How to make your practice more efficient

What does efficiency mean in the accounting profession? You may wonder what speeding up your processes and eliminating manual workflows leaves for you to do. Creating an efficient practice frees up your time to focus on innovation and strategic advisory for clients—essentially different forms of growing your practice through value-add services.

How can this level of practice efficiency be achieved? Through automation.

The key to efficiency

Automation is the use of technology to reduce human intervention in processes. For example, why manually calculate a client’s cashflow for the year, when this process can be done by AI—allowing you to offer quick and accurate forecasting?

The benefits of automation are clear: consistent delivery, cost savings, and the ability to quickly grow and scale your practice.

Streamlining the accounts production process

Producing accounts for clients is a central pillar of compliance, but with ever-changing guidelines and legislation (in-keeping with IFRS) the task often eats at your time and is prone to errors. With manual processes and data transfers, mistakes can be made when it’s crucial to get it right.

So how can we streamline the accounts production process? Automation software tools can help make your work more collaborative and efficient.

When selecting the right automation tool it’s important to look for:

• A solution that enables you to remain compliant, for example in keeping with IFRS.
• Software that helps your team collaborate such as cloud accounting that brings everyone into one system across their devices.
• And finally does the software enable you to do your job more accurately and faster? This may involve using AI and automation to highlight errors before they’re submitted to HMRC.

Automating your accounts production processes will revolutionise your team’s efficiency and accuracy, meaning they have more time to focus on strategy and the client experience.

Here’s how accounts production software can make your process more efficient:

• Produce fully compliant accounts for sole-traders, partnerships, LLPs, companies, charities, pension schemes, medical practices, farms, academies and groups.
• Save time by applying custom styles without changing the underlying accounts formats.
• Cut time spent on the final accounts review process by reviewing and amending accounts on screen
• Enable two-way synchronisation, as any journals you post can be synchronised back to most of your client’s bookkeeping software. No more asking your clients to post year end journals.
• Reduce risks through exception reports, as they highlight potential issues before the accounts are finalised.

Automating personal tax returns

Automation in tax filing involves using software to handle tasks such as data entry, calculations, compliance checks, and even the submission of tax forms.

With the rise of AI and machine learning, tax software can now analyse vast amounts of data, learn from it, and improve its accuracy over time. This means that many aspects of tax preparation can now be managed by intelligent software—expect a quicker and smoother tax return process. The benefits include standardised processes across your team, rapid access and implementation, and cost savings (particularly useful for SMEs).

Use personal tax automation software for:

• Greater e-filing success as software can incorporate the full HMRC XML framework for validating tax returns, giving it an unparalleled success rate for SA100, SA800 and SA900 online filing.
• Complete and file tax return quickly by accurately highlighting inconsistencies to easily amend errors before submitting.
• Customisable workflow templates that can guide your staff through the tasks they need to perform.
• Batch e-filing speeds up submission and allows progress to be reviewed across client portfolios.
• Improve the scope of your tax advice as you quickly and accurately prepare and review more complex returns. Simplify the completion of capital gains tax calculations and automates the population of dividend data.
• Enjoy a simplified return review as your cloud solution highlights key areas of risk, to improve accuracy, streamline the review process and reduce the risk of HMRC enquiries.
• Ensure consistent delivery of all items as you can predefine the documents you send to your clients for them to authorise submission of the return to HMRC.

Want to know more about how automation will change the way you work? Learn more about our cloud accounting solutions suite, CCH iFirm, built for practice efficiency.