1 & Done

Current Challenges in the Accounting Industry

Today’s accounting and tax professionals spend significant time worrying about the applications, systems, and files required to do their job and service their clients. They need access to a growing number of new applications. They are sharing information between themselves and their clients while being bombarded with headlines about security issues and data breaches.

Many are bound to an office location or a slow performing remote access solution to get to the systems and data they need. These situations reduce office productivity, add to capacity constraints especially during tax season, stifle client collaboration and limit entry into more lucrative new advisory services.

Technology Leverage Points

In mid-2019 a leading global consulting company speaking to a variety of accounting and tax firms of varied size found the following attributes most desired by the firm and their clients:

Remote Access to Full Featured Desktop Accounting & Tax Software

“Many of our clients have multiple locations… and some are international, so they want anytime, anywhere, any device access to our full featured desktop software application.” – Principal, CPA Firm

Multi-User Access to Desktop Accounting & Tax Software

“We wanted the flexibility to have multiple users access the system at any time including having a CPA and a business professional reviewing the same file simultaneously.” – CFO, Software Company

Substantially Increased Data Security

“Security and data protection have now become one of the most important challenges facing accounting firms and their clients. This is too big an issue for us to manage ourselves.” – Principal, CPA Firm

The Impact of the Cloud

While many CPA firms and accounting professionals are generally aware of the cloud most are not very familiar with how it works or how it could dramatically impact the ability to achieve business objectives.
Cloud offerings are changing the way firms and their clients do business including:

• Changing workflows.
• Enabling scale without geographic boundaries.
• Creating integration of data and applications not previously realized.
• Easing IT costs, overhead and security concerns.

The cloud can deliver all the leverage points we discussed earlier in this paper including the flexibility to support large and smaller firms. It’s becoming too costly to not be in the cloud.

• Your clients are expecting it.
• Your competition is doing it.
• The carrying costs of IT, application updates, security, backups and disaster recovery will become significant on the P&L.
• The ability for the firm to scale and to transform will be limited.

As the pace of change increases in the accounting world hopefully this preview of this whitepaper has provided a view into technology leverage that can play a major role in expanding your business, improving your level of service, productivity and profits.