Transform your accounting firm into the 21st century or how to digitise your accounting

The word digitalisation is used across all disciplines and we encounter it every day in our personal and professional lives. And it is no wonder that especially in companies it is a hot topic, because many of us spend our working time on unnecessary tasks that could easily be automated and digitized. This would leave more time to deal with more pressing issues, such as how to move the company forward or bring more added value to clients. 

It is no different in the case of accounting departments and especially accounting firms. Accountants spend up to 69% of their time on manual data entry and routine activities. Let's take a look together at how to use the advantages of the 21st century to your advantage and kick-start digitalisation in your accounting firm. 

Why companies are still not taking advantage of digitalisation

Why, you ask yourself, if digitalization brings such benefits, is it not used by all companies, but only by 3% of them in the Czech Republic? The most common reason is the high cost and long integration of most tools that small and medium-sized companies cannot afford. Thus, digitalization has often benefited only large companies whose budgets allowed them to do so. 

Especially in the past, there were also many tools that were inappropriate solutions or only addressed part of the process. Even if an accounting firm uploaded invoices and had them digitized, no one trusted the tool and accounting teams still opened the invoice and scrutinized it. Yet, for accounting firms in particular, digitization is absolutely crucial, especially when looking ahead to the future. Why?

Make digitisation of accounting a priority

Most accounting firms are already experiencing a shortage of people interested in accounting jobs. Up to 71% of accountants are dissatisfied and sometimes the dissatisfaction drives them to change their profession altogether. Coupled with the closure of some business academies and the consequent lack of graduates and the fact that young people are not looking for routine work, the warning lights should be flashing for all accountancy firms at least. It is thus high time to start addressing how to get out of this situation. And it's digitisation, which takes away the routine work, that can not only make the accountancy position more attractive to candidates, but also significantly reduce the time it takes to manage accounts for clients, so you don't have to worry about taking on new work with your existing staff. 

Digitisation will also help you improve the entire process of communication between accountants and clients, which is often very outdated and requires up to 70% manual activity. Often an invoice will pass through the hands of up to 8 people before it gets into the accounting system, making it very difficult for both sides to work together. Businesses waste time with lengthy approvals and accountants often receive invoices late before the accounts are closed and the search for lost documents is no exception. The result is frustration on both sides. The client feels that they are always dealing with invoices and the accountant in turn has to constantly remind themselves to send invoices on time. 

Even within accounting firms, the junior accountant first takes over the invoice, opens it, identifies it and manually enters it. The senior accountant then checks the data, corrects it manually if necessary, and communicates discrepancies with the client. Digitoo will simplify the whole process and bring benefits to both your accounting firm and the client. 

How Digitoo can help you

• It will reduce your invoice processing time by up to 75% because you can enter invoices into the system in seconds and check and send them to the accounting software just as quickly. Along with the reduction in time, the costs incurred are also reduced.
• It will free up the hands of senior accountants who can focus more on communicating with clients and bringing them more value in terms of reporting instead of tedious invoice review. We know from our clients that the original 4 hours spent on this check has been reduced to around 1 hour thanks to Digitoo. 
• Clients often cannot imagine how much time it takes an accounting firm just to transcribe all the invoices, and most don't even realize that everything is entered manually. Therefore, with more pro-client engagement from your senior accountants and more value added, there will also be a greater willingness to pay better for this work and activity.
• It will simplify approvals and you won't have to go back to the client to go around to your colleagues to get the necessary signatures. Everything is manually signed and approved directly in Digitoo.
• The client will send you invoices continuously and you don't have to worry about being overwhelmed during the accounting statements. It will also reduce the risk of lost documents that often occur in companies.
• It creates a book of received invoices that you can easily search and filter. At the same time, the client can look at the invoices without them being posted. In addition, you can easily add attachments to the invoices so you can have everything in one place. 
• Digitoo is connected to the tax office and ARES, so it will check your bank accounts, ID number and VAT number, or pull all the data from the commercial register. 
• Avoid duplicate invoices, which the accounting software will report only when you have overwritten the entire invoice. Digitoo will alert you to the duplication immediately upon upload, so you don't waste time.
• With all your accounting units clearly displayed on one screen within one account, you can easily switch between your clients without having to log in to a new account.

Be inspired by the personal experience of the accounting firm Spolehlivaucetni.cz

Some time ago, the accounting firm spolehlivaucetni.cz, headed by Radim Václav Michalík, decided to go digital. Before the first step on this path, 90% of their clients sent them documents physically, which meant storing everything in folders and archiving. Not only was everything taking up a lot of space, but more importantly time for unnecessary work.

The breakthrough year was the period of the pandemic, which brought with it the necessity to convert invoices at least to pdf in order to be able to bill from home. But it didn't stop there either. They were looking for a tool that could completely convert invoices into digital form and straight into an accounting program. For the company, one invoice meant minutes spent processing it. After a year and a half of trying to make the digitization as efficient as possible, Radim came across Digitoo, which, unlike other tools, was easy to use, 100% functional and the digitized invoices did not require any further complex adjustments. From a few minutes to post one invoice to tens of seconds.

At the beginning there was a concern, which you may also have, whether the digital form of invoices would be sufficient for the institutions during possible inspections. However, these have been allayed as no problems have been encountered by the authorities so far. Similarly, in the first step, clients needed to be made aware that they only needed to receive all invoices digitally. As Digitoo also benefits businesses, this was not a problem either and clients were happy to comply. The deployment and digitisation was thus completed in a matter of days, weeks at most, with the paper and files lying around being fully replaced by online Digitoo.

When uploading invoices, Radim & Co. mainly uses forwarding to a unique Digitoo e-mail, which then automatically transfers the invoices directly into the tool. Only in the case of zipped files, or when using shared drives, do they upload invoices manually. The invoice details are then read within seconds and then it's the checker's turn. For Czech invoices, just run your eyes over the basic details such as the ID number, VAT number, invoice number, variable symbol or VAT recap and then send to the accounting software. If it happens that the system does not recognize some part of the invoice, you mark the relevant field in the document and the tool reads it itself.

Radim, together with Digitoo founder Karin, described the whole process and showed it in practice in our webinar. If you are interested in more details of digitizing your accounting firm and want to see how Digitoo works in practice, watch the webinar recording. 

A peek into the crystal ball or what we are planning for the future

We're constantly working on improving Digitoo and we can tell you that you can look forward to integrating Google Drive into Digitoo, which means automatic downloads from Drive if your client stores invoices on a shared drive. In particular, your clients will also benefit from multi-level approvals, which comes in handy when invoices are approved by managers from different departments.

You already have the option to use bulk payment orders, but we are definitely planning full integration with banks in the future. This will allow you to see your bank account balance directly in Digitoo and allow you to pay invoices directly. 

If you can think of something that Digitoo can't do yet and you'd like to use it for invoicing, let us know.