Accounting secret : There are New technologies that can help you better support your clients as an accountant.
As an accountant, have you ever wished you had more time to spend with your clients in order to build up a relationship with them and giving useful business advice?
The act of preparing reports, recording transactions and balancing books can be time consuming. Some accountants do wish they could spend fewer hours on it and more on adding great value to their clients’ businesses.
The interesting news is that today, there are many softwares available that help you automate many of the routine processes to save you lots of time.
Cloud computing, Internet of things (IoT) and big data, AI (artificial intelligence) are reinventing accounting all over West Africa.
Some of these game-changing technologies that is ready to empower you to take up a new role in your existing and potential clients’ businesses are:
ACCOUNTING SECRET I: Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Apart from increasing automation pace, AI also enable fast information discovery by helping businesses to quickly find and recognize patterns in complex data and thereby empowering accountants to generate smart forecasts. In a survey made by Sage, it was discovered that 66% of respondents would gladly prefer repetitive and time-consuming tasks to be handled and automated by AI.
For example, if you are frequent with latest happenings around the accounting sector, you will notice that Chatbots, like Sage’s Pegg, are becoming more popular in accounting cause consumers tends to get more comfortable with asking computers questions. By simply asking Pegg (for example) who your debtors are, you can instantly get an overview of exactly where you stand with your debtors.
ACCOUNTING SECRET II: Big data and IoT (The Internet of Things)
Big data and analytics provides you a new way to interact with data, while Internet of things (IoT) helps you with the quick and automatic capturing of information about business like expense receipts and business kilometres. These information can be presented visually to help give a new insights into the business and also help you in better decision making.
Tip: With this, you can help your clients understand their data. And you can also produce an insightful forecast that will help them run their business in a smarter way by combine their data with financial trends and industry information.
ACCOUNTING SECRET III: Automation
Manual data entry is fast becoming obsolete. You can instantly produce a real-time overview of your clients’ cash flow and improving compliance through the capturing and categorizing receipts, expenses and invoices.
Tip: You can add other values like advising on regulations and identifying areas for growth to your clients’ business if you simply automate as much of their processes as you can.
Why you need to start thinking of employing these new Technologies.
A research done by sage found that 42% of clients expect their accountant to provide them with some accurate and trending business tips and advice. As an accountant, if you embrace this new role, you will be in high demand. But it starts and depends on your level of understanding of opportunities presented by new innovative business solutions and update your skills and capability based on these techs, to enable you add value to your clients.