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.
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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

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“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”

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

During a talk I gave at this year’s AIT Conference, I asked, “Is there anyone sitting in the audience who has never sent an email to the wrong person?”

Not a single person put up their hand!

There’s no question we have all emailed the wrong person at least once in our careers. Reading this now is likely jogging memories of those times you realised your mistake just a second too late when the email was already beyond your grasp and destined to end up in the wrong inbox. Sometimes these mistakes are embarrassing. But, other times, sending an email to the wrong person can be seriously damaging.
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How many emails are putting your firm at risk every day?

Every single email not protected against human error increases the likelihood of a data breach. For context – human error accounted for 88% of incidents reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) over the last year. What’s more, most of these breaches happened when data was sent to the wrong person.

Prevent email data breaches in three steps
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Since it is the number one cause of data breaches, preventing human error in email should be your firm’s number one security concern. ‘I made a mistake’ won’t be an excuse that will get firms off the hook with the ICO. However, with the correct technology staff can minimise the chance of making a mistake.

1. Potential Leak: Accidentally emailing the wrong person.
How to stop it: One of the most effective tools in combatting human error is email recipient checking in Outlook. Email recipient checking technology assesses domain names for risk and asks the sender to confirm external and public recipients. These solutions commonly protect against multiple other sources of email data breaches, too, including Reply All or Reply All when a BCC. After these checks, the sender can be sure information is going to the right person.

2. Potential Leak: Sending the wrong document or file.
How to stop it: An email recipient checking solution that offers an attachment checking function. On the same screen at the same time, users can confirm that both the email addresses and attachments are correct.

3. Potential Leak: Hidden information in email attachments.
How to stop it: Once confirmed, the sender can scrub metadata that could contain hidden but sensitive information that shouldn’t be accessed by the recipient.

Investing in technology to prevent human error is an important step toward compliance. Firms should aim to find a solution that won’t slow users down but still arms them with the right checks and balances to ensure an innocent mistake doesn’t result in serious damage.

Samantha Jefferies, Vice President of DocsCorp EMEA, continues to advocate for accounting firms to protect client data in email and stop the #1 cause of data breaches.

Next Issue

Nov 2018

Should accountancy firms now be investing in a modern, cloud-based Electronic Content Management System?

Do accountants need Electronic Content Management Systems (ECMS)? It’s a question that, sooner or later, every firm is going to have to address. Firms are faced with increasing challenges around the growing volumes of data that they have to store, much of it email, and the necessity to demonstrate convincingly to clients that their data is held securely.

Oops… I did it again!

A new data breach hits the headlines every day – and the repercussions are only getting more serious. According to the latest ‘Cost of a Data Breach’ report from Ponemon and IBM, companies pay an average of $3.9m per breach.

Have you ever sent an email to the wrong person?

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

Should accountancy firms now be investing in a modern, cloud-based Electronic Content Management System?

Oops… I did it again!

Accountants in IT stimulating collaboration

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