Can Accounting Technology Reduce the Demand for Recruitment?
When we speak with accountants, one of the many pain points that they are experiencing is the ability to recruit. The profession is experiencing a skills shortage, which is clear to see. Not only are fewer people choosing a career in accounting, but many experienced accountants are leaving the profession to pursue other passions or work ‘in industry’. While the focus has been on ways of attracting the right talent to accounting, should we instead be asking, how can technology fulfil certain roles within a practice?
I am not advocating a new age of robot professionals. Instead, firms need to look at how technology can create efficiencies through systemisation and integration to save time.
Many of you will be thinking at this stage, I have already invested in app stacks, and it hasn’t liberated us from work in the way we thought it would. This is certainly something we hear often, but when we look closer, we tend to find that technology and processes are disjointed and that different platforms aren’t integrated and communicating correctly with one another. The result is additional work, multiple databases and frustration. Ultimately technology that should help to free up time creates additional work.
That is why it is important to calculate how much time solutions can save so that you quantify the efficiencies gained and put a monetary value on the additional billable hours obtained through innovation.
Having implemented our systems across a number of practices, we are now at the stage where we can see how technology, and FibreCRM in particular, can save time, reduce stress and make accountants more effective at their job. The knock-on effect of this, leads to a better working environment and the retention of high-quality accounting professionals.
During the onboarding process alone, we have seen how clients that take on an around 350 private and commercial clients save more than 62 days per annum. That is equivalent to three months of full-time work for an employee – and that is only one of many processes where technology can assist firms and potentially reduce their need to recruit.
