Adele Quinn – Senior Channel Marketing Manager – Redstor
Accountancy practice management software has come a long way. Today, features like automated billing and reconciliations are easily integrated into the day-to-day practice workflow of Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting UK customers.
Our employees work side by side with our customers to create and manage these solutions – driven by a deep understanding of their needs and addressing the rapid changes in their environment.
However, it’s often hard to look beyond improving performance in day-to-day operations. Amid Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic and other disruptions, accountancy practices and their clients are dealing with an unpredictable economic landscape. Future business planning can appear daunting.
However, technology can support accountancy practices (and their clients) in making informed business decisions, and planning for the future. In the first part of our Accountancy Practice Management for Future-Fit Growth series, we’ll explore how they can use technology to define and easily track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Doing so gives practices closer control of performance tracking, and deeper insights that will inform strategic growth plans.
Saving Time
For several decades, business technology platforms have enabled practices to track performance metrics that they have customised. This highlights areas that qualify for improvement and underpins strategic planning.
Contemporary technology, such as CCH KPI Monitoring, makes setting up KPIs faster and easier for accountancy practices than ever before. This is vital today. The current business landscape demands that firms assess and amend KPIs more frequently, based on fresh market variables. KPIs such as client retention rate and business time-to-recovery have become increasingly prominent performance indicators in the past year. If clunky technology makes KPI management difficult, practices have less time and insight to plan future growth.
Reducing Risk
CCH KPI Monitoring makes it far easier to track KPIs and report on them. This is fundamental in minimising risk. For example, if a KPI is set to track and escalate debt filtered by overdue dates, the ability to easily set alerts and automatically generate reports is critical to practice performance management.
Some practices are manually running monthly reports to measure KPIs. Others are running real-time reporting engines, a key feature of CCH KPI Monitoring. This latter solution allows practices to review essential data at any time – covering both performance management and compliance requirements. They can do so remotely or on-premise.
This means that firms can assess issues before they become problems, and thus act proactively. Real-time reporting is a true asset in building a future-fit practice.
The Proof is in the Practice
A number of Wolters Kluwer customers have been using CCH KPI Monitoring for several years now. Our customers look to us when they need to be right. Ryecroft Glenton has successfully integrated CCH KPI Monitoring with its own system. This consolidates information from several sources, including CCH Central and CCH Practice Management.
“We can use the year end date to trigger a sequence of reminders. Have we asked for the books? Have they been received? If a request to a client has been outstanding for a certain period, the partner will receive an alert via email. For limited companies, we can monitor the corporation tax and Companies House filing deadlines – as well as the different deadlines for pension schemes”
– Ian Smith, partner at Ryecroft Glenton
“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”
“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”
“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”
“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”
What would your business do if you lost all transaction data from the last 6 months or if you lost some accountant data just before you had to submit your accounts to HMRC? How would you be able to fix it in 90 seconds and get your business running smoothly again?
Identifying and then taking steps to protect our most critical business services, like QuickBooks and Xero can be time-consuming, and far down the priority list.
Most people we speak to assume that all SaaS platforms are protected against data loss and corruption, because the vendor looks after it, however, this is rarely the case
If you don’t think you need to backup QuickBooks or Xero, ask yourself these questions:
• How does your businesses comply with regulations & policies, without it breaking the bank?
Businesses can stay compliant with industry standards, such as IRS 4557 & SOC2 by backing up QuickBooks or Xero with Redstor.
In a highly regulated industry, it is vital to keep all risks to a minimum, an independent backup and recovery platform is the easiest and most cost-effective way of doing so.
It takes 90 seconds click here to demo how easy it is!
• Mistakes happen - How can you protect the beating heart of your business from these mistakes?
With multiple people using QuickBooks online or Xero, more than one person can have access & change the same items simultaneously, further amplified if external teams are involved. Mistakes happen, so it’s important that QuickBooks files are backed up to guard businesses against these mistakes.
Redstor's QuickBooks backup give admins a safety net - instant, granular item restore means customers can fix anything that might go wrong.
• How can you have confidence a single change won't break QuickBooks?
A major source of data loss can stem from teams making changes to the production environment in QuickBooks (year-end changes, mergers & acquisitions and so on). With Redstor's QuickBooks backup, admins can recover real data to their QuickBooks sandbox to verify & validate any changes before pushing those changes to their production environment. Don’t leave these complex changes to chance.
• Do you think you could defend your business against cyber criminals without backup?
Cybercriminals are targeting QuickBooks online (& other accounting software) with clever phishing and spear phishing attacks in order to wipe data and even pay themselves fraudulently.
Let Redstor be the reinforcements you never knew you needed and help defend your business against the unknowns. Redstor QuickBooks backup can help you identify these fraudulent transactions, and get your business back up and running in 90 seconds
• How many times have you woken up in the morning assuming your QuickBooks or Xero data was the same as when you left it?
Intuit QuickBooks & Xero (like lots of other vendors) operate a shared responsibility model, where QuickBooks customers are protected from incidents such as total platform outages, but not protected from everyday threats like ransomware, malicious or accidental data deletion/loss. See QuickBooks T&C's here, (6.1.1)
Automatic backups & on-demand backups, means businesses can set the first backup running in seconds and can take extra backup whenever they need.
Redstor can help you answer all of these questions, with our smarter backup and recovery solution, delivering centralised protection, via an intuitive app, for data residing on infrastructure, cloud-native environments, and an ever-widening array of SaaS apps such as QuickBooks and Xero.
It takes just 90 seconds to set up, with zero hardware required, the solution is infused with AI-powered malware detection, Redstor reduces complexity and management overhead, making it the simplest, safest, and smartest way to protect all your data.
Make the smarter decision by backing up your data today – Contact Redstor
Written by: Adele Quinn – Senior Channel Marketing Manager - Redstor
Endorsed by: Dan Boddington – Product Manager - Redstor
Despite accountancy firms investing in diversity and inclusion programmes, recent figures suggest that the diverse make-up of the accountancy workforce is falling behind its counterparts. So what’s holding them back?
Is your IT presenting you with more than your fair share of challenges? A Managed IT Service may be key to overcoming them.
Digital Distinction will be central to the continued success of established accountancy firms competing against the new wave of digital native companies, says Ville Somppi, Vice President of Industry Solutions at M-Files, a global leader in information management
The last few years have been a valuable lesson in the importance of staying connected with each other and our clients. With a whole raft of digital tools at our collective disposal, hybrid working now commonplace for many businesses and consumers becoming more demanding, it has become challenging for accountancy practices to deliver excellent and consistent customer care.
Accountancy firms will always be a serious target for cyber criminals due to their sensitive client information and the significant funds they handle. Extensive data consumption means they need to ensure they have the right technology in place to protect client information with the increasing threat from cyber criminals.