Digital Transformation: The Accountancy Revolution

Today all industry sectors including accountancy practices are having to embrace technology just to stay in the game. Digital transformation is poised to deliver a radical shake-up to the accountancy sector, and companies are under increasing pressure to deliver on digital innovations, or risk facing extinction. The HMRC’s implementation of ‘Making Tax Digital’ looks set to be a revolution in practice accounting.

Fairway Consulting provides Digital Transformation and technology management to help companies negotiate through the challenges and get the best value out of digital technologies and systems. We are passionate about the helping our clients improve their bottom line using technology.

In this article, I look at 5 elements of Digital Transformation that will bring challenges and opportunities to accountancy practices.

1.Re-evaluate Value

Digitalisation allows accountancy practices to break the yoke of billable hours. Automation frees up time for what matters: advice to the client. And it liberates the most valuable resource of all – time to develop, adapt and grow thus allowing practices to focus on higher margin services.

2.Client Centred

Clients are increasingly expecting the same level of service regardless of time, place and medium.  Digitalisation will allow them to self-serve that service and have it at their fingers tip’s 24/7. Freeing you and your staff from routine requests.

3.Increased Transparency

Transparency creates trust, self-serve accounting also leads to increased transparency. Clients will be able to monitor their accounting and reporting in real-time. Meaning practices will be able to increase their transparency and consequently also increase their service level exponentially. Information often begets engagement.

4.Agility

Increasing digitization facilitates the agility of companies but at the same time also forces them to be agile. Customers are increasingly demanding and open platforms provide endless opportunities – in terms of tailored services.

Agility allows for the rapid development of new personalized services, which in addition create new competitive advantages that are difficult to replicate.

5.Empowering employees

There has never been a time when it has been more necessary to liberate you and your staff to embrace change and break silos. Transformation isn’t just about technology, it’s also concerned with opening communication flow, and inspiring employees to integrate. By encouraging business collaboration, teams can be made agile and empowered responding quickly and effectively to change,

Digitisation is a massive erosion of competitive advantages such as location and access to knowledge and information This evolution is forcing accounting firms to look at the same questions that every company investing in digital transformation encounters: what makes us valuable to our customers, our employees, ourselves?

Fairway Consulting provides Digital Transformation, vCIO and IT consultancy to help companies negotiate through the challenges and get the best value out of digital technologies and systems. We are passionate about helping our clients improve their bottom line using technology.

Interested in how your company could benefit?

Reference

 The CA of the future (Will Mathieson CA DataTracks  March, 2017)

Get your firm ready for the digital tax future (AccountingWEB, April 2016)