Are you wasting your time on admin tasks like other UK accountants? There is an easy solution.

It’s highly unlikely that you trained hard to become an accountant just so you could perform manual data entry tasks like bookkeeping, bank reconciliations, and other such compliance functions. Yet that is the picture online accounting software provider, FreeAgent’s recent research is painting.

Their poll of over 100 accountants working with micro-businesses found that 20% accountants were spending most of their time on managing and processing expenses. A fifth of the respondents (19%) said they were busy reconciling bank transactions, while 18% were spending their time correcting financial and admin errors.A massive 66% said most of their time was spent doing tasks that are essentially bookkeeping, rather than in-depth accounting!

You can see a detailed breakdown of how accountants are spending their time for their SME clients below:

[Source: FreeAgent]

Although admin tasks are part of any accounting professional’s job, there are several ways to cut down the time spent doing those tasks. Unfortunately, most accountants waste hundreds of hours each month because they do not take the time to rework the methods they use to undertake their client’s bookkeeping and compliance jobs.

According to FreeAgent’s research, a paltry 2% said they were spending their time giving advice about their clients’ business finance and tax affairs. This is of great concern because as the use of technology increases, businesses will seek more than compliance support from their accountants. Accounting is already evolving for a cloud-first world with the trend really moving toward integration of services that accountants and their business clients use on a daily basis. For small practices this means leveraging the technological shift and improving productivity across admin tasks like bookkeeping, bank reconciliations, tax returns, etc. But this doesn’t doesn’t precipitate the end of accountants. However, it does mean that the number of billable hours will decrease and accountants will have to move from being just an accountant to becoming a business advisor.

An even easier solution – QXAS helps accountants deal with bookkeeping and other admin tasks using cloud accounting

QXAS’s outsourced cloud accounting services were designed to specifically take the low-margin admin functions like bookkeeping and turn them into profitable services. Our cloud services (including Xero, QBO, FreeAgent and Clearbooks) are easy to use – all you have to do is allow our qualified accountants to access your systems remotely and we’ll do the rest. This will not only minimise the time you spend on bookkeeping but also contain the employment costs and free up your time so you can provide a wider accounting expertise to your clients.

If you want to find out more please call Parth on 0845 838 2452 or email [email protected]

VISHAL KURANI

Bringing forth rich marketing experience in the accounting industry, Vishal blends his wealth of knowledge and creativity to educate accountants about the pressing industry issues. He is passionate about marketing and helps accountants scale their practice through his detailed write-ups.

Originally published Oct 18, 2015 03:10:39, updated Jul 06 2021

Topics: Outsourcing