Alex attended the Digital Accountancy Show recently which introduced accountants to more digital resources to help serve businesses better and assist with making the financial function work efficiently.
All VAT-registered businesses have been pushed down the digital route by Making Tax Digital (MTD) be compliant. From April 2024, the same will happen for individuals operating small non-VAT registerable businesses and landlords. Embracing the digital transition should be taken as a positive, as there are a lot of benefits to digital records which take the burden off the business owner to free up their time to concentrate on the day-to-day running of the business.
Highlights from the show:
What pain points do business owners have?
- Supplier payments – paying invoices, when is the payment due, how much to pay, login into online banking, making sure there are no errors with payments etc.
- Apps can assist this whole process, syncing with the accounting system making life easier for the business owner and reducing error (e.g. Comma, Libeo, and Modular)
Cashflow – finance and funding
- Traditional ways of funding such as bank loans are not always accessible for smaller businesses. There are alternative funding outlets available such as ARX, accounts receivables assistance (which helps finance individual invoices to raise quick finance)
- Property owners that need to comply with MTD
- Hammock, specifically aimed at property owners, simplifies the management of finances digitally. Bank data automatically pulls into the app and the income/expenditure is allocated accordingly which will make the transition to MTD far easier.
Being aware of how you manage your data is especially important, to help eliminate cybercrime. Some keys points are:
- Making sure the right access is granted to people that can help with the security of digital data.
- Make sure passwords are not all the same, setting up 2-factor authentication so that you need two steps of authentication to access data.
We regularly attend webinars and seminars to make sure we have the relevant and up-to-date knowledge of the digital accountancy world so that we can help our clients progress their finance function to be less of a burden on the business owner.
