iscover The time-poor accountant’s guide to connecting with clients
TechnologyAccountants will need to reclaim their time amid mounting workload demands if they want to keep their clients happy.
Client service sits at the heart of accounting, but administrative tasks and competing demands can quickly eat into the time professionals have to engage with the people who matter most.
Further, with so much being asked of accountants in the current regulatory environment, it is “no wonder” they barely have the time to connect with clients, Taxy’s co-founder Amanda Walker said on a recent episode of Accountants Daily Insider.
“If we shut out the noise of everything else and just look at, okay, ‘what am I doing with my day?’ If it’s not spending time with my clients, what am I spending it on?
“If the tasks I’m spending my time on are not exciting to me, it’s causing a lot of frustration that is going to have an impact on my work and my ability to engage with clients,” Walker said.
Walker said “small, incremental changes” can make a huge difference to shifting the tide back to client services.
In particular, a push toward technology and artificial intelligence-enabled workflows can give accountants the chance to take menial administrative tasks off their calendar.
This is especially the case with information requests, which Walker observed can be a “huge time sink for accountants”.
For smaller firms in particular, purpose-built technology can fill a gap that larger teams might ordinarily address.
“The opportunity really is there to look at ‘am I spending time with the client’ or ‘am I spending time chasing them’ for information’.
“The tools we’re using, the templates, the structures, [and] the language we’re using around that, I think it really proves to be the biggest opportunity for a lot of accounting firms because it’s maybe not something they have considered before,” Walker said.
Walker also urged accountants to consider the work that should remain solely human, particularly when it comes to making judgements and decisions about personal circumstances.
She added that Taxy’s “ethos” has always been to offload jobs that can be automated to make time for those that cannot.
“If you don’t understand their personal circumstances well enough because you haven’t been able to spend that much time with them, it puts you at risk of that grey area of, ‘have I shifted the judgement or shifted accountability into a process or tool’.”
Looking ahead, Walker said it is the profession’s willingness to embrace technology that “excites me most”.
“There is a lot of noise and questions of ‘where do I start’ or ‘who do I trust’, but cutting through all of that, there is a general eagerness to try new things,” Walker said.
“Curiosity will serve us very well moving forward.”
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