As Head of IT at Larking Gowen, I’m responsible for writing and delivering our IT Strategy. The engagement with PrimeGlobal is an important aspect of that process. I attend both the Digital and IT Communities of Practice (COPs) and enjoy sharing ideas and discussions with the other member firms.

In 2022 I met Ian from Hall Morrice at a COP meeting, and two years later we’re in the process of helping them completely replace their technology infrastructure. Spending time with Ian, Bob and the rest of the Hall Morrice team in Aberdeen has been a really positive experience.

We usually invite along technology providers to the COPs to present to us their latest developments in all aspects of technology. We were introduced to Beeye through PrimeGlobal and have just signed up to use their AI Audit workplan tool, something which will greatly improve our flexibility and efficiency in managing our audit planning and reducing the risk of using a manual tool. We meet most of these providers at technology events and conferences throughout the year, such as Accountex and Alternative IT. Those events are also a great way to catch-up with other PrimeGlobal member firms; I’ve met with peers from Henderson Loggie, Carpenter Box, Hall Morrice, Monahans and HURST.

Through those events we’ve really been able to develop something that’s key to our IT Strategy – Automation and AI. As well as using Beeye to manage our audit planning, we’ve been using a tool from FD Intelligence to automate large parts of our personal tax return process, it processes client’s standard tax documents and automatically enters the data in our tax software for review, saving many thousands of hours of manual work across the practice. Using AI, we can also take unstructured data from clients, such as emails, and pull out tax information and enter into our tax software. In addition to those great tools, we’ve got our own bots running to streamline parts of our bookkeeping service in Xero and QuickBooks. We’re trialling an AI based tax advice tool to help our tax teams be more efficient and finally we’ve got around 30 users using Microsoft CoPilot 365 to see if we can use AI in the Microsoft stack of products, such as Outlook, Word, Excel and Teams. It’s a great tool that I use every day and something that’s getting new developments released weekly.

The aim of the use of automation and AI is not to replace people, but to free them up from manual, time-consuming tasks. This means they can focus on spending more time with their clients to enhance relationships and help them grown their own businesses. The engagement with PrimeGlobal and collaboration with other member firms is key to helping this area of the business grow and develop.