Why Accounting Firms Should Adopt Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is the key to succeeding in a socially distanced environment. Social distancing and hybrid workplaces are quickly becoming a reality. Therefore, digital transformation is essential for any business to thrive and not just ensure sustainability.

Yet, it is not easy for traditional businesses to successfully make the transition to digital workplaces. According to a Harvard Business Review report, most digital transformations fail. Studies by academics, consultants, and analysts indicate that the rate of digital transformation fails to meet their original objective ranges from 70% to 95%, with an average of 87.5%. However, the report reiterates that digital transformation, which has been a top corporate agenda for many businesses for nearly a decade now, still retains its importance.

What is Digital Transformation?

Most businesses communicate and work to ensure that all results and deliverables are aligned with client requirements and timelines. Digital transformation can be defined as a set of processes that organizations use to incorporate technology into their business and help it thrive by optimizing the use of these products or services. Digital transformation is designed to create real, long-term, and durable change.

How Does it Help Businesses? (Benefits)

Digitization is critical for CPA firms or businesses with clients across diverse industries because of the following reasons:

• It allows for greater productivity and efficiency in completing tasks and projects, especially in remote or hybrid work settings
• It improves adaptability to the current market, economy, business, and tech trends
• It drives more value for workers, clients, and shareholders
• It leverages automation to ensure accuracy in high-volume, time-consuming, and detail-oriented work such as number-crunching, financial transactions, and inventories
• It helps business owners take data from this high-volume work and prepare easy-to-understand reports that include insights gleaned from the data.
• It provides apps and tools to help key decision-makers understand the financial and operational health of the business in real-time
• It helps business leaders draw periodic inferences or study past trends exhibited by the business
• It helps manage the business more efficiently and ensures greater profitability.

Some examples of digital transformation trends in management and marketing include:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI, including chatbots and virtual assistants), machine learning, and cloud services
• Automation (including automation of social media content)
• Microservices customized to specific business functions like accounting or sales or for organizational needs such as performance metrics or KPIs
• Internet of Things (IoT) devices like smartwatches, smart thermostats, self-driving cars, etc.
• Metaverse tech, such as Blockchain, cryptocurrency, NFTs, etc.
• 5G mobile networking technology for exponentially increased speeds and network capabilities
• Customer data platforms that help glean actionable and insightful information from customer behavior data.

Here are some more benefits that digital transformation can bring about for CPA firms or businesses looking to grow and expand within their respective industries:

Streamlining Daily Operations

Measuring input figures, reconciling parallel accounts, and ensuring accurate data input are all critical aspects of accounting. Given the time-consuming nature of accounting work, embracing digital capabilities helps bring in a higher level of accuracy and reliability than the ones associated with cases of manual accounting procedures.

Developing digital capabilities can help business leaders streamline and automate basic tasks without affecting any existing deliverables. This helps free up valuable human resources within the business set-up to devote to higher-caliber work. Such tasks include analyzing numerical data and providing key insights to support business decision-making.

Digital capabilities are also essential for businesses that want to develop a competitive edge. A continuous process can be implemented wherein existing clients and customers are not affected while executives empower the business to generate new revenue sources. Also, digitization supports trained and experienced accounting resources while transitioning towards high-value work instead of time-consuming accounting tasks.

Enhancing Security for Business

Digital transformation also allows for improved security, a capability that will be increasingly in high demand. A January 2022 report estimated that around six billion phishing attacks would occur in 2022. Additionally, 95 percent of all cybersecurity breaches are caused by human error. As more businesses transition to the cloud, security becomes essential for their data and all their clients.

Digital transformations help businesses scale up to industry security standards swiftly with the help of processes such as encryption, authorized access, and even customized solutions for phishing, etc. By accessing professional assistance such as managed IT services, business leaders can ensure reliable security protocols are implemented and reliable backup options are available for businesses needing access.

Choosing the Right Digitization Solution: How Analytix can help

The process of choosing a tech-enabled solution can be completed once a thorough analysis is carried out. This includes verifying the business’s needs and the needs of the clients, which can help provide valuable information about the digitization capabilities required. The right solution will offer services and products such as:

• Key accounting and business performance data on a single dashboard for easier referrals. This dashboard should be able to help clients in industries like restaurants, hotels, and dental practices.
• Data management, including data automation and conversion for salaries, inventories, sales figures, performance metrics, etc., for businesses across periods and, ideally, across physical locations such as franchise businesses.
• IT assistance such as cloud-managed services, web and mobile applications, and custom software development.

By choosing the proper professional assistance, business leaders can optimize efforts and costs for their businesses. Professional assistance helps:

• Free up in-house resources to focus on critical and informed decision-making that is essential to business growth.
• Empower the accounting business to deliver value to clients by extending services and allowing more time and freedom for in-house resources to research, study, and assess cross-industry trends and best practices and innovations.
• Help the accounting business explore new ways to generate revenue while continuing to add value to an existing business.

Several other practical benefits accompany the deployment of the digitization process for an accounting business:

• In-depth assessment of accounting and bookkeeping tasks and those of clients of the business
• Understanding available digitization solutions and clarity on which solution will work best for the business
• Relevant and reliable solutions, including troubleshooting, backup, and security and safety against phishing and other cyberattacks
• Savings in costs and efforts for all stakeholders, including those within the business, clients of the business, and business investors.

As a leading KPO firm that began more than ten years ago, Analytix outsources these efficient, high-quality services for you at affordable rates and by leveraging the knowledge of experts so you can focus on scaling your business.

Insight360 by Analytix, is a comprehensive, industry-specific tool with a robust reporting portal that can be customized to individual business needs. These applications and tools automate time-consuming tasks by integrating them into reporting, which helps businesses focus on productivity.

Next Steps

• Learn more about how Insight360 can help your business or CPA firm deliver value to your clients while ensuring profitability. Visit us at https://www.analytixaccounting.com/.
• Email us at sales@analytix.com or call 781.503.9002 today.
• Follow our blog for industry trends and the latest updates.
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Written by

Analytix Editorial Team