Industry challenges

New regulations and deadlines. Collaborating effectively with clients. Adjusting to working remotely. These are just some of the challenges facing the accounting profession as the profession adjusts to the post-pandemic workplace. How firms cope with these issues will not only impact their revenues, but also their ability to attract and retain the best young talent.

Monie Grewal, Head of US Solutions with Caseware, recently presented the findings of Caseware’s first State of Accounting Firms Trends Report to PrimeGlobal members. The report surveyed more than 3,000 accounting professionals from firms of various sizes around the world to discover some of the key challenges they face and how they are adapting.

Some of the top practice management challenges were magnified by the pandemic, Grewal noted. “But many of these challenges have been bubbling under the surface for some time,” he explained. “The pandemic just accelerated them and, whether we like it or not, many of them are here to stay.”

The top practice management challenges respondents identified were:

• New regulations and deadlines - 47%

• Using new technologies - 42%

• Interfacing with clients - 41%

• Adjusting to working remotely - 36%

• Rising cybersecurity/fraud threats - 23%

• Finding the right talent - 14%

One way accountants are overcoming many of these challenges, Grewal noted, is by adopting technology. For example, working remotely is extremely difficult if your tech is limited.

Collaboration is key

Tools such as Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams help close the remote collaboration gap. But they don’t offer a complete, seamless remote work experience. What accountants really need are cloud-based solutions that improve collaboration, practice and engagement management and data insights, Grewal said.

Caseware’s report showed most accounting firms are using collaboration tools (78 percent). But when it came to client engagement, just 42 percent believed their firms were very efficient, with 54 percent describing themselves as somewhat efficient and three percent rating their processes as very inefficient.

“If your firm doesn’t have a seamless and efficient client engagement process or collaboration process, I think you’re doing yourself a serious disservice,” Grewal said. “Not only is this affecting your staff, but you’re also risking losing clients by providing a poor experience. Clients today expect top-notch service and if they’re not getting it from you they’ll go over to your competition.”

Delivering better insights to clients

One emerging technology that can help accounting firms overcome the challenges they face, Grewal said, is practice intelligence. Many accounting and auditing firms have access to a treasure trove of valuable data in their current and historic engagement files. Practice intelligence solutions allow you to aggregate data from potentially hundreds of thousands of engagement files to create new insights. They also help you track engagements more closely, allowing you to see, at a glance, what staff are working on, as well as impending deadlines.

Practice intelligence also allows you to more easily offer advisory services to your clients. Grewal said when he was working in public practice, one of his clients asked him to advise them on how they could become more efficient and earn a certain benchmark revenue.

“I had to pull data from several different sources across multiple years of engagement files and different accounting packages to be able to provide this information to my client,” he explained. “It took a significant amount of time — around 2.5 months.”

A practice intelligence tool, such as Caseware Sherlock, is able to provide year-over-year client data as well as benchmarking information pulled from other sources.

“Imagine if I was equipped with a practice intelligence tool that provided this data and those financial insights, all in one place at the click of a button,” he said. “That would have enabled me to give the same results in a more timely manner, and my client could have made a business decision faster.”

Click here to view a recording of the Caseware webinar The State of Accounting: Top Trends in Technology.