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Reckon has dismissed the industry's fears of automation, saying technology advances such as the ATO’s Standard Business Reporting (SBR) are a good thing for the industry.
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Reckon dismisses accountants' fears
16 January 2015
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In a recent AccountantsDaily poll, just over half (52 per cent) of respondents said automation will cost their firm revenue this year. However, Sam Allert, Reckon’s managing director- accountants group said he does not think automation should cost firms revenue at all.
“I don’t understand why people would be sitting there thinking that I’m going to lose my compliance revenue. All automation is doing is speeding up the compliance process. I get that there is fear out there, but there shouldn’t be,” Mr Allert said.
While acknowledging that improving technology is changing what accountants do, Mr Allert said that in fact technology is also positioning them for revenue growth, not a decline in revenue as many accountants appear to fear.
“In terms of the pressure on compliance, unless I’m missing something I think there is a lot of fear there but I think that it’s unwarranted,” he said.
Cloud computing is an excellent example of how technology and automation are actually driving revenue growth for accountants, Mr Allert added.
“If accountants move all of their clients to a cloud-based product like Reckon One they will get more and faster access to the information they need to be able to give clients accurate advice.
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“All of a sudden, they’ve stripped out time required to gather that information because it’s all in the cloud and you have automated bank feeds. They’re looking at real data that they can make as accurate as possible and that’s a type of automation but surely it hasn’t cut out their ability to generate revenue, its only enhanced it – and I think SBR is similar logic,” he said.
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