A look into the future at Accountex

John Stokdyk thinks there will be plenty of opportunities for practitioners to discover how the profession is going to change at the big event taking place in London on 6-7 June.

Suddenly everyone’s a futurologist. I recently signed up to share my vision of what lies in store for practitioners at Accountex on Friday 7 June only to discover that I'll have quite a lot of competition.

Sage asked me to do a Friday afternoon presentation, but after agreeing to do so, I discovered that Rebecca Benneyworth will be on stage before me, talking on Thursday afternoon about the technical issues that will affect accountants in the year ahead. Following her on the bill is always a thankless task, but the show will go on.

My colleagues Robert and Rachael, meanwhile, will be doing a turn for the CPAA on Thursday too, and are promising to draw a lot of their material from the comments and conversations that have taken place on the site during the past few months.

Rebecca’s focus will be mainly on things like the arrival of cash accounting, universal credit and HMRC’s agent strategy, which will see the tax department taking a more active role in reviewing how tax advisers’ clients perform.

Robert Lovell, meanwhile, warns that the government’s anti-red tape crusade is likely to keep accountants on their toes for years to come. He and Rachael Power will be looking at some of the things accountants are doing to stay ahead of the game, whether that means modern marketing techniques, embracing social media or collaborating with clients in the cloud.

A closer look at the Accountex conference programme shows that similar themes are everywhere. Some of the speakers who are familiar to us include:

• Simon Warren, of CaseWare on the new era of accounting
• Smeebi’s Rob Connell on online dashboards
• Xero’s Gary Turner, who starred in our live seminar this week, will be reprising his cloud crusade. A similar theme will be covered by Kevin McCallum (another former Pegasus executive now with Turner’s rival cloud accounting firm FreeAgent), and Charlie Carne, an accountant specialising in media and music work, who's appearing at the Intuit theatre.

Among the other figures you will be able to catch at Accountex are Mark “Boring is optional” Lee, Accountants Bootcamp pioneer Paul Dunn, Tolley’s Chris Jones and paperless guru Kevin Salter.

Practice development consultant Mark Lloydbottom, meanwhile, will be looking at “deeper” management strategies to improve client relationships and practice cash flows.

“We’re going through a period of unprecedented change. If we look back in a few years, the issues we are dealing with now will be seen as a turning point for the profession,” Mark told me.

“That may be imperceptible now, but as the GB Olympic bicycling coach Dave Brailsford told us, success comes from an aggregation of marginal gains.”

But if you really want the low down on what’s going to happen to the profession in the next few years, you’ll have to wait and see - and drop in to my session at 2pm on the 7th. See you there!

Find out more about Accountex 2013 here