Why Accounting Firms are Bullish About Digital Work

In business and in life we come across moments where we think: “what if.” What if I would have invested in this? Or what if I would have been an early adopter of that? Would my life or my business look any different?

It can be tempting to lose yourself in “what-ifs” — but it isn’t always a bad thing if you shift the “what if” from past to present. What if we could do something today to build a stronger tomorrow? The good news is that you and your organization have a lot of opportunity at your fingertips. There are plenty of areas where digital is creating value for accounting organizations. In fact, digital has permeated the accounting industry with cloud accounting, automation, AI and ML. But what if, there’s more potential to be tapped? What if there was a way to strengthen your most valuable asset…people…by improving how work gets done.

The rise of today’s remote workforce is reshaping both workplaces and work relationships. This is a concept that is not foreign to accounting firms – a profession that heavily relies on working remotely while on-site at client offices. The question for CPAs is not why remote work is valuable, but instead how to make sure your flexible working program as successful as it can be by investing in human capital.

Today’s technologies have the potential to create meaningful digital business models for accounting firms that can optimize flexible work environments. To succeed in such transformations, firms must design digital experiences with user requirements in mind. Simply put, by putting people first and designing around their needs, wants and goals you’re one (big) step closer to seeing (even bigger) benefits like increased productivity, talent retention, and customer satisfaction.

Digital Work Is Driving Accounting Success

In a survey conducted in collaboration with Citrix, Oxford Economics found that 78 percent of surveyed financial services executives linked digital work with financial success. And this digital work comprises much more than just the support of remote working — it includes virtual and mobile work and flexible workspaces as well as redesigned core business processes to take advantage of mobile and digital technologies. When implemented effectively, it affects the way businesses design their offices, processes and strategies that enable employees to work how, when and where they want. And an added valuable outcome is a highly engaged workforce.

The same study found that financial services executives are more likely than others to say they have changed mobile and virtual strategies in their workflows and business processes (45 percent vs. 38 percent total) and their IT procurement processes for endpoint devices and applications (43 percent vs. 36 percent total).

However, that’s still just less than 50 percent of the financial companies investing in virtual work. Seventy percent of surveyed executives expect to either increase or significantly increase their spending on virtual work over the next few years, meaning that financial companies that wait too long risk losing out on the productivity and business gains that cost them their competitive edge.

How One Firm is Capitalizing on Cloud

To enable their businesses to thrive in a highly competitive landscape, many accounting firms are turning to the cloud to retain their competitive edge. One such firm is international CPA firm, Hernandez & Company, which provides accounting and consulting services for international clients – including multinationals who want to establish operations in the U.S. or international investors who want to invest in the U.S. As a global firm managing sensitive financial data, a big challenge it faces is information sharing and the protection of that information.

Hernandez & Company relies heavily on technology to give its employees the mobility and access to inhouse resources they desire. President and CEO, Armando Hernandez, says that the role of IT in the strategy of the company is so important that it’s become a main role. By adapting to a cloud-based model and using solutions from Citrix to build an intelligent digital workspace, the firm’s employees have access to data anywhere in the world that they choose to work, via any device. Cloud technology lends Hernandez & Company the mobility employees need, without executive management having to sacrifice control of the security of that information.

After moving the business to the cloud, the boutique CPA firm is now able to get to its final destination with minimal amount of operational costs. The elimination of on-premise solutions also means the elimination of expensive on-site maintenance or complicated product upgrades and inevitable downtime. Hernandez and Company now benefits from a centrally controlled IT infrastructure that provides high security and availability without compromising performance, with simpler and more streamlined management and deployment processes.

Furthermore, the firm is enjoying expanding into a new suite of virtual workplace solutions available in the cloud that organizes the businesses enterprise apps and data in one spot, without the hassle of wasting time navigating between piecemeal solutions. As a result, Nicole Cunningham, director of client relations at Hernandez & Company, reports that employees can better know and better service their clients – and the cloud is part of that of that solution.

Looking to the future

Accounting firms must look beyond defining mobility in terms of smartphones and tablets. They should look at their human capital the way they look at financial capital and build a meaningful end-to-end experience that enables talent to do their best work, grow and thrive. The digital work of the future will include big data-powered machine learning, artificial intelligence and many new strategies that take advantage of these technologies to boost productivity and collaboration. All of these capabilities are made possible by a cloud-based digital workplace. It is essential that CPAs invest in digital work strategies now to ensure they don’t get left behind in the future of work.

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Donna Kimmel is the executive vice president and chief people officer of Citrix. She is responsible for all aspects of identifying, fostering and developing top talent as well as overseeing organizational strategies that maximize engagement and position the company to win in the marketplace.

Drew Del Matto is executive vice president and chief financial officer at Citrix. Del Matto is responsible for the company’s financial and capital management strategies designed to fuel high growth, enable the intelligent workspace, and position the business to move at cloud speed.