Even as accounting firms emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic with a new appreciation for technology’s ability to enable remote work and seamless collaboration, a new challenge has surfaced. The mass exodus of employees from the workforce—known as The Great Resignation—is impacting the accounting profession and leaving firm managers scrambling to find quality staff.
With many tax and accounting professionals choosing to take a break or pursue other passions, smaller firms are finding that remaining team members are wearing multiple hats and are at risk of burnout. To ensure you can retain and expand your team, it may be time to invest in a tax technology solution that can streamline time-consuming processes and boost the agility of your accounting firm.
Increasing productivity with tax technology
There is no question that manual processes bog down productivity. If your firm is still spending hours sorting paperwork, typing numbers into spreadsheets, and entering the same data over and over, it’s time for an upgrade. By automating non-billable and low-value activities with a tax technology solution, your staff can shift their focus to proactive, value-added activities like providing advisory services. This shift can increase engagement and lower the risk of burnout by offering staff more rewarding work. Plus, improved productivity and more strategic services can lead to increased profit.
So, how can tax technology boost the agility of your firm? It enables your staff to:
- Reduce manual data entry. When you use tax technology to link returns using a tax ID number, your staff doesn’t have to make the same changes across multiple documents. By reducing manual data entry, you boost accuracy and save time.
- Collaborate in real-time with clients. With cloud-based technology, you and your staff have the ability to share data and documents directly and securely, automatically extract data from client source documents, or easily transfer account balances from integrated business tax preparation software.
- Detect inaccuracies. With sophisticated diagnostics, accountants no longer have to manually detect blank fields or numbers that don’t add up. By comparing a tax return with last year’s documents, tax technology detects inaccuracies before it’s too late to fix them.
- Streamline the entire tax workflow. From data collection to preparation to review and final delivery, a customized, cloud-based, end-to-end solution with advanced data sharing and paperless processing provides a seamless tax workflow process from start to finish.
How do you attract and retain talent with tax technology?
By encouraging more flexible work practices and adopting the technology to support them, smaller CPA firms can attract and retain talent—even amidst the staff shortage brought about by The Great Resignation.
In the not-so-distant past, an entry-level accountant spent a good portion of their day entering trial balance data into engagement software or formatting financial statements. With today’s technology, young accountants can jump right into value-added work like looking for trends and outliers, collaborating with clients, and working with management to resolve issues. Technology boosts their involvement in meaningful work and gets them thinking at a higher level, faster. And that’s beneficial not only for their careers, but for the firm overall.
Why are tax technology solutions so important?
By utilizing tax technology to offer your staff the flexibility to work in the way that works best for them, you can boost their loyalty, trust, commitment, and overall productivity. Technology plays a major role in supporting retention strategies—and increasing the overall productivity of your firm.
So, use technology to your advantage by equipping your staff with the tools they need to get their jobs done effectively and efficiently. It can help your firm weather the staffing challenges of The Great Resignation and provides an opportunity for your staff to engage and grow with your firm.
Ready to streamline your workflow and become a talent magnet? Find your flow with accounting solutions such as UltraTax CS and an easy approach to research with Checkpoint Edge.