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Innovators who have shaken up their sectors offer surprising insights into how accountants could change, says consultant Rob Pillans.
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Tax industry should take heed of disruptors in other sectors
24 April 2023
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Disruptors who have overturned established thinking in other sectors offer insights into the way accountancy might change, says Rob Pillans, founder and principal consultant at Planet Consulting, and some of the examples are surprising.
Speaking on the latest Accountants Daily podcast, he said two disruptors from retailing showed how tax agents might change for the better.
“Specsavers to me is just such a fantastic example of someone working out the best way to deliver something that we do time and time again. It’s a repeating type thing: test someone’s eyes, get a script, get the glasses made, fit them, away we go.
“In a sense, that’s what we do with our clients as accountants, isn’t it? We’ve got repeating work every year that we’re doing, we might have the monthly work, it’s lots of repetitive things.”
Specsavers offered a model of how to tackle this effectively.
“They’ve got the right equipment, they’ve got really, really clever systems and processes, they employ quite young people but they train them really well.
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“When I’ve had Specsavers experiences – as I do pretty much every year – I felt confident that they know what they’re doing and I come away feeling like I’ve had good service.”
Another lesson came from a disruptor in appliance retail, he said, which had identified two pain-points when it came to buying whitegoods: How quickly can the item be delivered? With fridges, in particular this could critical. And what happens to the old one?
“Appliances Online have, I think, very brilliantly solved that,” Mr Pillans said.
“So an example, I ordered an appliance at 9pm one Sunday evening and at 11am Monday morning that appliance was delivered to my house. That is impressive.”
The lesson for accounting firms – when the work was more complex than an H&R Block return – went to turnaround time on jobs.
“It feels like there’s opportunity to be turning those around a lot faster. And there’s a whole bunch of benefits that come from that not just for the client, but also for the firm, because the longer the job is in the accounting firm, the more likely we are to be inefficient in terms of working.”
“This is just all about planning and scheduling your work. So agreeing upfront with your clients: ‘If you get your work in on this day, I’ll have it done by this day.’
“Some firms do this really well. They will do some scheduling and get it turned around that that little bit quicker. Everyone wins from that approach.”
Another pain point for accounting clients lay in pricing.
“We hear sometimes stories around people saying, ‘Oh, got a bit of a surprise with the fee from my accountant.’
“That doesn’t have to be the case. You can have an agreed fee for an agreed scope of work with the client, everybody’s happy.
“When we go to the supermarket we don’t get to the checkout and get a surprise. We know upfront what the price is going to be.”
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