SPOTTED ON SOCIAL

WE ARE SUPER EXCITED TO BE A PART OF XERO’S ROADSHOW ONCE AGAIN THIS YEAR! WE WILL BE TRAVELLING THE LENGTH AND BREADTH OF THE COUNTRY WITH ROADSHOW IN FEBRUARY. THIS GIVES US THE AMAZING OPPORTUNITY TO MEET NEW CLIENTS AND OF COURSE SEE ALL OUR CURRENT CLIENTS AS WELL AS OUR ECOSYSTEM PARTNERS TO CONTINUE TO SHARE THE BENEFITS OF WHAT AUTOMATED DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT CAN DELIVER TO ACCOUNTING FIRMS.

Showcasing our latest features

The last few months have seen a continued stream of FYI features being delivered to market. Such as…

• We’re excited to continue to empower our clients to work smarter with the all new, and highly requested, Task Templates.

• Investing in supporting our clients to get the answers they need to problems quicker than ever before with our new Support Bot.

• Helping our clients on their individual Learning journey’s in FYI, providing an all new practical hands on experience using sample data to test and learn with our Prework

Plus, so much more to come…

Meet the team behind FYI

The Xero Roadshow series kicks off on the 7th of February in Geelong & Wollon and then works its way...

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By Sean Woods

THE WORLD OF ACCOUNTING IS PIVOTING WITH INCREASING GOVERNMENT REQUIREMENTS AND EVOLVING CLIENT NEEDS. IF YOU DON’T MANAGE CHANGE IN THE COMING YEARS, CHANGE COULD MANAGE YOU—LEADING TO A CAREER FOREVER ON THE TREADMILL. TAKE CONTROL NOW AND ENSURE THE COMING YEARS ARE EVERYTHING YOU WANT THEM TO BE.

The pandemic showed how accountants are the true superheroes of the business world.

Yes, there was significant extra work. But a door was opened. As accountants performed tasks like helping clients prepare reporting to access government assistance, clients were educated about a closer relationship with an advisor they could trust.

Similarly, Making Tax Digital in the UK has indicated that client relationships can evolve as accountants focus more on additional service offerings, such as periodic financial check-ups, and less on basic compliance now that the government de- mands technology do much of that work. that’s right for everybody. But it’s wise to jump off the treadmill for just a few minutes and plan your route. The focus should be less about the specific and unique challenges. Instead, look at the ways you can navigate through the challenges in a way that will create a future perfect for you. Scaling up, scaling down, specialising or more rad-

All of this is becoming the norm, rather than the exception.

In the very near future, more and more taxes will be digitalised—everything from income tax to corporation tax. Simultaneously, governments worldwide are increasing business regulation.

Scaling up

As the philosopher Alan Watts said, the only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

For accountants, this means scaling their practice to exploit challenges in the coming years.

But while basic growth is simple—do more of what decade, resulting in an inevitable fight to the bottom when it comes to pricing and profit. Nowadays a high street accountant competes with online services. clients being able to cope with the increased demands of at least quarterly reports for each trade and landlord income, plus discrete end of period statements (EOPS). And that’s before we discuss the requirements for digital record keeping and digital linking.

Providing more of the same is unlikely to be effective. Instead, fresh service offerings and increasing your practice’s understanding of client needs must be central to any plans to scale.

Clients that scribble down income and expenses as they occur, then hand this over to their accountant each January along with a bag full of receipts, are in for a huge shock.

But some accountancy practices are seizing the chance to manage this change and in doing so, they illustrate perfectly the mindset needed for practices looking to scale.

Client accounting services

You need to choose how you and your practice will fit into this new world.

The issues are the same as they ever have been: ensuring you’re relevant to clients, pricing services optimally, remaining profitable, and so forth, all while being guided by your values.

There isn’t a single path ical options—all must be explored, and a destination selected. you’re already doing—accountancy practices have opportunities to instead evolve what they do, driven by aforementioned increasing government requirements and changing client demands.

And that’s perhaps the most important point. All journeys start with a single step. But less often mentioned is that all successful journeys start by choosing the best destination for you.

After all, basic accounting services have become commoditised over the last

For example, Making Tax Digital for Income Tax Self Assessment (MTD ITSA) arrives in the 2024/25 tax year, with the expectation that many businesses will signup to the pilot programme ahead of time as of the 2023/24 tax year.

There remains industry-wide incredulity about

MTD ITSA’s quarterly reporting requirement in particular means some business owners and managers will need to have much more contact with their accounting.

Because of the obvious reluctance of those clients to do so, some accountancy...

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GAME-CHANGING

By Andrey Kustarnikov, G-Accon

IF YOU ARE A BUSINESS OWNER, G-ACCON CAN IMPROVE THE WAY YOU MANAGE YOUR COMPANY.

Our app excels in integrating Google Sheets with various cloud accounting platforms. With G-Accon, you can automatically export, import, email, and refresh your data and reports. You can pull data from apps like Xero, Quickbooks, and Freshbooks; make needed changes; and send the data back to your accounting software. You can also use a variety of pre-existing flexible templates to make 50+ reports including things like Account Transactions, Purchase Orders, Profit and Loss, Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and more.

From how we’ve described it, G-Accon might sound like the perfect glue that can hold your business’ data together. However, it can be more difficult to actually visualize how G-Accon would be used in your day-today operations. That is why we’ve started this new interview series!

We firmly believe that there is a whole story behind each individual client and business. In this series, we aim to explore these stories and show how G-Accon is used today by real, thriving companies. This will allow you to reflect on your own business and think about how you could use G-Accon to streamline your operations. For this particular magazine issue, we had the distinct pleasure of talking to Clay Sandoz, the founder and owner of Wellstead Solutions.

Wellstead Solutions is the product of Clay looking at the market, seeing a gap, and filling it himself. Wellstead Solutions is essentially a consultant company for people who want to create their own non-profit foundations. Clay saw people and businesses in the market who wanted to make the world a better place but lacked the logistical support. This is where Clay stepped in with his skillset. Now, he helps these new nonprofits with logistics by creating structure and establishing processes so that the businesses can focus less on operations and more on doing good.

“G-Accon has been crucial in allowing me to reduce my time doing something a computer can do, greatly reducing error (no copy/paste or manual entry) - all of which has allowed me to scale my business”.

Behind the scenes, mid-sized nonprofits require full-service financial operations, including donation processing, bookkeeping, accounts payable, expense reimbursements, payroll, and more. One of the biggest factors that has to be handled is processing all things donation related. This means processing physical checks, overseeing online...

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By Alan Hyland, simPRO Software

UNDERSTANDING THE OVERALL HEALTH AND FINANCIAL STATUS OF ANY BUSINESS CAN BE DIFFICULT WITHOUT THE RIGHT INSIGHTS AND REPORTS. FOR YOUR TRADE CLIENTS, DAY-TODAY TASKS INVOLVED IN RUNNING SERVICE, PROJECT AND MAINTENANCE WORK OFTEN KEEP THEM BUSY, SO THEY RARELY HAVE TIME TO LOOK AT DATA. BUT BY NOT PAYING ATTENTION TO DATA WITHIN THEIR BUSINESS, THEY ARE MISSING AN OPPORTUNITY FOR GROWTH.

Consistently dedicating time to review and manage business data enables your trade clients to identify workflow blockages, eradicate outdated information, pinpoint discrepancies in revenue and much more. As their expert advisor you can be the driving force behind this change, encouraging them to run these reports as part of their regular data analysis processes.

Whether you have clients already using simPRO, or you’re new to the software, we’ve put together the top five reports that are available in simPRO to help your trade clients take their business to the next level.

1. Price Discrepancies Report

This report helps monitor materials and supplier costs, and helps identify when your clients may need to switch suppliers to get a better price for them and their customers.

Trades clients can review individual items on supplier invoices, such as price discrepancies, applied credits and updated pricing.

2. Stock Value Report

Stocktake is a time-consuming task for many businesses. Controlling the amount, location and type of inventory is a huge job in itself, then add to it the need to regularly account for the value of materials and you’ve got a big (and frequent!) headache for the business.

The Stock Value Report helps track the value of inventory throughout the year. It displays an overview of the value of stock across all of your storage devices - including separate warehouses, work vehicles, and site locations.

Trade clients can also use the extended Report View to see the quantity and value of stock items according to part number.

3. Job WIP Report

Not every job progresses in a straight line from start to finish, especially right now, where there are frequent fluctuations in material costs. It’s important to be able to stay on top of job progress at every stage, as timeline disruptions cut into cash flow, especially if your trade clients don’t regularly invoice.

That is where the Job WIP Report can help. It shows trades clients which jobs are partially or not yet invoiced, which helps identify issues early on so they can manage cash flow and other jobs accordingly.

4. Profit / Loss Report

Profit and loss analysis helps trades businesses assess their performance by reviewing the profit/loss status of invoiced jobs. By evaluating profit and loss per job, you can help your trades clients understand:

• Which jobs are most profitable

• What common factor causes a loss on similar... Keep reading