Automate your practice: A guide for accountants and bookkeepers

Delivering more value to clients should be high up on the agenda for any accountancy or bookkeeping practice. But the need to collate, organise and process large amounts of data as part of your daily workflow can easily get in the way.

To help you tackle this challenge, it’s worth turning to technology.

By automating the processes that are slowing you down – such as data entry for your bookkeeping or timesheet management if you’re dealing with payroll – you can focus on elevating your performance.

Automate your practice is a guide that will help you take the steps to improve how your accountancy or bookkeeping practice functions, so you can reduce the time spent on manual processes and spend that freed-up time on improving the client experience.

Automate your practice covers the following topics:

• Automation in practice
• The foundations of automation
• Where to automate
• The benefits of automation
• Automate your practice
• Start your automation journey with Sage
• Your practice success journey
• Help from Sage to automate your practice

An excerpt from Automate your practice

Business is shifting to a near-live environment, so financial processes need to match the speed at which decisions are made.

Access to real-time data enables a transition to more proactive and informed decision-making.

For accountancy and bookkeeping practices, this opens up opportunities to change how you work with your clients.

Producing accurate and meaningful management accounts quickly, managing VAT and payroll efficiently, and completing year-end returns and tax information helps improve the visibility of business performance and cash outflows, and provides data that can lead to better decision making.

Automation is about creating the right controls and processes to manage the flow of information around revenue and costs. In turn, it helps to reduce the amount of time required to manually process and manipulate data.

An agile service is a better service and forms the foundations of your future success.

Bridging the skills gap with clients

Many small businesses still rely on paper-based records or aren’t aware of the benefits and efficiencies that a digital approach delivers.

This can create problems when it comes to timely reporting under an increased burden of regulation, and hamper their ability to remain competitive.

For some, automation could simply mean taking pictures of receipts on their phone and forwarding invoices by email can save considerable time and speed up bookkeeping.

Such simple changes can have a direct impact on cash flow, including automated invoice credit control to reduce aged debts and boost their bank balance.

Simplifying the payroll process and allowing staff to access their own payslip and personal data online could greatly reduce the amount of additional administration around printing, distribution or providing repeat information.

Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2020 and has been updated for relevance.