Technology in Accounting Offices: What Has Changed?
Have you ever stopped to think about what an accounting office was like 50 years ago? Certainly, it has no relation to the current reality. The technology in accounting offices has changed the way accountants relate and service their customers. Can you imagine the office boys coming and going between the client’s office and the accountant’s office, bringing documents in and out? It is true that they had invented the facsimile machine. You put the document on the side here and your caller was waiting on the other side. This is of less if we stop to think about how the deeds were done, with manual filling of fiscal books, accounting entries and elaboration of statements. For the accountants, it was a lot of work, a permanent exposure to errors and lengthy conciliation procedures. Not to mention the old typewriter, which when you got it wrong gave a damn trouble to correct. It was the numbering machine, you missed a number and that was it. The sum was wrong, the numbers did not beat and had to start all over again. As a consequence, the productivity of an accounting firm can not be said to be exemplary, however great the accountant’s expertise. What was more advanced was the spreadsheet system called Lotus 123. It was the maximum of automation possible in the accounting offices.
The leap of technology
From the 90’s, mainly, business management software began to gain strength in Brazil. Small, medium and long-term companies received IT solutions that allowed a broad view of the business through management reporting. The paperwork decreased, as well as the need for human resources involved in administrative processes, allowing companies to allocate them in their activities. Decisions became more agile and even the life of accountants was facilitated, since most of these software had accounting modules. At the same time, accounting offices have gained specific tools for accounting records and reporting. Automation on both sides, the productivity gain was natural.At the beginning of the twenty-first century technological solutions began to evolve at a dizzying pace. With the spread of the Internet as a business tool, data transmission has gained new momentum. Office boys were on their way. Today, we are experiencing the age of cloud software and system integration. Now the challenge is to integrate the various sources of strategic information, from software to news feeds into a single tool. We have already come across solutions that allow you to control various financial flows centrally. The logic is reversing. Now it is no longer the manager who seeks information, but the opposite. We are in the information age in real time. Competing is no longer just having the best value proposition for customers. You need agility to make decisions now.
Competitive accounting technology and offices
If you are an accountant, you must have realized that technology and competitiveness go hand in hand. An accounting office competes with other offices. Although competing for price is not the best of strategies, sometimes it becomes inevitable. After all, customers want the best service at the lowest cost. The good news is that this is fully possible. From the moment you have greater productivity, you can serve more customers and, therefore, deliver competitive prices. In accounting, today, agility in the provision of accounting services is a way to generate value for the customer . As for prices, a lean and agile operation, coupled with productivity, guarantees reduced costs and the possibility of being competitive.
What do we have to change these days?
The new change, which is not even so new, in the organizational universe are online softwares. The advantage of this type of software is that it allows you to integrate people into different places. Managers, vendors and administrative staff can share the same information whether or not they are in the office. Thanks to new data transmission technologies, software can be integrated. From this leap forward, the new business model involving accounting offices and their clients is full integration and remote transmission. By means of accounting integration it is possible that the accountant has remote access and capture not only of the financial reports, but also of the fiscal documents. From this resource, besides the near zero reduction of the risk of errors, the work of the accountant has become still more agile. The customer data is captured and already absorbed by the accounting software. With this, we have a scenario in which the financial statements can be produced almost in real time. That means, for the accounting offices, more productivity, less costs and more customers.
