As an accountant in Australia or New Zealand, you’ll know that accounting technology has always helped make your job easier. You’re likely already using technology in your business in some way, perhaps to automate some tasks or make it easier to gather and interpret data. But, chances are, there’s a lot more you could be doing. One survey suggests businesses are losing 200 hours a year per employee to duplicates of manual, low-value tasks and that people spend just 27% of their day on skilled work.
If that sounds familiar, swapping unwieldy manual processes for cloud business management software could save you major headaches, free up time for higher-value activities and put you ahead of competitors. It’s an easy win.
So, which of your core processes should you start with?
Driving profits
You don’t want to miss an opportunity just because your Excel spreadsheet is out of date. But if your team is spending time manually adding data into a spreadsheet instead of converting a lead, you’ve got an entirely different – and equally as limiting – issue. Having an automated system in place will not only eliminate manual data entry but also help you convert leads faster, giving you more time to nurture your clients. Moving your client data to the cloud allows you to easily capture and track new prospects as you turn them into new business.
Managing cash and billing
If you’re manually managing cases and invoices across unintegrated, standalone systems, you’re probably doing things like adjusting each invoice to suit the rates for each client and manually calculating time spent. That’s time-consuming and a process just waiting for errors – so your team is likely managing queries each month, too. By automating your payables you make processing invoices easier, faster and more accurate. That’s because data is automatically imported into your system, reducing the time staff need to spend on manual data entry and eliminating the risk of errors.
Tracking people and workflow
Juggle your teams’ workflow across multiple disconnected systems – think email, Word documents, MSM and face-to-face catch-ups – and you’ll never know who is working on what. It also creates knock-on issues for billing and payroll. Cloud business management software removes all that. Your data is centralised – generating timesheets automatically and managing capacity, job management, workflow, project scheduling and timesheet integration from one system with a companywide view of workloads. Clever integrations with best-in-class apps can help you do more – clearly identify activities across your practice, track budgets, configure project boards per division, team and department and set alerts and prompts so your team never misses a deadline.
Managing clients
Using disconnected systems to manage client data is risky. Get manually updated data wrong, and you are looking at many hours fixing errors, risking your profits and client relationships. A cloud business management system integrated with best-in-class tools changes all that. Automatically track and manage scheduling and chase debtors, manage documents through a secure client portal, get documents signed digitally and generate reports so you can understand which clients are delivering the most value.
Compliance processes for clients
If an accounting practice has a disconnect between systems for its clients’ compliance processes, it has a big problem. It’s leaving clients open to pricy fines if things go wrong, adding unnecessary time to employee workloads and probably delivering less-than-ideal customer service. Understandably, manually keeping up with ever-changing tax regulations is cumbersome too. With a good cloud management system, you can streamline the process – you’ll have compliance information pre-set and, with good integrations, you’ll find that gathering and managing client data is streamlined.
