With such massive changes, as Making Tax Digital brings, it’s easy to focus on the difficulties that lie ahead.
But, in fact, the reforms offer a brilliant opportunity for accountants to re-evaluate their practice and set it on the path to greater prosperity.
It’s the ideal time to pause, review and reflect on how the practice can be more efficient and effective.
Company’s mission
Approaching MTD from this perspective, IRIS has created a five step programme to make a success of complying with the new rules, in line with the company’s mission to make accountants’ lives simpler, more effective and more productive.
IRIS’ digital experts have broken down the essential components of MTD and assembled these into an insightful guide that can be followed through a series of articles, webinars and a whitepaper.
The programme is aimed at placing accountants in pole position to take advantage of MTD.
The steps are:
- Profiling your clients
- Profiling your practice
- Selecting technology
- Enabling the practice
- Ongoing obligations
Once accountants have been through the five steps, they will have laid solid foundations for making a success of MTD compliance.
As alluded to above, at the centre of the five steps, is reassessing and re-evaluating the practice, then re-shaping it to be more effective and profitable.
That’s why steps one and two are about profiling – for clients and the practice. It means accountants gain a deeper understanding of how to streamline their client base and see how they can optimise profits. By undertaking these steps, firms can discover what might be possible for the future.
New system
Carrying out this review may, for example, point towards a new system of charging a premium for clients who are primarily paper-based, because they clearly require the most amount of work. Perhaps some clients would be happy to adopt online bookkeeping if they realised how straight forward it is.
Understanding the client base, accountants can then appreciate how much time and effort is required. They’ll see more clearly what types of clients they have and how many fit into each category.
The programme poses a number of vital questions that accountants must answer themselves.
These include:
- Who is making the first submissions to HMRC in April and how?
- Is the firm planning to use a bookkeeping solution, receipt digitisation, bridging software or a combination?
- Are disparate systems being used to record VAT submissions?
Following the IRIS five step programme will soon make MTD much clearer and less daunting. Discover more here.