Why a Decline In Compliance Work May Be No Bad Thing

It is fair to say there is a lot of anxiety amongst many professionals that robots will steal their jobs, as automation gets more sophisticated and widely available. 

Accountants are not immune to this threat of course. Regulatory changes such as Making Tax Digital have only accelerated the pace at which manual compliance tasks are moving towards being filed digitally and automatically. 

While some clients will still need help with that, software can do a lot of the work you once did manually in a spreadsheet in a fraction of the time. 

One response to this has been for accountants to take on more clients, as they can do so with the extra time it frees up. But there is also an opportunity to leave the boring manual work behind. Did you really get all those qualifications just to do some data entry and basic calculations in Excel?

A survey by FreeAgent in the past year found that 61% of accountants thought they would not be doing the same day-to-day tasks in five years’ time. Three quarters said they would be concentrating instead on giving business advice to clients, while nearly as many - 69% - thought they will spend less time on manual tasks.

With all the business expertise you have accumulated over the course of your career, business advisory is a natural choice. It is bound to be more stimulating than compliance work.

Perhaps that’s why nine out of 10 accountants surveyed by AAT said they are looking forward to the changes that are to come in the profession, whatever the upheaval. Business advisory was also a key growth area identified by Sage in its Practice of Now report this year. 

Despite that, it can be difficult to know which are the first steps to take, how to develop these new skills, and critically how to get the right sort of clients who are looking for business advice.

If you are wondering where to start with this transition, why not consider becoming a Runagood® Business Centre. When you are paired with an AI Business Advisor®, new clients come to you for an extremely low fixed cost.

To find out more, please book a call HERE.