When you hire someone to build you a house, you want them to work with the best tools. But what happens when they have great tools but don’t have a reliable power source for them?
This analogy works especially well when applied to accounting services. You want them to use the best software, but if you aren’t supplying that software with well-managed and accurate data, are you really getting the best work out of your team?
Your accounting and tax professionals can only do so much for you if tracking down the documents and data they need is convoluted and messy. Important documents can get missed if they are managed with a system that does not integrate well with your accounting software.
The question then becomes, “what accounting software is my team using, and how can we ensure that our usage of it is optimized?”
Why Should You Use CCH Axcess?
CCH Axcess tax preparation and accounting services software earns high marks from just about everyone who tries it out.
And its profile has only grown since the start of the pandemic. The cloud-based functionality central to CCH Axcess has proven invaluable to business after business that has had to fluctuate between fully remote, partially remote, and fully in-office workforces over the last two years.
Those businesses that had the foresight to integrate software similar to CCH Axcess’s cloud based tax preparation software before the pandemic hit had a massive advantage over their competitors that did not. Instead of clogging bandwidth trying to find a secure solution to keep tax prep and other accounting services on schedule, businesses with CCH Axcess could focus on providing their products and services to their consumers.
This is not to say that CCH Axcess is the only cloud based accounting services platform. Still, it does offer modern business tools that make it ideal for companies looking to take advantage of advances in technology in the accounting sector.
While the cloud has been mentioned a few times here already, the benefits of conducting accounting and tax services business through the cloud can’t be understated. From allowing clients to access their information and reports no matter where they are in the world to providing a means of sending and receiving vital information that is more secure than email or hard copies, taking advantage of the cloud helps you and your clients conduct business intelligently.
When looking at the biggest trends in accounting services over the last few years, centralized information management, secure client portals, and the question of whether to charge clients based on hourly work or as part of a value-based subscription service model are common themes.
How your clients are charged is up to you. Still, CCH Axcess provides the tools for your team to stand out on the forefront of both remaining trends— but to truly stand out and set the next trends for the industry, you’ll want to augment your accounting software with intelligent content management solutions.
Optimizing Your Accounting Services
So you have a program in place that utilizes the cloud to centralize information and offer secure portal functions to your clients no matter where they are in the world— how can you optimize that system to ensure you and your clients get the most out of your business relationship?
The key is integrating top-of-the-line content management software. By creating a digital workspace for your accounting and tax solutions, you open the door to more standardized workflows, less risk of human error in data processing, and even some automation to augment your team’s hard work.
Incorporating a strong content management plan in conjunction with your accounting services strategies improves communication with clients as well as within your team, accelerates and secures your digital migration, and helps bolster quality assurance and quality control efforts.
Digitizing the Workspace
In order to optimize your accounting and tax prep software, it’s best to start by creating the optimal digital environment. Implementing a platform that provides the space to create apps and workflows that will facilitate the best practices you seek to embrace paves the way for progress.
TEAM can help you build a development platform that can be tailored both to your needs and to your clients’ needs via M-Connect: Digital Workplace.
With M-Connect, you can take a collaborative approach to app and program development so that your digital workspace reflects the needs of your team. If you need branded client portals that can walk your customers through the document submission process and a metadata driven search function that will pull data across your system to give you the most complete picture of your client’s financials— M-Connect: Digital Workplace can give that to you.
M-Connect allows you to improve your use of CCH Axcess by creating a digital environment in which the tax and accounting services of CCH Axcess can be augmented with content management solutions that put everything you need in one place, accessible to anyone that is authorized to see it.
You also gain the ability to transfer important data securely from clients to Accounts. Because M-Connect: Digital Workplace is designed with versatility and compatibility with a vast array of software in mind, you will be able to work with your clients’ data no matter what format they submit their information in— not just pdfs or spreadsheets.
Why is that? M-Files.
Managing Content
CCH Axcess gives you the tools you need to handle every aspect of account services in the modern business world, while M-Connect creates the digital environment that lets you make the most of CCH Axcess’s cloud-based features. But in order to take both of those tools to the next level, you need a robust content management solution.
Accurate tax and accounting work depends on accurate data. With M-Files, you are able to store and search through vast document libraries across your company to find every piece of relevant information you will need for your client without running into the barriers presented by data silos.
M-Files allows you to store and manage documents, images, and other artifacts that can prove essential to conducting your business. And it also facilitates sorting outdated or duplicate data for archival or deletion.
And the ability to institute workflow automation for tasks such as data entry that can take up significant work hours for your team and run the risk of being thrown off by the slightest human error helps ensure accurate information when that data is used for accounting purposes.
For example, one issue that emerges from some accounting applications is creating new contacts if a client name wasn’t an exact match on every incoming document. M-Files metadata driven functionality can check out and eliminate that confusion to ensure that you don’t have one client’s information spread across twenty different contacts that you didn’t realize existed.
You can even bolster the security offerings of CCH Axcess and M-Connect by establishing document access protocols in M-Files. And thanks to version control, you will be able to rest assured that the documents you are using are the most up-to-date versions.
A Three-Pronged Solution for Your Accounting Services
By utilizing the power of the cloud, creating a digital workspace that can grow and adapt to meet both your needs and the needs of your client base, and leveraging content management solutions, you can optimize your team’s use of industry leading accounting services and tax preparation software like CCH Axcess.
Don’t settle for “good enough” or stick to “the way things have always been.” Advances in technology are paving the way for faster, more efficient methods of accomplishing tasks as well as giving us fresh perspectives on how data can be used to best serve our clients and customers.
The world of accounting services has come a long way in the last few years. And while some companies are still asking, “what is account services?” TEAM’s expertise with M-Connect: Digital Workplace and M-Files can help take your firm to the cutting edge of accuracy and efficiency in accounting and tax services.
Reach out today.
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