8 Key Benefits of Adopting a Digital Commerce Accounting Tech Stack

“Fast-paced and complicated, keeping up-to-date with digital transactions in real-time is agonizing without automated accounting solutions.”
- Nana Guenther, CPA, CA (Senior Practice Solutions Expert)

Digital commerce represents a great opportunity for your firm to develop accounting specialism in a rapid-growth market. The number of businesses selling their products and services online is growing daily, and increasingly these businesses are enabling their customers to self-serve. So, if your clients are able to fully automate their commerce experience, then chances are they will look to do so as the growth benefits for their businesses could be game-changing. 

However, to be fully supported through this process, these digital commerce clients will need your help to automate and streamline their accounting processes so that they have all the necessary financial insight they need to run their business, available to them in real-time. This means your firm needs to be skilled and equipped to help them make the right decisions, and the most of the opportunities available to them. And in doing so, you become a trusted partner, intrinsic to their growth. 

So what does this mean in reality for accounting firms? 

As well as being more complex than traditional sales accounting, digital commerce accounting is typically much faster-paced. So much so that keeping up-to-date with transactions in real-time is near impossible without automated accounts data processing to make light work of:

• Omnichannel orders - online, offline and hybrid
• Multiple payment methods
• Overseas transactions
• New tax liabilities
• Sales Taxes
• Inventory forecasting, and 
• Supply chain management

Without automation of sales data processing and management, carving out the time to partner clients and provide the insights they need to accelerate their growth comes at a very high cost. This typically limits the firm’s worth to ‘number crunching’ and reduces the opportunity for client accounts to remain profitable. 

Whereas leveraging the right tech stack, firms can make their clients’ pain points disappear and tap into their hopes and dreams for their business. It’s not only a great way to cement existing client relationships, but will also allow the firm to demonstrate accounting specialism in a rapid-growth market. 

By offering clients a smart digital commerce accounting solution as part of your service, you can:

1. Relieve the collective team from ‘busywork’ - clients will be delighted with their time saved, and your team’s capacity and skills can be better invested in value-add activities.
2. Reduce overheads on client accounts - and improve recoverability by upselling higher-return services such as digital data health checks, accurate business valuations, supply chain management, better reporting and forecasting, and tech advisory.
3. Help scale processes effectively - with automation in place, your team can cookie-cut a streamlined approach to onboarding and servicing new clients, so you can take on more of them, confident that you have capacity to do so.
4. Facilitate accurate and real-time insights - agile cash flow management is ultimately key to client success and for this, they need continuous visibility of their assets, liabilities and equity in order to make informed commercial decisions.
5. Support proactive decision-making - as well as providing deep insights to clients, the right accounting stack provides vital management information about how your firm and your team members are performing and may identify opportunities to improve.
6. Ease the burden of legal compliance - the right tech stack makes it easy to comply with Tax Authorities in terms of digital data storage, and automates the process of paying the right tax to the right tax authority. It supports robust and demonstrable legal compliance.
7. Improve the client experience -  investing in your d-commerce accounting stack shows your clients that you are not only invested in their growth, but also in the here and now security and protection of their customers.
8. Attract a new generation of accounting talent - 91% of digital native Gen Z employees said workplace technology influences their job choice. With the current recruitment challenges and increasing cost of hire, recruiting and retaining talent can ‘make or break’ accounting firms.

As you can see, investment in a digital commerce accounting stack all adds up to significant time and money savings whilst delivering a better service to clients. As well as improving recoverability and profitability, investment can transform your reputation, which in turn, builds your marketability in a rapid-growth market.

To learn more about how to improve recoverability on client accounts by implementing a digital commerce accounting stack, watch our on demand webinar here.