Accountex has certainly cemented itself into the scene successfully over the last few years, and the line ups often provides a useful mirror on the profession. Richard Sergeant explains his take on some of the top themes for this year, and who has caught his eye.
MTD is implied everywhere, but those doing the talking standout
Unsurprisingly there is much on offer when it comes to this, although perhaps not as much as you might expect. You’d be hard pushed to find a session that won’t reference Making Tax Digital (MTD) in some way; however, for pure MTD pleasure there isn’t much to chose from, but the quality is good.
From vendors, my front two are Steve Checkley’s ‘Making Tax Digital – What Every Practitioner Needs to Know’, which promises to reprise a good session from last year, and the well respected and pragmatic Mark Purdue’s ‘MTD - countdown to go live’. If you haven’t had your fill by then, Paul Aplin’s 'MTD in practice – Where we were, where we are and where we are heading’ brings some well-respected practice insight.
Given the timetable in play, I suspect we’ll be seeing much more of this in 2018.
Cloud connected services are becoming more real
From the looks of things the battle to convince practices about why they should be looking at cloud has been fought (hey, I didn’t say it had been won!), and is moving towards what else it could be delivering.
There’s a nice ring to 'Open banking, what it will mean for the accounting profession' led by Kevin McCallum, which I don’t think should be dismissed easily. The banking sector is being transformed by new standards and technology, and the link between it and the accounting software industry means a whole new raft of services on the horizon. 'Alternative finance and co-financing opportunities' with Kevin Vendell seems to be a good example of this, and perhaps pair these with 'Cybersecurity” delivered by Barclays, Graeme Brand - just to be sure.
For those that are already on their way to the cloud, the ‘what next’ doesn’t necessarily have to mean advisory; there is plenty of scope for new and connected services.
Marketing moves over for practicalities
What does stand out is how little sales and marketing features this year. There are of course pockets of good quality, and Karen Reyburn’s 'The trap of marketing ‘advisory services’: why it isn’t working and how to fix it” stands out, as does Martin Bisset’s 'Building the pipeline', but compared to previous years there is much less on view.
Given the need of pressing practical matters with MTD, perhaps this is no surprise.
Never mind the robots, here’s more practice automation
But queen of topics this year, and perhaps one of the hottest tech areas of 2017, is practice automation.
Most of the big guns are represented. However, one to attend should be Alan Laing’s ‘Digital World’ if only because out of all the vendors with a huge PR battle still to win, it’s Sage, coming from so far behind as they have. Do they have enough to win back the practice community?
Brendan Woods talking on ‘Automated accounting: work smarter not harder’ promises much, and I hope to see a very practical and pragmatic view, especially as I suspect there will be a proliferation of data sources coming into practices over the next couple of years.
'Automation? Quicker, but does robotics mean Daleks?', delivered by Jessica Pillow, grabs my attention too. OK, there’s a product link here to one of the growing number of interesting cloud based practice management systems, however the point of trying to build in and build out useful connections to help the flow and handling of data has never been so much in focus thanks to HMRC’s digital agenda. Doing it, while retaining and building valued client services I think is a message we’ll be hearing a lot about. As the substitute to the “compliance bad, advisory good” chant, it’s not a bad one either.
What does this all tell us? Well for sure there is more innovation being talked about, but it’s hard to escape that the focus is very much on the here and now. 2017 seems to be about the vendor community laying down assurance that whatever MTD brings, your future is safe with them; and confidence could be worth everything.