Professionals in both finance and accounting have likely spent the majority of the last two years tackling brand new challenges daily. However, CPA firms need to be more ready than ever before to execute different long-term strategies to continue to well position their organisations as they grow and scale to keep them profitable.
There are plenty of emerging trends to be aware of as it relates to finance. Also, there are a lot of opportunities that you need to pay close attention to. Knowing about these trends and how to leverage them can dictate your success.
Continue reading this article to learn more about some of the emerging trends to know about within the accounting profession in the near year.
1. Remote Accounting Work
One of the biggest things to come out of the pandemic is the fact that it has showcased how well different organisations can run without having people at the office. The same is true of financial organisations. Because of the pandemic and social distancing orders, more and more financial organisations had to run their operations without people at the office. Thanks to the various technologies and digital accounting innovations in the space, professional accountants can provide high-level service no matter where they are located.
Even though there are plenty of different organisations that are growing increasingly comfortable and familiar with having staff members work remotely, there is still a lot to consider when it comes to keeping data safe and secure from data breaches and cyber security attacks.
Whether dealing with the handling of financial records to accurately analysing data, there are plenty of things in accounting that are now routinely digitised. Thus, it is something that can be easy to do remotely. It doesn’t matter if an accountant is at the office or home, they can provide services to their clients with all of the information readily available to them. This can help clients get the accounting services they need cost-efficiently.
2. EGS Reporting
This is another thing to consider. EGS is something that was growing in focus even before the pandemic. A lot of organisations saw the value of this type of reporting for a good reason.
After all, it helps businesses not only fill consumer mandates for greater corporate responsibility but also gives them a very important metric that can help to boost risk mitigation throughout the organisation.
Not only has the increased focus on sustainability and various ethical issues grown in importance throughout boardrooms everywhere, but external investors have become much more in-tuned to responsible investing. The criteria derived from EGS has become one of the more decisive elements for a lot of important stakeholders in businesses that are looking to accurately measure the performance of organisations. This has made it very important for organisations to effectively quantify their EGS efforts.
The accountants of tomorrow will need to have a good balance of professional and ethical standards with technical skills to meet the dynamic challenges ahead. You can learn more about EGS and how to effectively measure it here.
3. Automation
Going into the next couple of years, this is only going to get more important in the accounting profession and field. Automation is something that is already widely used across the industry as it’s helped over 91% of companies.
Along with this, using automation technologies has made it much easier than ever for accountings to spend the majority of their time doing result-producing work. Instead of spending a lot of their days inputting numbers, crunching numbers, and more – they get to spend a lot of their time adding value for their clients and focusing on client interactions much more.
One of the biggest reasons this type of automation in the future has to do with its role in enhancing and improving human accountants. Proper automation is something that can reduce confusion, reduce mistakes, minimise wasted time, and make a lot of tedious and otherwise slower-moving processes much quicker. Search fast property finance to see results.
4. Cloud-Based Accounting
There are various trends in technology that reach beyond automation. The cloud is quickly becoming one of the things changing the industry. It’s become a very popular choice for a lot of accounting organisations because it gives accounting firms the chance to reduce on-demand hardware.
With the help of cloud accounting, firms can reduce their reliance on having to maintain their hardware and safe-keep their data. That way, they can unload it to a company that specialises in it. This allows them to have their internal IT teams focusing more on strategic tasks rather than preventative security and maintenance.