen languages

Excellence is a Singapore based corporate services firm that handles everything from incorporation to accounting to taxation. Since 2013, they’ve grown to serve more than 5000+ clients across constructions, interior design,wholesale, retail, investment holding and more.

Their team of about 12 staff manages this volume with a support office in Malaysia handling the heavy lifting. The clients are international: Europe, US, China, Australia, and across Southeast Asia.

That diversity means documents arrive in every format imaginable.

Physical documents by the box

"For those that are physical, it can be very heavy," says the CEO. "Tons of plastic bags or even carton boxes."

Invoices and receipts in foreign languages

Mandarin invoices. Hungarian receipts. Documents that required manual translation before anyone could even start the entry.

Clients who don't organize anything

"When clients don't organize their documents, the team has to spend extra time sorting, matching and finding the right papers. The pre work makes it very difficult to scale."

"Missing invoices, insufficient information, messy documents. This caused the most back and forth issues."
— CEO, Excellence Singapore

They tried other tools. Nothing stuck.

Excellence explored HubDoc and other OCR tools years ago. The verdict:

"It just didn't work out. There was this lack of AI smartness in it."
— CEO, Excellence Singapore

The tools couldn't handle the variety. Different industries, different document types, different languages. For a firm that has served 5,000 clients across that many verticals, partial automation wasn't enough.

The demonstration that changed everything

The CEO first heard about Tofu through word of mouth at a professional meetup. A colleague mentioned "the AI that could read documents."

The turning point was the demo.

"The capability to handle different document types and the high accuracy of its information extraction was pretty impressive. That got us started."
— CEO, Excellence Singapore

Setup was fast. The team had prior experience with other tools, so the learning curve was minimal. But unlike those tools, Tofu actually worked.

"Once we created an account, we could almost use it immediately already."
— CEO, Excellence Singapore

The new workflow: scan, drag, drop, done

Now the process looks like this:

1. Hard copies: Scan them, drag and drop into Tofu
2. Soft copies (Dropbox, shared drives): Drag and drop directly
3. Tofu extracts and processes
4. Export to Xero or QuickBooks

The Mandarin invoices? Handled automatically. The Hungarian receipts? Same. No more manual translation before entry can begin.

"Because it's automated, we don't have to look around, what does this mean? Everything is just taken care of automatically."
— CEO, Excellence Singapore

50% time savings (and counting)

Excellence is tracking time closely to measure the impact. The preliminary numbers:

"We foresee anywhere from 50% or more. That's what I can confirm, about 50% or even more."
— CEO, Excellence Singapore

For a firm processing 600+ clients with a team of 12, that's not incremental. That's transformational.

From typing to reviewing

The real shift isn't just speed. It's what the team does with their time.

"We are no longer just typing. We are actually reviewing and ensuring the integrity of the data, which is more professional. You're a reviewer now."
— CEO, Excellence Singapore

The Malaysia support office used to handle the heavy manual work. Now they handle more volume without the usual stress. The Singapore team focuses on advisory, compliance, and analyzing financial health for clients.

Junior staff who were doing data entry are being upskilled to advisory roles.

"The team can focus on higher value work. Advisory, compliance, analyzing financial health for the clients. You are channeling your focus to something of higher value."
— CEO, Excellence Singapore

"Can you Tofu it?"

The adoption was so complete that Excellence developed their own internal language for it.

"The SOP in our company is very simple. There's a lingo going on. When there's a bookkeeping task, we ask ourselves: Can you Tofu it? If you can, please just load it in. Don't think."
— CEO, Excellence Singapore

That's the test now. Every document, every client, every task: can you Tofu it?

"Like having four arms"

When asked if Tofu feels like an extra team member, the CEO put it differently:

"We only have two hands, two arms. It's as if you have four arms now."
— CEO, Excellence Singapore

Fora 12 person team that is serving an existing 300+ bookkeeping clients, that extra capacity is the difference between scaling and burning out.

What Excellence would tell other firms

"I would tell them to give it a try. The time and accuracy you gain far outweigh the initial setup. It's an essential tool for any firm looking to modernize."
— CEO, Excellence Singapore

The firm has been running since 2013. They've seen tools come and go. This one stuck.

"Tofu is a fast, accurate and reliable AI partner that transforms the way we handle our bookkeeping workload."
— CEO, Excellence Singapore

And when a new task comes in? The question is always the same:

"Can you Tofu it?"