Firms looking to transform their business, diversify offerings, and grow their practice and bottom line must first streamline their tax workflows and create efficiencies via software tools, freeing up time for staff to focus on driving change.
Are mundane, day-to-day tasks sapping your staff’s will to work? Do your employees find their work meaningful and fulfilling? If your staff is looking more exhausted than excited, give them the cutting-edge tools they’ve been begging for!
Long gone are the days of sitting around a conference table, cutting coupons for extensions and estimates, copying tax returns, collating, stapling, and putting them in the mail. Employees want to put their time to good use and do meaningful work that has an impact on the firm.
According to a FlexJobs survey of over 3,100 professionals, only 7 percentof workers say the office is their location of choice if they need to be most productive on important work-related projects. According to the same survey, a whopping 65 percent of workers think they would be more productive telecommuting than working in a traditional workplace.
Flexible work environments, and the efficiencies they produce, are only possible thanks to cloud technology.
Opportunity costs: You can’t afford to stay out of the Cloud
When firms begin the process of socializing their decision to move to the cloud, many people’s first reaction is “Isn’t that going to cost more?” but what often goes unmentioned are the costs your firm is going to minimize or potentially eliminate all together by adopting cloud native tools: installations, updates, maintenance, and staff coming in on weekends. All these actions, and the costs associated with them are transferred to your cloud provider, saving your firm time and money.
It pays to flip the cost conversation on its head – what will happen to your firm if you’re NOT invested in cloud technology? There are a few areas to consider:
Risk management
With the heightened cyber-attacks on tax and accounting professionals, firms are always going to need to maintain a level of risk management. Finding a trusted cloud provider can help minimize some of the costs associated with that. Most firms cannot afford the level of security, staffing, software, and hardware needed to monitor and control risks. Trusted cloud service providers, like Thomson Reuters, have easy access to those kinds of resources. Firms can never completely mitigate risk, but by partnering with a trusted cloud service provider, like Thomson Reuters, you’re passing that risk to somebody else.
Business Continuity
Tax and accounting firms with portals and cloud tools were more prepared for the pandemic than other firms because they were already at least partially in the cloud. It was easy for these firms to transition to remote ways of working with clients and staff. Consider the increased incidence of serious natural disasters like COVID-19, the recent heat wave in Texas, and hurricanes. Does your firm have a plan for business continuity? Doing business in the cloud can help your firm stay nimble, ready to work no matter what.
Technology is your firm’s first impression
Imagine that a new client visits your firm for the first time. What will they see? New clients don’t know you, yet. If they visit your firm and see staff using technology that is 20 years behind, why wouldn’t they assume that your knowledge of tax law is just as outdated? This is an opportunity cost that must be considered.
With automation comes the opportunity to add Advisory services
What if you could set aside fee pressures for traditional compliance services and instead engage your business clients differently? While products like GoFileRoom and the Cloud audit suite allow for automation, freeing your staff to do more, Practice Forward was designed to leverage the efficiencies created by that automation to create the big-picture strategy needed to drive your firm’s profitability and success.
This means your firm can identify the right advisory services to offer - that your clients actually want - and apply a value-based pricing model, while also putting the right team members in place to handle day-to-day routine tasks.
With existing relationships often focused on compliance issues, there isn’t always a natural opening to present the benefits of having your firm serve as a trusted advisor. Practice Forward offers a way to open the door to advisory and enter these deeper, consultative conversations.
Practice Forward comes with content and tools, coaching, consulting, and other concrete methods for practitioners, allowing them to become comfortable developing and maintaining this enhanced relationship with clients.
Instead of mostly looking back at compliance, the opportunity to look ahead with a focus on advisory is nurtured.
Cloud makes your firm attractive to top performers and new talent
The 2020 Rosenberg Survey reported that “”Leveraging staff is a key driver to maintaining healthy growth”. Automation drives efficiency, freeing up valuable staff to focus on the end client and impactful work that gives meaning to their day.
Having the best, most up-to-date software tools not only helps your firm retain top performing staff – it also helps with recruiting. New college grads interviewing at your firm are looking to see which software tools you offer your staff. If a new grad comes to interview at your firm and sees your employees working with 20-year-old tools, they’re much less likely to accept your offer. It’s also important to note that top performing employees are always looking to keep their resumes current with experience in the latest tools.
Connect the dots for a more efficient tax workflow
Connect the dots between your tax workflows, data, clients, teams, and tools with the industry’s only interconnected ecosystem of tax solutions. Delivering time-saving automation plus trusted answers in a truly cloud-based environment, the Thomson Reuters Tax offering helps your firm:
- Connect research, tax compliance, and document management solutions for an integrated workflow
- Connect with colleagues while working from anywhere, using cloud-based solutions that update in real time
- Connect your current technology stack to the next generation of tools, leading the way in tax technology transformation
- Connect your clients and their data to better manage client expectations and advise for their specific needs
Digital Transformation starts with Thomson Reuters
Firms looking to transform their business, diversify offerings, and grow their practice & bottom line must first streamline their tax workflows and create efficiencies via software tools, freeing up time for staff to focus on driving change. By automating the manual aspects of your tax workflows, your top talent’s real potential is unleashed on what matters most: analyzing data, advising clients, and uncovering new opportunities.
At Thomson Reuters, we lead the way in digital transformation. Through AI, automation, and cloud-based tax solutions, your firm can increase efficiency and reduce costs; grow and diversify your portfolio, and recruit & retain talent.
