Accounting is undergoing a rapid change as technology offers new tools, solutions, and ways of working. This represents one of the largest paradigm shifts to the role and duties of accountants in the professions thousands year history.

What are the benefits of accountants digitally transforming?

Digital transformation transforms the way that accountants work to make them more efficient, more cost effective, more accurate and more competitive.

Digital transformation allows practices to be more accurate, more efficient, and more cost effective than ever before. But, those that are late or unwilling to adopt these new ways of working face a serous competitive disadvantage and ultimately risk being made obsolete.

But what exactly does digital transformation offer?

In this article we will look at some of the top benefits of digital transformation in accountancy:

• Better insights and intelligence
• Increased efficiency 
• Save costs and drive revenue 
• Gain a competitive advantage
• Easier AML compliance 

Better insights and intelligence

One of the main advantages of embracing digital transformation is the wealth of information it brings to a practice. This provides benefits across all functions of the business; whether it is practice development, credit risk, or core accounting functions.

Practice management platforms not only improve the day to day accounting functions of accountants but also allow for analysis of your individual clients and overall client book. Allowing accountants a much more complete view of their clients and adopt a much more holistic approach to analysing their client book and strategy development.

Business data and credit reference platforms, like Red Flag Alert, represent the best new source of insights and intelligence available to accountants and allow them to significantly improve their decision making.

Accountants have always been limited in how they can help their clients by the very fact that they rely on them to provide with information. Often clients are late in passing on critical information or do not at all.

With Red Flag Alert you gain deep insights into your clients, such as direct data feeds to the UK courts, UK first CCJ information, credit score & health rating, adverse media, debenture information, and bad debt information. Meaning you no longer need to wait for your clients to update you with important information and can add value to your relationship by proactively contacting them with advice.

You don’t need to worry about missing anything as our fully customisable monitoring tool will automatically contact you with alerts for any events that are relevant to your business.  

This data is not only useful for helping your clients. It allows you to perform thorough financial due diligence on any prospective clients and run analysis on your local economy.

Increased efficiency

Technology is also driving massive increases in efficiency at accounting practices.

Practice management platforms, such as Xero & Sage, mean time consuming workflows are able to be completed instantaneously and with greater accuracy, data entry is minimized, and analysis is quicker and more detailed which allows for better, faster decision making.

The automated nature of these platforms also mean that human error is eliminated and the laborious process of trying to identify and correct mistakes is no longer necessary.

These two factors alone mean that each individual accountant is able to complete work on individual accounts in a fraction of the time it previously took, allowing for each practice to take on more clients an increase their revenue.

Save costs and drive revenue

Whilst investing in the technology needed to digitally transform does come at a cost, if it is used properly it will save or generate a practice significantly more money.

Automation means that practices need less support staff and are able to streamline operations. It also means that less time and labour is needed on each individual account, reducing the associated cost and increasing associated profit. Practices are able to then take on more clients which increases the total revenue of the practice.

Using business data & credit risk platforms to pre-screen potential clients for creditworthiness and to monitor the financial health and risk of your clients means that you are able to mitigate bad debts and protect the revenue and cashflow of your practice.

Red Flag Alert also features a B2B Prospector tool which allows you to create detailed searches of the companies you wish to work with. Filters include turnover, SIC code, creditworthiness, health rating, growth potential, auditor, employee number, and location. This tool includes an estimated turnover and best match SIC code function that gives an unparalleled access to the UK’s SMEs.

Allowing you to gain high quality prospecting lists in seconds and run cheaper and more effective targeted marketing and practice development campaigns.

Gain a competitive advantage

Whilst the majority of large practices have already embraced digital transformation and the advantages it brings whole heartedly, many mid to small practices are yet to in any serious way. This means that those that digitally transform are able to run more efficiently, effectively, and profitably than their competitors.

Technology allows accountants to do smarter and safer business across all aspects of their practice. For those who resist these changes it will be difficult to keep pace with their digitally transformed competitors.

Easier AML compliance

AML compliance is the current bugbear of the accountancy sector, and it is not without good reason. Guidelines are vague, compliance and evaluations are time consuming and difficult, they are inconvenient to customers, and non-compliance leads to fines and/or reputational damage.

As such, it is not viewed as adding anything to a practice.

It must be said that AML regulations do perform an important function in protecting our economy, but whether this provides any solace to accountants or not, there is software that can make compliance easier.

Red Flag Alert offers a digital AML platform that allows you to send out fully compliant checks in seconds, which your clients then complete on their device. Our advanced AI technology verifies documents and identities and conducts multi-bureau analysis to provide a referral rate of just 2%. A full audit trail is stored in the cloud, making your compliance easy to evidence in practice assurance assessments.

But more than this, AML compliance onboarding processes can actually be used to enhance your client experience and build trust in your practice. Our checks can be sent in your full branding and appearing as having been sent from your business. This provides your client with a seamless, high tech, and slick experience whilst showing your practice to be forward thinking and equipped with the latest technology. 

These are just some of the ways that digital transformation benefits accountants but there are numerous other advantages that it offers.

Red Flag Alert is by accountants, for accountants and your partner for digitally transforming your intelligence, risk and AML compliance processes. To find out more read our Ultimate Guide to Digital Transformation and see how we can help you with automation.