About Canvus

Jonny Cohen founded Canvus in 2018 after spotting a gap in the way businesses approached workplace and property decisions. Too often, companies were making major choices about their offices and workspaces without the right information, strategy, or support behind them. 

Canvus was created to help organisations make smarter decisions. From where they should be located and how much space they needed, through to designing workplaces that genuinely supported the way their teams worked.

Today, Canvus is evolving again into a more advisor-led business, helping organisations bring together data, insights, and strategy to make confident property decisions. By connecting the dots between people, property, and business goals, Jonny and the team help companies create workplaces that are built for long-term success.

The challenge:

When Jonny started Canvus, his priority was helping businesses make better decisions about their workplaces. The last thing he wanted was for managing his own accounts to become a time-consuming process. 

Previously, his accounting hadn’t been built around a digital-first approach. This in turn made things harder than they needed to be. He summed it up as:

“The company I used before wasn't digital first. So the Self Assessment experience felt a bit labour intensive to put it nicely. It was a lot of work and time to go through stuff to get it in shape.”

Jonny needed a simpler way to manage the financial side of his business, without the process becoming another thing to manage. 

The Crunch difference

Crunch offered Jonny the right balance between easy-to-use technology and human support. The digital-first platform meant he could manage the financial side of Canvus more efficiently, with access to the tools and insights he needed.

As Jonny explains:

“I think the ability to do that quickly at pace has definitely helped me operationally. And the other thing I think is access to the multiple dashboards that is available from the tax, to bookkeeping, to banking. It's made it easy. It’s helped me to make sense of everything in more of a categorised way.”

For him, having everything connected in one place made the day-to-day running of the business feel far more manageable. It wasn't just the platform that made Crunch the right fit, though. Knowing expert accountants were on hand whenever he needed them was equally important. He said:

“Today's world feels like you just get an AI chatbot giving answers, but I need to know it's specific to my accounts and my business. That personal human interaction is really important.”

That reassurance gave him confidence that, when it really mattered, someone was there who genuinely understood his business rather than offering generic advice. Cost was also an important factor. Crunch's combination of an affordable platform and expert support gave him the value he was looking for, without compromising on the level of service.

As Jonny puts it:

“I discovered Crunch as a digital player, and that kind of platform helped to reduce the expense of accounting. That affordability piece plus the customer service was what really pulled me in and that expectation has lived up over the years.”

Together, these factors have given him the confidence that he has an accounting partner that can support his business as it grows.

Jonny’s recommendations:

Starting a business means making big decisions from day one, and Jonny believes one of the most important comes right at the beginning. It also comes with a pretty steep learning curve, but having the right people around you can make all the difference. 

For Jonny, it's about finding partners who do more than simply provide a service, they take the time to understand your business and support you as it grows.

As he said:

"You learn quickly about how they operate. Are they partners? Are they really helping you through it? Or are you just another client? That's something that's really important."

Overall, his advice is simple: don't be afraid to ask questions, invest in the right support early, and work with partners who feel like an extension of your business rather than just another supplier.

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