Picture this — it’s tax filing season, and your accountants are up to their necks in client returns. You encounter a discrepancy, but there’s no record of where it stemmed from. So you have to scour through what feels like a thousand Excel sheets for the correct page of transactions, wasting time and increasing your stress levels. Now, imagine this happening over and over across your team.
This is what traditional accounting has looked like for a long time. Luckily, it doesn’t have to be this way anymore.
Around the world, accountants are embracing the benefits of automation and outsourcing. With the rise of cloud technology, it’s easier than ever to store your financial data securely online, allowing you to outsource tasks to teams anywhere in the world or have automation software do the work for you.
Outsourcing and automation are two of the most cost-effective ways to scale up your practice, enhance your efficiency, and boost profitability — and they’re easy to implement right away. In this piece, we’ll discuss the importance of accounting workflow automation as well as outsourcing for better accounting practice management.
Benefits of automation and outsourcing for accounting practice management
1. Take more control of your business
With automation, a large range of tasks can now run in the background, freeing up your team’s valuable time. They can then focus on the activities that require human insight, such as strategic planning or client relationship management.
Given that every team member has a certain bandwidth, automating accounting processes lets you efficiently utilise your human resources. Plus, the software will automatically flag anything your team needs attention, allowing them to step in whenever relevant.
2. Automate routine accounting tasks
Tasks like issuing invoices, paying bills, or reconciling transactions with bank statements are laborious, repetitive, and prone to human error. Instead, you can use automation tech for accountants to execute these in a fraction of the time and with complete accuracy.
Accounting technology solutions integrate with the rest of your tech stack to pull in all relevant data, from payroll records to bank statement histories, making for comprehensive calculations without any manual intervention needed.
Not only does this ensure that your books of accounts are always up-to-date, but it’s also invaluable for saving time when you’re preparing end-of-year accounts or helping clients with tax returns.
3. Outsource non-core accounting activities
Non-core activities, like bookkeeping, routine tax preparation, or payroll, are useful services that are frequently availed of by clients but may not require the same personalised attention that more critical tasks (like accounting strategy design) call for.
These activities easily lend themselves to outsourcing, letting you free up your time while offering your clients the same high-quality service. Outsourcing service providers possess specialised knowledge and have the top accounting technology solutions to execute non-core activities with ease. Whether your client’s needs scale up or down, the outsourced workforce moves with you, making it a cost-effective option.
4. Choose the right outsourcing partner
A big part of efficient accounting practice management is knowing who to work with. By selecting a reliable outsourcing partner, you can rest assured that whatever accounting functions you outsource will be executed competently and on time, without the stress and cost of hiring more in-house staff.
Be sure to do your homework on different outsourcing options and choose the partner that has the right blend of industry experience, ease of communication, data security measures, and suitable tech for accounting.
5. Focus on core strategic activities
Core strategic activities in accounting include things like financial analysis, business consulting, and tax planning for complex clients. When you invest in outsourcing and automation for accounting, you free up your team’s time to focus on these core activities.
These are undoubtedly a better use of your team’s expertise than invoicing or bookkeeping, and they’re also high-value client services that bring in much more revenue than bookkeeping or payroll.
The more bandwidth you have for strategic activities, therefore, the greater potential your accounting practice has for profitability.
In addition, automation in accounting can offer powerful real-time insights into any gaps in your accounting practice, allowing you to potentially invest in new services and open up further revenue streams.
6. Make your practice more scalable
In addition to focusing on core strategic services, an easy way to boost your practice’s profitability is by taking on new clients. With just your current team, this can be hard to execute — but with accounting workflow automation and strategic outsourcing, you can cater to a much larger client pool without needing to hire more staff.
Depending on what your clients need, you can scale up or scale down the work you outsource and pay only for what you avail of. Accounting technology solutions are also designed to scale with the work you do, making them a highly useful investment for growth-oriented accounting firms.
Conclusion
In a fast-paced economy where clients expect nothing but the best, automation and outsourcing are invaluable aids to accounting practice management. From saving time with automation to freeing up your team for core strategic services to enabling easy scalability, the benefits of a combination of these activities over traditional accounting processes are manifold.
At the same time, moving from the traditional ways to a digital-first approach can be challenging. If you’re looking to grow your practice, you may well seek a more personalised perspective on how outsourcing and automation can help.
This is especially important for navigating the transitional phase with your accounting team so that they feel like the change is impacting them positively. Reach out to the team at Stellariipe today for a one-on-one conversation with an expert. We’d be happy to help you design a tailored strategy.
