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Three reasons why accountants can’t rely on e-mail

27th Jul 2017
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communication portal for accountants

1971 was the year that the first email was ever sent. It was a defining moment in the evolution of communication. Users of email were able to take advantage of a new and efficient way of communicating through creating, sending and receiving messages across the Internet.

 

So what’s the issue with e-mail?

When email is such a prominent feature within the everyday workplace, some could say that it would be a hard habit for accountants to break free from. The ability to instantly send and receive information with clients, using a tool that has already been adopted by millions of people; why would you want to switch? But at the same time, it’s important to look at the facts – email is limiting in many ways, and that could be holding your business back.

Email can cause significant time wasting at work. A study from the McKinsey Global Institute found that the average employee spends 13 hours a week reading and responding to emails. What’s more, the time spent dealing with these emails adds up to approximately 28% of working hours in the average working week.

 

The effect on your productivity

Email makes it relatively easy to avoid accountability, and this can be a serious production killer at work, especially amongst teams. What’s more, with a lack of due maintenance, any email inbox can become chaotic to manage; meaning that it’s more than likely a client could completely miss your important message or update, costing you more than just your productivity.

 

The effect on your communication

When it comes to emailing any more than two individuals at a given time, the situation can quickly become out of control. It’s inevitable that you will face confusion over trying to work out who the messages are intended for and what the discussion was originally about, as you work your way down the email chain.

 

The effect on your client security

As an accountant, security is a priority (and legal obligation), when dealing with client data and transferring sensitive information on a regular basis. With this in mind, email can lack in the sufficient security measures for frequent business interactions and secure file sharing – and it only takes one email to be sent to the wrong person to lose the trust that you’ve worked hard to build with your existing clients.

 

How can a communication portal help accountants?

So, what else is available as a more secure way of communicating and sharing sensitive files with clients? The implementation of a communication portal can enable you to have effective discussions with clients whilst saving valuable working time and protecting their sensitive data with the relevant and compliant security measures.

A communication portal like Clinked can provide activity streams and comprehensive audit trails to provide the much needed transparency between yourself and your clients. Working time can be much more efficient and effective with the collaborative features, and two-factor authentication can provide added protection for your client data.

Clinked also removes the restriction on file size and offers unlimited file storage, whereas email can mostly only support 25MB file attachments (for instance, this is the case with Outlook and Gmail).

 

It’s apparent that in order to make email more effective, you should use it in combination with a second communication tool to maximise productivity and time efficiency in the workplace. It’s unlikely that email is going to disappear from the workplace completely, but a communication portal is clearly a much more efficient way of dealing with clients and sharing sensitive information from A to B.

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