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Conference report: Digita determined to stay out in front

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18th Mar 2008
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Digita’s annual conference is always an upbeat affair and this year was no exception, reports Nigel Harris.

Managing director Jerry Rihll's opening address was sandwiched between anthemic tracks by Snow Patrol and Coldplay (or was it Keane – or Radiohead? Everything sounds like Coldplay now to me these days!), and punctuated by an unnecessarily loud and long Xbox 360 advert from one of the conference’s key sponsors. The audience faithfully sat through this epic with teeth clenched since Microsoft was also sponsoring the bar later that day!

Digita has come a long way since its launch in 1986, but the accountancy profession has always been key to its success. "We learned that accountants make good customers – they always pay their bills," Rihll quipped. Against a background of 15% growth in 2007, and 27% growth so far in 2008, the company looks poised to continue to make inroads into its competitors' markets.

Contact Manager

Leading the attack this year is the new practice management software, or Contact Manager as it is currently called. Max Thomas, product manager for non-tax applications, explained that until the Time and Fees module is launched in August 2008 he was reluctant to call it a "practice management" solution as most customers would expect to see time and fees in software bearing that name.

Nonetheless, Digita Contact Manager (or DCM) will be an important step forward for Digita users as it is the over-arching client database that integrates the tax, accounts and company secretarial applications and enables the practice to generate documents, forms and workflow reports across the Digita suite of programs. DCM also enables users to carry out batch updating of basic admin tasks, such as changing staff allocations to clients, and adding user-designed fields across the whole database.

DCM will be a free update for users of Digita software, part of the new integrated structure the company is developing. The Time and Fees module will be an extra module for those who wish to buy it later this year. The final piece of the jigsaw will be Automation, intelligent linking of the modules so that data can be automatically updated as specified by the user - you may or may not want, say, changes to client addresses in personal tax to flow over into the company secretarial module. As a user you will be able to control the degree of automation. The company has not set a date for the implementation of this final feature.

Time & Fees

The so-called launch of Time and Fees at this conference had been somewhat overplayed in the tabloid section of the accountancy press. In fact, what we got was the first public preview of the software. First impressions were good, although questions from the floor seemed to suggest that many satisfied users of the tax and accounts applications were not going to rush to change their practice management software. Digita has clearly looked at what firms want out of time and fees software and have addressed these. Thomas was also taking notes of delegates' comments and requests, so product development is ongoing even now.

As you would expect, Time and Fees will capture timesheet information and generate invoices. A neat feature is the automatic tracking of the client being worked on and the time spent in the other Digita applications, thus producing a draft timesheet to get you started. This can be edited later. Jobs, quotes and budgets can also be tracked. The good news for those who have trashed the timesheet is that the software will also handle fixed price fees and value based invoicing.

The setting of standard hours using a Monday to Sunday table makes it much easier to account for irregular work patterns and part-time staff. Timesheet entry can be by traditional grid or using an Outlook-style calendar view for those recording their activities on a larger scale.

In response to current trends within the profession, timesheet entries can optionally be analysed between Compliance or Advisory, facilitating a later analysis of fee income between these two main types to assist practice development strategy.

On interesting aspect is that Digita has chosen not to develop a debtors ledger within the application at the moment, opting instead to provide easy export of fees data into Sage 50 and Microsoft Office Accounting.

Some 60-70 reports will be available when the product launches, with full tailoring and customisation facilities. Luddites will be relieved to learn that billing reports are designed to be self-contained so that principals can raise fees from the reports alone without needed to be sat in front of a PC. However, at the other end of the scale, the software will also offer totally automatic billing driven by rules defined by the user.

The User Summary or dashboard screen is going to be an extremely powerful part of the new software. It can be customised to display a range of KPIs for the firm or the user, in a range of graphical styles, plus task lists and RSS feeds (such as AccountingWEB, of course). These options will be available via a whole range of "widgets" which users can drag onto their Summary screen and position and customise at will. Firms will be able to write their own widgets too, and it is likely that firms will be able to share these with other users via Digita's website.

Ready for Vista – and beyond

Always on the cutting edge, Digita remains proud of its software certification from Microsoft. Digita Personal Tax now holds the "Certified for Windows Vista" badge from Microsoft and its Corporation Tax application is working on achieving it. The company is keen to stay at the forefront of software development, so Digita has ensured that its practice management software will hold this certification on launch. In fact, while many software house are playing catch up (and accountancy firms are trying not to), Digita already has software developers preparing for the operating systems that will succeed Vista.

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