Parkes

Greetings all.

Welcome back to Signals from Parkes. You might be wondering why we chose this name.

If you’re are familiar with Ignition, you may already know that Parkes was founded and built by a team inside Ignition. You may also know that Ignition was originally founded in Australia.

Parkes is our nod to the roots of Ignition. Parkes, NSW is a small town a few hours west of Sydney. It’s world-famous for being the home of the Parkes Observatory.

This observatory was part of a network of connected observatories that helped broadcast the Apollo 11 moon landing to 600 million people. It did the quiet, dependable work behind a historic moment. In the same way, Parkes connects your tools, your firm's knowledge and the shared skills of a community of firms, to help you run your firm, not your returns.

We are proud of our roots, as much as we are proud of our already globally distributed team of folks that have supported the Accounting profession for over a decade each. We can’t wait to share more.

Tom
GM | Parkes

Greetings all. Thanks so much for signing up to the Parkes waitlist. We are looking forward to bringing you all into Parkes soon.

In the meantime, I wanted to share a little more about some of our guiding principles that not only led us to building Parkes in the first place, but how we built it.

1. Human authenticity and collaboration at the heart: This is critical for us. Among the team, there’s over 100 years of collective experience supporting the accounting profession. We want that experience to show up in an authentic, human way. We’ve built that right into Parkes, with both a free marketplace of shared skills and knowledge, and an embedded community, where you’ll be able to interact with the Parkes team and fellow Parkes users.

Also, if we didn’t have the time to write it, why would you give us the time to read it? Any of these posts we share, will be written by the team, and not by AI.

2. Parkes is for everyone in a firm and our pricing will reflect it: If you’re already using Claude or ChatGPT across your firm, you’re paying per seat. That’s fine for your power users, but you’re likely over-investing for the members of your team that are early on their AI journey. Parkes will be unlimited seats and priced on usage only (more to come there). Commercial AI should be for everyone.

3. Visibility, auditibility: We are power users of Claude. When used well, it’s incredible. However, I have no idea how my colleagues are using it, what for, what’s working well for them, and what isn’t. A team inside a firm needs to see whats happening, such that the collective excellence of the team can rise the tide for the business. Parkes has a robust audit trail that makes every single user query, and subsequent action from Parkes visible to the Admins of the account. While we aren’t proponents of micro-management, we are huge advocates of continuous improvement and collective knowledge

4. One-click integrations with guardrail control: Parkes already has 30+ integrations with your favorite accounting and ecosystem tools. Our goal for Parkes is to have the most comprehensive list of direct integrations imaginable, fully curated for the accounting profession. Each integration is extremely easy to connect. the out-of-the-box controls will ensure that Parkes is not allowed to do anything without your permission. From there; you’ll be able to set up custom guardrails for yourself, and a different set of guardrails for your team. For example, you may choose to always allow Parkes to void an invoice on your behalf in Quickbooks, but completely disable that action for your team. You are in complete control.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more updates where we will give you a sneak peek into the product itself. Keep your eyes peeled on your inbox or come back to Signals from Parkes any time.

Tom Maxwell.
GM | Parkes

Signal from Parkes

Why is it named Parkes?

Our Guiding Principles behind Parkes.

Welcome to Signals from Parkes