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KEY POINTS
- Improved business continuity.
- Work wherever you like.
- No need to post or email documents.
- No need to purchase specialist software.
With the busy season for processing client tax returns approaching, tax practitioners will be looking for ways to ease the burden in meeting the 31 January deadline.
How can practices ensure that the busy season goes smoothly at a time of year when everything seems to conspire to bring work to a halt, with winter weather, higher sickness levels in the office and often less than co-operative clients?
The use of cloud-based solutions improves business continuity and client collaboration and also provides other benefits, such as greater productivity and increased agility to enhance practice performance throughout the year.
A more resilient business
The traditional computing model requires accountancy practices or firms to own, operate, maintain and upgrade software systems, with their own IT team on their premises.
In contrast, cloud-based solutions are available as and when needed, as a service over the internet, rather like turning on a switch for electricity.
We are all used to using consumer-based web services from the cloud, such as Google or Amazon, but now business applications are being made available in the same way.
Improved business resilience is one of the primary benefits of using cloud computing, where computing resources are provided as a service by an experienced technology provider.
This gives it great appeal for tax practitioners, who can find to their cost that it is just when data is at its most valuable – as the end of January looms – that it becomes most vulnerable.
In the day-to-day pressure of work, it is all too easy to neglect your back-up routine or accidentally overwrite data.
With cloud-based software, the data will be held securely in the cloud environment, freeing practitioners from performing regular back-ups.
Your security becomes the responsibility of dedicated IT professionals, rather than being an extra duty for your busy team.
Furthermore, with cloud, work becomes an activity that can be carried out anywhere: it is not restricted to a fixed location – the office where the server or IT equipment resides.
As cloud-based tools are available over the internet, they offer round-the-clock availability, with any time, anywhere access. All parties can share information immediately, whether at home, on the client’s premises, on the move or in the office.
Consider the value of this functionality if the country grinds to a halt in the new year after a few inches of snow, as has happened in recent years.
According to the Forum of Private Business, absenteeism caused by severe weather (also known as “snowlidays”) can cost UK businesses £230m a day if they do not take steps to enable staff to work from home.
A practice is exposed to more than adverse weather during the busy season though. Last year, HR Magazine noted that sickness rates are 27% higher in winter.
Working from home, by being able to access software and data over the internet, means that staff off sick can keep their workloads ticking over and ease back into work. This also minimises the spread of common infections to other staff.
Year-round business continuity
It does not take too much imagination to think of the many ways your usual working environment could quickly become off limits at any time during the year: flooding due to a burst pipe, fire, burglary, vandalism, and power-cuts are all possible.
As these examples show, if you and your team have the capability to work just as efficiently out of the office as in it, you are protected from the natural and man-made disasters.
Rather than being “closed until further notice”, with the associated impact on your profits and reputation, your practice remains open for business as usual and you avoid the cost and effort of rebuilding your systems and the data stored on them.
New ways of working
There can hardly be an accountant in the UK who has not experienced the stress induced by a client turning up at the 11th hour with a carrier bag bulging with receipts, expecting their tax affairs to be put in order and their tax return submitted to HMRC.
While it may be human nature for clients to behave in this way, cloud solutions offer a model of practitioner-client collaboration that can reduce the pressure, opening up new ways of working together and sharing information.
This has proved an effective way for many firms to help clients keep their bookkeeping and accounting affairs in order.
Neither party needs to install or maintain software, and the accountancy firm has secure, live access at all times to the clients’ books.
For their part, clients have the peace of mind of knowing that their accountant is metaphorically looking over their shoulder and checking they are not coming adrift. Is the client taking too much money out of the business, for example?
Any issues and mistakes can also be rectified as they arise, before they escalate, rather than further down the line.
Importantly, having data reliably coming in from clients throughout the year also avoids last-minute panics in meeting key statutory deadlines. Again, as staff do not have to be in the office to accept the aforementioned carrier bag of receipts, they can work from any location.
Alerts can be set on the online bookkeeping software to provide an “early warning system” that spots emerging issues, according to pre-defined parameters, and prompts the practitioner to take action, once again allowing potential problems to be firmly nipped in the bud.
Sharing documents
A cloud-based solution specifically designed for accountants, will enable documents to be exchanged with clients in a highly secure, simple and time-saving manner.
In compliance with the UK rules on data protection, all documents should be stored on servers based in the EU.
Instead of spending time printing and posting out paper copies of tax returns and accounts, or risking sending them by email, staff alert clients that the latest version of their documents is ready for collection via the cloud. The firm pays only for the space it needs and can scale up usage at any time.
Having a cloud-based solution creates a very useful two-way channel. Clients can send proof of identity for anti-money laundering purposes, or scan in documents if they don’t want the originals to leave their possession.
By eliminating the delays that are inherent in sending documents by post or email, it is easier to keep the momentum going with a faster turnaround by both practitioner and client, so avoiding delays and bottlenecks.
Should a visit to the client be necessary, the information is accessible through an internet connection without needing to take files out of the office.
Staying compliant and current
Most tax practitioners do not train long and hard in their chosen profession only to become IT managers, yet they often find themselves being the practice go-to-guy for IT support by default. With a cloud-based solution, the service provider takes care of testing, updating and uploading the software.
As a result, tax professionals are free to focus on what they do best: fee-earning accountancy work.
One obvious benefit of using software-as-a-service is that, rather than time being spent checking that all laptops and PCs are using the latest version of the software, it is automatically updated by the provider to reflect changes to the tax legislation, with the latest tax bands and rates.
Instead of being reliant on the skills and availability of your in-house IT expert or local IT consultant to make this happen, you and your staff can log on and take it for granted that everyone is using the latest, updated version of the software.
You will not have to spend time thinking about maintenance and support. This is especially important during the January busy season.
While it is an overhead in any practice, IT management can be a disproportionately large drain on smaller practices, where there are not the same economies of scale.
Cost-effective outsourcing
Many of our tax practitioner clients are already enthusiastically adopting cloud-based solutions for iXBRL tagging, client bookkeeping and exchanging documents.
There is no doubt that these solutions are revolutionising the way they do business, enabling them to work more efficiently and effectively with their clients.
Furthermore, many cloud-based tools and services are often priced on a freemium model, offering initial use for free with additional features and functionality requiring payment once the user is content that the tool suits their way of working.
But even then the costs are relatively modest, especially when the true cost of the alternatives is calculated.
After all, how much money do you spend on maintaining and refreshing your IT infrastructure? How much professional expertise is diverted from higher value work to resolve IT issues? Are you paying for software licences that you are no longer using?
What are you spending on (escalating) postage costs and the outgoings associated with purchasing, storing, printing and filing paper?
All these overheads are a constant drain on your resources and budget, while the financial impact of a disaster striking your practice (especially if it happened at a peak time) hardly bears thinking about.
From hype to reality
With all these benefits, it is not surprising that cloud computing has become one of the most talked about technology trends of recent years. The solutions readily available turn the hype into reality.
It is time for accountants to take a closer look at cloud computing, and consider how it may help them at a time when practices are under pressure to cut costs, improve efficiency and deliver more for their fees.
Phill Robinson is chief executive officer of IRIS Software
