Every accountant knows that time is a precious commodity during the working day. Whether ensuring compliance with regulations or providing financial insights to their clients, accountants juggle a variety of responsibilities.
As such, many look to technology to streamline and automate their most repetitive, menial tasks. These help accountants to optimise their own productivity and provide a high-quality service. A prime candidate for technological innovation is financial reporting.
Broadly speaking, this can be broken down into three stages:
Let’s take each of these in turn.
Automated tax software is only ever as good as the quality of data that you feed into it. It’s therefore crucial that financial reporting data is complete and accurate, while reducing the scope for human error on the client’s part.
However, the more that your clients choose to diversify their assets, the more cumbersome that data-gathering process becomes. Take cash, for instance. Most wealthy individual clients and business clients will know that, to ensure maximum eligibility for FSCS protection, they can only hold up to £85,000 with a particular financial institution.
Therefore, they open multiple accounts and must keep continual track of all of them in turn. Meanwhile, the accountant is forced to trust their clients to do their own due diligence – and sometimes, no amount of reminder emails or chaser phone calls is enough.
A cash management platform can help to alleviate this problem. It gives accountant and client mutual visibility of cash holdings and brings them all together on one screen.
Being able to display financial data clearly can help accountants to develop client relationships – particularly in crucial scenarios such as year-end meetings. To achieve that clarity, accountants can end up experimenting with a variety of financial reporting templates ahead of meetings.
However, standardising those reporting templates plays a vital role in saving accountant's time. By establishing standardised templates, formats for financial statements and charts of accounts, accountants can streamline the financial reporting process and ensure consistency across different periods and entities.
Many accountants already use standardised templates for income statements, balance sheets, cash flow statements and other reports. These eliminate the need to reinvent the wheel for each reporting period: accountants can simply populate these templates with updated financial data.
This principle can be extended to tracking cash holdings – and when these are held with various institutions, having an automatic financial reporting template can help bring that disparate data together efficiently. A cash management platform can provide exactly that.
Efficient, accurate financial reporting equips accountants to provide their clients with up-to-date financial insights. This in turn empowers those clients to make informed decisions promptly, so as to reach their next financial goals.
Clear data and insights enable accountants to proactively identify opportunities in their cash management. Whether it's optimising cash flow, managing expenses, minimising risk or forecasting interest earned, accountants can use a cash management platform to assess tax liabilities ahead of time.
They can also use the insights they gain to forge a stronger working relationship with their clients. This can equip the accountant to expand their range of services, and create a holistic service offering for their clients – one worthy of a higher price.
In accounting, time is precious. Insignis stands ready to support accountants who are looking to simplify and streamline financial reporting and compliance, while also reducing the potential for human error.
Through our platform (free-to-use for introducers), you can encapsulate a proportion of the cash savings market on one screen – covering a panel of over 45 banks and building societies.
When your clients create an Insignis account and fund it, you can monitor their holdings and generate both reports and illustrations in real time. We’re also delighted to work with those practices that are interested in turning cash management advice into a new revenue stream.
To find out more about working with Insignis, get in touch.
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St John’s Innovation Centre, Cowley Rd, Milton, Cambridge CB4 0WS
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