You can be crippled by too many choices especially if you don’t know what your goals are – Chip Kidd, US graphic design legend
Despite landing in the UK only recently (four weeks ago), I’m on a mission to depict the current landscape of software available to accountants to help them improve their practices through better visibility, efficiency and/or automation.
My goal here is to break down and understand just how many pieces of software are out there to help paint a picture on what firms can do in 2019 to build their tech stack successfully in the UK.
Here’s Part 1 of my personal guide:
There is a lot of software to choose from out in the UK marketplace and even with the ones listed, there’s a good chance I’ve missed some off the list. (Apologies in advance).
What I have done for you is broken down the core software into four categories used by what I’ve observed as innovative and progressive accounting firms in the UK, so that you can see where each of these tools fit in your practice.
The biggest challenge I see with accounting firms across Australia, the UK and the US is that they don’t know what they want when they start looking.
They don’t have an existing process or they have no idea of what changes they want to make to their tech stack and why.
It also leads a firm to think that they just need to digitize their existing process – which I 100% completely disagree with. Read more here to understand why.
Before I really dive in, it’s important to note the only reason you would want to change your tech stack is because you actually want to bring in automation, systemisation and scalability into your firm.
Whether that be to enhance your client experience or to gain visibility into your operations at an in-depth level.
If you have no interest in changing or achieving anything along these lines, then you really must ask yourself why are you looking or even contemplating changing from your original tech stack.
So where do you start?
Cloud Accounting Software
Start with your cloud accounting software. What are you using internally with your clients. If i had a preference, I would try and choose just one piece of software to use internally, and that would be either Xero or QuickBooks Online.
These are the two biggest platforms globally, boasting the biggest ecosystem of app partners and importantly they are more likely going to work with the workflow tools that you’ll need to use in your practice.
It also means you only need to train your team on one product, attend one set of conferences, roadshows – you catch my drift. Now this works really well for the small to midsize practices (up to 500 clients) not so well for larger firms that already have an established base of desktop clients.
Even to this point, my first goal as a larger firm (1000 clients and more) would be to get as many clients to a cloud software as soon as possible.
All the benefits are there, real-time reporting enables real-time conversations which means you can do a better job helping your clients not go bankrupt and avoid the iceberg well in advance of ever seeing it at the last minute.
All the technological investment happening in this space, is all geared towards cloud products. Very little to none is invested into desktop accounting software other then an annual update and new TAX / VAT Tables. All the innovation is headed to the cloud and having all your clients in the cloud will help meet your MTD obligations.
My recommendation: Xero or QuickBooks
Client Onboarding & Payment Collection
- Practice Ignition
- Accountancy Manager
- GoCardless
- GoProposal
Now being completely upfront and transparent, I’ve worked with the Practice Ignition team for quite a while now but I want to try and paint a transparent picture for you the reader, so that you can make up your own mind and decide what works best in your firm. After-all this piece isn’t intended to be a sales pitch, but educational content.
Client onboarding can mean a lot of things to different people, it’s the place where you price your services with your clients, create proposals, send your engagement letters, set your clients on automatic payments and depending on your workflow it has the potential to automate your receivables, eliminate your debtors, forecast your revenue and deploy jobs into your workflow.
Whilst it’s a relatively new category for the accounting industry specifically, I’d argue that you’ve got some really talented people trying to solve a common problem.
Accountancy Manager, being a workflow and lodgements platform, does tackle client onboarding, but I would say the key strengths come from it’s workflow and management of clients. Feel free to investigate and see if it can suit you.
GoProposal, a relatively new player to the market but have definitely made a splash and impact with the firms using their platform. Focusing heavily on helping you calculate your fee’s with your clients and creating a proposal and engagement right in front of them. Integrating directly for one off invoices in Xero, QuickBooks and then Karbon and Senta for workflow.
Practice Ignition allows you to price your fees with your clients, collect client direct debit information upfront in your proposal, forecast your revenue, automate your engagement letter and then integrate with tools like Xero, QuickBooks for your cloud ledger. Xero Practice Manager, Karbon and Senta (Via Zapier). Effectively rolling multiple functions into one platform. Pricing, proposals, direct debit payments, forecasting and job deployment.
GoCardless, direct debit kings and queens for the United Kingdom. GoCardless have a huge market share for recurring payments and recently raised $75 million to expand their product internationally. If you weren’t already using something like Zurich or Practice Ignition, then you may consider something like a GoCardless to set up your clients on fixed fees link to your Xero or QuickBooks software ledger.
Look out for Part 2 of my guide … coming to a screen near you soon.