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Power up your firm with practice workflow

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Improving your tax season processes starts with streamlining your workflows. With legislation and technology changing the accountancy profession, now is the perfect time to structure your firm’s workflows accordingly.

17th Dec 2019
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Workflow is now more important than ever for firms. A number of factors are motivating this change, starting with the ongoing transition to digital accounts via the government’s Making Tax Digital (MTD) initiative. In 2019, MTD has motivated many practices to engineer their own systems in line with the new digital requirements. 

But this is just the beginning. With MTD for Income Tax, the next step in the online tax filing process currently due to come into effect in 2021, firms will need to optimise their workflows even further to be able to handle five deadlines per year.

Besides MTD, practices will need to deal with other challenges in 2020, including the changes to IR35 and GDPR regulations that are on the way, the upcoming Fifth Money Laundering Directive (5AMLD), and the Brexit uncertainty.

With all these changes happening soon, practices now have even more reasons to standardise and document their processes, as well as to look for new ways to improve their efficiency so that they can deal with the additional workload.

Finding blockages and automating processes

The first part of the process is understanding what the present situation is. Mapping out your existing workflows can help you identify any bottlenecks, as well as inefficiencies and bad habits that may have infiltrated your firm.

This is a process that requires the involvement of all the members of the team. Everyone should have the opportunity to talk about the problems they face when working on different tasks and where they think there is room for improvement. For instance, do they need to enter the same information more than once? Is there a way to avoid this?

This process will also help identify any non-chargeable administrative tasks that can be automated. Sometimes, standardising or automating procedures can be as easy as using templates for emails or an automated email or text service to remind clients of upcoming deadlines, which can save hours of work every month.

By finding inefficiencies and improving your workflows alongside the rest of your team, you will be placing your firm in an advantageous position to face all the challenges of the digital age.

TaxCalc’s new guide, written in association with AccountingWEB, highlights the key steps in the process of adapting your systems and software tools for the digital age, including how to build and implement an efficient workflow.