Its influence is much wider than many accounting professionals realise, accelerating the process of digital transformation in accounting, and greatly changing the workflows by making procedures easier, faster and less expensive, and by allowing accountants to provide even better services to their clients.
Automation enables greater digital transformation across all parts of accounting, freeing up accountants to focus on more client-facing work on a daily basis.
Automation
In this context, it makes perfect sense for human professionals to automate low-value, repetitive and standardised accounting tasks and spend more time on the higher-value, strategically important and value-generating work they’re more qualified to perform. Many other benefits flow from system automation – greater productivity, accuracy and efficiency, such as less time spent on error-prone manual data entry and more transactions per hour processed.
By automating a series of tasks, integration with clients’ current programmes and protocols becomes much simpler, and firms can potentially provide a more custom-tailored, individualised service that increases client satisfaction.
But digital transformation comes with its own shortcomings: the biggest challenge stems from new risks in the sector, in particular thanks to widespread use of cloud services to store sensitive documents, which exposes firms to an increased risk of cyber attacks and data leakage.
Digital transformation must be carefully planned and put into action to ensure that new systems fit neatly into established workflows – rather than stewing in them. While this obviously takes time to accomplish, the long-term gain – and beneficial future maintenance – is worth the investment. A good first step is to identify the priority processes.
Analytics
Digital transformation in accounting is the leveraging of technology to alter how your business runs and communicates, helping you achieve your strategic goals more effectively. For this to occur, you need to have the full support of everyone in management, leadership and on the shop floor – not just a ‘plug and play’ approach to new tech, but integration with what you have.
Digital transformation will allow companies to create new products and services that could not be offered on an analogue basis, opening a route to new revenues and growth, while providing an advantage over competitors through greater efficiency and accuracy.
Accounting is catching up fast in terms of digital transformation, especially in the area of payments, which is the subject of this blog. Automation and digitisation of payments have resulted in significantly improving payment effectiveness: * Accounts payable automation reduces manual data entry, clearing, and reconciliation activity, and increases invoicing and supplier relationship management by teams with significantly smaller team sizes. * Payments are credibly claimed to be happening on time – this, in turn, promotes a healthy supplier relationship. * Companies are hitting their growth and profitability targets; for the larger corporates, they are meeting their obligations for the EU regulations on electronic identification of public sector bodies trade transactions – eIDAS.
Integrations
As digital transformation changes the nature of business, accounting technology must be perfectly integrated alongside other systems in order for accountants to reap the rewards of the burgeoning wave of digital innovation by automating error-prone manual process; engaging clients and stakeholders in streamlined reporting processes; providing real-time data to clients and making decisions based on accurate information.
It’s crucial to understanding your business needs before selecting capability integrations, thinking about workflow and disruption, evaluating security, setting up your software to allow for suitable future accounting requirements today and looking at user friendliness and support for integrations.
Integrating digital tools help to ensure greater efficiency with relation to the financial operations, while at the same time they help with communication with clients and increase the perceived accountant trustworthiness. In this sense, entrepreneurs using such digital tools might bolster their importance as a partner for the implementation of their clients’ business expansion plans. Additionally, digital tools can be used by the accountants to perform advisory services as an integral part of the client relation.
Management
Any for-profit organisation deliberating the commencement of a digital transformation must guarantee that they are beginning with a leadership team who have a track record that includes aiding the area of finance to navigate through the change. Provide tools through training, and services support to deliver facilitation, while offering time and resources for planning are essential not only for the design of IT tools, but for providing transformational leadership to steer cultural and organisational change.
Automation the tedious manual data-entry tasks can be extremely transformational for a business as it eliminates the fallible man entry, provides more time for more meaningful work, increases the productivity while decreasing operation expenses, and help you to take better decisions with the supersonic speed of information analysis and interpretation.
When it comes to digital transformation in accounting, it’s possible to improve services to clients and a firm’s brand as well. By leveraging new software, firms can generate reports tailored to each client’s specs; this boosts confidence in the business relationship, as well as client loyalty – both factors that are instrumental to the health of a client relationship. Additionally, by digitalising marketing, firms can improve their brand recognition, as well as their pipeline of high-quality leads.
