VEWA as seminar administration at info-steuerseminar

VEWA digitizes the seminar administration at info-steuerseminar GmbH. Extensive price scales from law firms and their cooperation partners. VEWA as a controlling instrument for management to optimize the cost side.

The info tax seminar GmbH is an educational institution and has been offering a wide range of further education and training in the field of tax law since 1988. The target group of the training and education are employees in tax offices, such as tax consultants or tax clerks, to whom the info-tax seminar offers working groups and seminars in order to continue their education and stay up to date in tax law. info-steuerseminar GmbH is headquartered in Düsseldorf.

info-steuerseminar's range of advanced and training courses mainly includes working groups, which are currently being offered at selected locations in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW). Over 60 working groups are offered in 17 different cities within North Rhine-Westphalia. Up to 60 participants register for these working groups. In addition to the working groups, seminars are also offered. These include day seminars in face-to-face form, online seminars, refresher courses, in-house training courses, weekend seminars or client training courses.

The subject areas always include selected focal points that are relevant for the participants both from a theoretical point of view and for practice. The team of lecturers, highly qualified by info-steuerseminar, imparts specialist tax knowledge.

In total, info-steuerseminar organizes around 1.000 events every year. A large part of the events are the working groups, for which venues throughout NRW, speakers and equipment have to be booked. Of course, documents such as confirmations of participation, attendance lists and incoming and outgoing invoices also have to be managed.

The events were initially managed using a self-created individual solution. "Due to the increasing demands on seminar management, we reached our limits, since the individual solution could only be adapted to our dynamic processes to a limited extent," explains Anne-Wiebke Bergmeister, Managing Director at info- Steuerseminar GmbH, the decision to introduce professional seminar management. Because in addition to the individual solution, there was also the website for booking the events with your own customer account, so that two portals with partially redundant data had to be maintained. Invoices also had to be created manually, which meant an enormous amount of work given the increasing number of events.

After Bergmeister had looked at around 10 software solutions, the decision ultimately fell on the seminar management GRÜN VEWA. "GRÜN had the best overall package. Because it was important to us to find a partner who would support us in the digitization of our business processes and at the same time connect the seminar administration to the Internet in an overall solution,” says Bergmeister as the reason for the decision.

VEWA now manages all events at the info-steuerseminar: from the creation of the working groups and seminars to the extensive booking and participation management to the administration of lecturers and equipment.

A large part of the events offered at the info tax seminar are working groups. What is special about the administration of these working groups are the extensive price scales. When creating the seminar, the standard fee for participation in a working group is stored in VEWA. VEWA then automatically calculates the various price scales according to predefined criteria.

As soon as a law firm books participation in a working group, all employees of this law firm receive a reduced fee for the current calendar year. But not only the employees of the law firm receive this discount. In VEWA, any number of relationships to other cooperation partners can be stored in the law firm's data record. The employees of these cooperation partners also receive the discounted prices. This means that discounts are passed on to employees of your own law firm as well as the employees of cooperation partners via relationship management.

In addition to the graduated prices, volume discounts play an important role for the working groups: From the fourth booking within a year and within an event category, the participants receive a discount on the booked events. If you book more than seven seminars, you will receive an even higher discount, so that info-steuerseminar stores up to 10 different prices for a working group and seminars in VEWA.

Another important point is the communication of the info tax seminar with the participants. In addition to the booking confirmation, the participants in the working groups will receive another attachment that lists all the individual dates of their working groups.

Another aspect of digitization: Whereas in the past you had to call all participants if, for example, a seminar was cancelled, a message is now sent to the participants via VEWA. In addition to the cancellation of the appointment, this message also contains suitable alternative appointments in the vicinity. Of course, a rebooking can be made at the request of the participants.

What is special about communication is the distinction between email addresses. If the working groups are often booked through the law firm, the tax advisors and tax clerks also have the opportunity to book further events privately - of course within the discount scales described above.

VEWA is used by the management of the info tax seminar as a controlling instrument. All costs incurred for an event are planned and stored as a target value in VEWA. So you know in advance what the event will cost. After the event, the actual costs for each item are added to VEWA. “Thanks to VEWA, we can compare the target and actual costs in detail. VEWA supports us in controlling and is therefore an important planning and decision-making tool for optimizing costs,” says Bergmeister.

All events in the back office of GRÜN VEWA have been created can be booked easily and conveniently online. Here comes the online seminar administration GRÜN eVEWA, which is connected to the info-steuerseminar website via the VEWA connector. Of course, the discounted prices are also displayed here as soon as a participant has registered on the website.

The advanced training courses are currently primarily aimed at people with prior knowledge of tax law. "We want to further expand our offer so that we can reach more participants beyond NRW, i.e. throughout Germany," says Bergmeister as a short-term goal. To do this, info-steuerseminar relies on optimizing its own website and is striving to optimize the new website in order to be found better in search engines such as Google.