The New Normal in Accounting: The Digital Client Experience Imperative
The COVID-19 crisis has led to dramatic shifts in how accountants and bookkeepers work with their clients. Accountants will have to work harder to meet the ever-evolving client experience requirements in order to win and remain relevant.
The race to become a digital practice has arguably already been run. Firms across the world, and their clients alike, have been making significant steps into the digital world over the last two years, even if a full migration onto ‘the cloud’ hasn’t totally materialized.
As the world returns to some version of normal, accountants and bookkeepers now have the chance to play a key role in enabling client success by taking into account both the needs of clients and the challenges and opportunities of the current commercial environment.
In order to remain relevant and valuable to clients, accountants must prioritize digital transformation in accounting and service delivery.
There are two key reasons for this:
Digital will be the new normal: Even before 2020 made in-person business more difficult, consumers and companies were going digital. You’ll need to meet entrepreneurs on their level and adapt to the way they want to work.
In-depth services require increased efficiency: As clients ask for more than compliance and traditional planning, you’ll need to refocus time and resources away from manual data collection, management, and analysis. By automating these processes, you can prioritize value-adding services based on insights and customer interaction.
3 Keys to Maximizing Your Practice Growth with Digital Transformation
Scaling your practice with the right technology
The best way to look at accounting technology is that it’s a solution for your clients and your practice. One of the main barriers to actually growing a business is finding the time to concentrate on those metrics that’ll help you get there, and the right technology can help you do that.
Instead of driving around collecting receipts or having boxes of receipts dropped at your door. Digital tools like Dext Prepare help you capture data from all invoices, receipts, and bank statements immediately upon issue straight into your cloud software without manual data entry work.
Learn how to pitch and price your digital accounting solution
One area that many accountants and bookkeepers struggle with is ‘selling’ the idea of using technology to their clients. This means that you need to come up with a perfect value proposition if you’re going to land first-rate clients. Firstly, identify your USP (Unique Selling Point). What do you offer better than everyone else? Industry-specific experience, client support, speed and technological efficiency – are all reasons to set you apart from your competitors.
Helping your team adopt technology, faster
It may feel like the entire world has shifted towards the digital space over the last year – and in many ways, it has. However, for some accountants and bookkeepers, changing a manual process that hasn’t presented obvious problems can be a tough sell.
It is important to position the technology as something to aid your clients, not replace it. Through communicating the value of technology and by offering the right kind of training for those less familiar with your systems, push back from staff is minimal.
Leading the Next Generation of Accountants
Over the past 2 years, we at Dext (formerly known as ReceiptBank), have dedicated ourselves to building the tools to help accountants and bookkeepers to get more done and ultimately make more impact on their clients.
We’ve added two new products to our growing portfolio of transformative technology to create a solid foundation for the next generation of accountants.
The first of them we’re now calling Dext Prepare with Receipt Bank. Dext Prepare is the ultimate bookkeeping productivity solution: It’s a way to capture data from all invoices, receipts, and bank statements – paper or digital – with speed and accuracy that frankly blows the competition out of the water.
The next product is Dext Precision with Xavier. Accountants and bookkeepers use it to assess the quality of new clients' books to decide how to price them. Some use it to gamify the bookkeeping process for their team by assigning health scores to each team member. It’s really the ultimate workflow and data integrity tool for your practice.
The last product added to our line-up is Dext Commerce with Greenback. With this tool, clients with ecommerce and digital retail businesses can automatically fetch sales and expense transactions from top retailers, payment platforms, and seller marketplaces.
As our industry continues to change, let Dext do the heavy lifting for you. Learn why we are the top-rated app in our category on the QuickBooks App Store, Xero Marketplace, and TrustPilot. Start a free trial today.
