Accountancy practice management software has come a long way. Today, features like automated billing and reconciliations are easily integrated into the day-to-day practice workflow of Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting UK customers.

Our employees work side by side with our customers to create and manage these solutions – driven by a deep understanding of their needs and addressing the rapid changes in their environment.

However, it’s often hard to look beyond improving performance in day-to-day operations. Amid Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic and other disruptions, accountancy practices and their clients are dealing with an unpredictable economic landscape. Future business planning can appear daunting.

However, technology can support accountancy practices (and their clients) in making informed business decisions, and planning for the future. In the first part of our Accountancy Practice Management for Future-Fit Growth series, we’ll explore how they can use technology to define and easily track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Doing so gives practices closer control of performance tracking, and deeper insights that will inform strategic growth plans.

Saving Time

For several decades, business technology platforms have enabled practices to track performance metrics that they have customised. This highlights areas that qualify for improvement and underpins strategic planning.

Contemporary technology, such as CCH KPI Monitoring, makes setting up KPIs faster and easier for accountancy practices than ever before. This is vital today. The current business landscape demands that firms assess and amend KPIs more frequently, based on fresh market variables. KPIs such as client retention rate and business time-to-recovery have become increasingly prominent performance indicators in the past year. If clunky technology makes KPI management difficult, practices have less time and insight to plan future growth.

Reducing Risk
CCH KPI Monitoring makes it far easier to track KPIs and report on them. This is fundamental in minimising risk. For example, if a KPI is set to track and escalate debt filtered by overdue dates, the ability to easily set alerts and automatically generate reports is critical to practice performance management.

Some practices are manually running monthly reports to measure KPIs. Others are running real-time reporting engines, a key feature of CCH KPI Monitoring. This latter solution allows practices to review essential data at any time – covering both performance management and compliance requirements. They can do so remotely or on-premise.

This means that firms can assess issues before they become problems, and thus act proactively. Real-time reporting is a true asset in building a future-fit practice.

The Proof is in the Practice
A number of Wolters Kluwer customers have been using CCH KPI Monitoring for several years now. Our customers look to us when they need to be right. Ryecroft Glenton has successfully integrated CCH KPI Monitoring with its own system. This consolidates information from several sources, including CCH Central and CCH Practice Management.

“We can use the year end date to trigger a sequence of reminders. Have we asked for the books? Have they been received? If a request to a client has been outstanding for a certain period, the partner will receive an alert via email. For limited companies, we can monitor the corporation tax and Companies House filing deadlines – as well as the different deadlines for pension schemes”

– Ian Smith, partner at Ryecroft Glenton

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”

Timekeeping data is a hugely valuable asset for accountancy practices, argues Colin McArdle, Tikit’s Senior Account Director for the accountancy sector in EMEA. In this article he outlines how such data can make a significant contribution to competitiveness and profitability 

Why does data matter? Because it gives you a number of very important things. The right data can tell you how much an engagement cost and how profitable it was. It gives you high visibility of productivity and utilisation; reveals the blend of skills that will optimise the next project; and helps you schedule it with confidence. 

The right data contributes to well informed decisions about which projects to take on and which to swerve. You can cost jobs and pitch hourly rates accurately. It means you can submit bids that are both competitive and that you know will yield a profit. 

And of course this matters much more than it used to. Your clients have always cared about their bills. But in times when costs are under scrutiny, they care more than ever about these and have developed a liking for fixed fee engagements. 

Meanwhile the fundamental relationship between practices and clients has shifted with clients now looking for value first and foremost. To compete you need sound information on which to base decisions. It takes great data. But where does that come from? 

Image taken from https://www.intapp.com/blog_posts/automated-time-billing-software/

Timekeeping Data
Unfortunately, for far too long, practices have depended on stale financial information. This is essentially historic data based on past performance. Moreover, it’s based on outcomes not inputs. So the practice concentrates on billings and rates and less about actual cost. It is an expensive mistake in today’s highly competitive climate. What practices need to do is tune in to the accurate, current data generated by a high quality timekeeping system. 

Practices should look for systems that provide the ability to log time on any device and suggest where potential billable time has been missed. You must give your professionals the capacity to enter time really easily on the desktop, a tablet, their phone, in a cab, on a train, in a plane, 24/7. This way you capture every crumb. The intention is to maximise time to maximise revenue and hence profitability. But simultaneously you create accurate, current data which lets you clearly understand cost. 

Next look for a system that provides excellent analytics and reporting. Tikit’s Carpe Diem, for instance, can produce a dashboard that will instantly show the time spent on an engagement so far, and performance against targets. 

Carpe Diem also supplies a Forecasting Module that can help you predict the time you will spend on a forthcoming engagement. It will subsequently run a report comparing the forecast with actual time spent so you can refine future forecasting and resource deployment. It gives the practice a lot of confidence around future bids and the capacity to maximise utilisation. Importantly it gives cost certainty to clients. 

Going forward these are exactly the sort of data and analytics capabilities that practices will need to stay competitive. 

Aug 2017

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Thomson Reuters’ survey reveals the views of UK accountants on the Government’s MTD deferral. The deferral of Making Tax Digital (MTD) has not slowed accountants’ preparations, according to the latest survey by Thomson Reuters.

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Challenges for the digital practice

Although MTD has now been delayed, the government is still clearly committed to taking as many services as possible online, not least because of the significantly lower cost of transacting its business that way. So what challenges – apart from purely technical ones – are likely to face an IT director looking toward this new, digital future?