An outsourcing partner should reflect your accounting practice’s goals, and become an extension of your team. Advancetrack delves into the detail of how to choose an outsourcer.
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
“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”
“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”
“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”
“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”
Taking the leap and choosing an outsourcing partner is, in some ways, as critical as choosing your practice’s tech systems. It cuts to the core of what is the engine room of an accountancy practice: tax and accounts production, and bookkeeping.
However, it is a path that is now well-trodden among the profession. The increasingly complex needs of clients, talent recruitment challenges and a maturity in the market means that outsourcing drives not just the ebbs and flows of a typical year in a practice, but helps drive strategic goals, such as efficiency and scalability.
But, where to start? Advancetrack has put together a checklist that provides some foundational support for practitioners when it comes to choosing an outsourcing partner.
How your practice – and its clients – work
Whatever the type of service you’re looking to outsource, the key point is: understand the scope of your requirements.
This will include an appreciation of the level (i.e. volume) of work that you are considering to be outsourced and what that work entails. The latter point will relate, in particular to the client base whose work will be outsourced: are they similar clients, or diverse? Is the work complex or relatively simple? Does it involve back and forth with the client, or a ‘one-touchpoint’ approach?
These are questions that delve into an understanding of your processes and workflows.
What credentials should an outsourcer have?
● Knowledge and knowhow
– Strong case studies
– Deep understanding of UK tax and business law/regulations
– Resources at hand as needed
● IT security and data protection
– Compliance with GDPR
– Major security accreditations (see next section for more)
–Security protocols
● Technology nous
– Understanding and compatibility with the major accounting and bookkeeping platforms
– Understand the migration path to working together
● Communication
– Set our clear paths of communication
– Make those paths timely and respectful
– Understand your firm’s culture and strategic goals
Will the outsourcer understand, and align, with your firm’s strategic direction?
An outsourcing relationship should not be a purely transactional one. The outsourcer should understand your practice’s direction of travel, and how that translate into the day-to-day. This could include:
● Aligning with your firm’s ambitions
● Communicating proactively with you
Advancetrack’s recent service addition, Podsourcing®, combines the best of offshoring and outsourcing to create a team working alongside your firm. By its nature, close alignment both operationally and strategically is critical for its success.
How Advancetrack meets accounting practices’ needs
Advancetrack has a deep understanding of the accountancy industry, borne out by being an ICAEW-regulated organisation ourselves. We explain further here.
We also have multiple ISO and BSI accreditations, details of which can be found by clicking here.
Our team is growing rapidly but has a backbone of great experience. Crucially, with our breadth of services offerings and platforms, our people stay with us and progress their career.
Finally, and most importantly, we operate with a mission statement: to improve the lives of the people running the practices we work with. It’s a statement that we believe is also embedded within the most forward-thinking practices, in making the lives of their clients better. We mirror that.
If you’d like to talk to us about your plans for the future, and where we could help, then please get in touch by clicking here.
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