Practice Automation for Accountants

Adding greater value to clients should be high on the priority list for every accounting or bookkeeping firm. The requirement to collect, organize, and handle vast volumes of data as part of everyday workflow, on the other hand, can easily get in the way.

Why do companies chose to outsource bookkeeping to India?

It is worthwhile to use technology to assist in addressing this difficulty.

You may focus on improving performance by automating the activities that are holding down, such as data input for bookkeeping or timesheet management if deal with payroll.

Accounting automation now uses technology to eliminate the manual aspects of an accountant’s job in many cases.

This indicates that:

Manual Data Entry
Manually Reconciling bank statements
Paying each supplier individually
Using a spreadsheet to create financial reports
Chasing after documents from clients
And there are so many more repetitious activities…

In conclusion, there are various advantages to finance process automation, and accounting automation allows to handle the majority of accounting duties, freeing up resources that can be utilized for other reasons such as practice management.

Cloud accounting is well-known among accounting companies, and it has exhibited a variety of efficiency and customer service benefits:

Looking over the client’s shoulder and interfering if necessary to prevent mistakes or poor behaviors before they become greater problems.
Seasonal workloads are smoother because live data makes it easier to compile tax returns on time.
When spend less time analyzing figures and processing data, have more time for interpretation and recommendations

Mindspace can help to automate accounting in Key Areas:-

1) Accounting Software for General Ledger:-

When it comes to automation, cloud accounting software (also known as accounting automation software) for general ledger considerably outperforms desktop accounting software.

This is due to the fact that it serves as a hub to which other pieces of software may connect in order to easily transport data back and forth, considerably reducing the time spent on accounting duties.

The advantage here is that automation allows plug and play different programs in real-time to modify and automate virtually any manual accounting process.

There are a ton of cloud accounting systems to choose from, but my preferences for the right accounting software tend to lean towards Xero or QuickBooks Online. They have the largest app marketplaces which are critical for automated accounting.

2) Expense and Accounts Payable Processing

Replace the shoebox full of receipts and piles of paper that must be manually input into accounting software with some handy automated accounting applications.

Apps like Dext & Hubdoc, which use a combination of robotic process automation and artificial intelligence, allow to streamline accounting processes and completely eliminate all manual data entry associated with entering expenses into an accounting system when providing client accounting services.

It appears to be as follows:

Take pictures of receipts with your smartphone or send electronic copies to the app.
The program automatically scans the documents and pulls the necessary information in real-time (ie. elimination of manual accounting data entry and human error)
The financial data retrieved syncs with cloud accounting software.

3) Payroll

legacy accounting process automation software packages include a payroll function. Even though it involves: I still see some accounting companies adopting it.

Inputting data into the accounting management system manually
Manual procedures for computing net pay
Relaying the information to the customer and/or cutting checks on their own

However, with automated accounts via payroll automation, payroll may run in minutes with taxes deducted and properly filed along with all necessary papers.

4) Month-End Evaluations

Senior accountants often analyze the books before closing them to identify any accounting irregularities or possible difficulties.

This task consumes precious resources, especially if the manager must evaluate a large number of files every month.

Fortunately, there are also solutions available to help automate the month-end review process and detect problems before they reach the manager’s desk.

Dext Precision, for example, will examine the ledger for the period in question and alert to things like duplication, unreconciled items, difficulties with bank reconciliations, multi-coded contacts, and much more.
It will then give a health score, and low health ratings will be evaluated by the preparer before being sent to the manager for approval:

Similar to Dext Precision, VerifyIQ presents itself as a platform for accounting companies to collaborate on and speed file evaluations.

The app connects to Xero and QuickBooks Online files and scans them identically to try to uncover faults or potential concerns for accounting and finance departments.

5) Schedules for working papers and journal entries that need to be adjusted

Accounting professionals frequently establish a number of schedules for deferred revenues, fixed assets, loans, prepayment, and so on as part of their month-end or year-end operations in order to prepare their financial statements.

You may, however, automate the generation of these schedules and adjust journal entries submitted immediately to the accounting system using some clever computerized accounting software.

When using an automated accounting system, it won’t require as much paper.

Facta is one app to keep an eye on in 2022 since it looks to be capable of handling a variety of accruals, timetables, and modifying journal entries with the press of a button.

6) Accounts Receivable (AR)

Most businesses assist their small company customers with various accounting and financial activities such as their books, bill pay, payroll, accounts payable, and so on, but they are invisible when it comes to the A/R section of the revenue cycle.

In my opinion, programs like Invoice Sherpa, which automates the collection of A/R, are the next natural service offering that accountants can give through automated accounting to make life easier for their clients.

Effective A/R collections are dependent on two factors:

Sending out enough payment reminders for past-due payments.
Customizing reminder messages based on who ‘re sending them to With the right accounting software, all of the above may be automated.

7) Accounts Payable

In the accounts payable department, are still writing checks or sending one-time transfers to pay suppliers?

When it comes to automatic accounts payable, financial experts, it’s time to make the switch to something far more simple.

There are a slew of apps that can assist with automatic accounts payable and bill pay, like Bill.com in the United States and Plooto in Canada. The most significant influence it can have on small business is to set up automatic accounts payable.

8) Expense Reports

Using spreadsheets to handle accounting, compiling employee expenditure reports may be extremely time-consuming and error-prone.

Using Dext’s Expense Report module, where each employee has a unique login and email address:

Dext will show the user on the expenditures in-processing screen when that employee sends in their receipts for their expense report. This makes it very simple to categorize goods by employee and produce expenditure reports immediately within Dext before transferring them to Xero or QuickBooks for payment reconciliation.

9) Banking & Credit Card Data

To reconcile a collection of accounts, we use bank and credit card transaction data.

Cloud accounting software helps to automatically draw in that data via bank feeds, which streamlines accounting procedures, but there are three challenges to consider:

The feeds from bank accounts regularly fail, necessitating re-authentication.
It’s not uncommon for transactions to be duplicated or absent.
Bank’s transaction information is frequently insufficient to identify the transaction.

10) Reconciling Uncategorized Transactions

For accountants, gathering feedback from customers when it comes to missing information on uncategorized transactions has traditionally been a time-consuming task.

However, today’s boring activities are becoming mechanized.

Not only did Intuit reveal their new Transaction Collaboration tool to assist tackle this pain issue at the 2021 QuickBooks Connect conference, but there are also two more wonderful choices to help avoid swapping spreadsheets with clients to get this information.

To begin, Uncat is an app that allows to give a link to clients that contains all uncategorized transactions in QuickBooks Online and allows them to see the information right on their screen (ie. no spreadsheets required).

11) Cash Flow Forecasting

Firms or accounting departments have traditionally created cash flow estimates manually in an Excel spreadsheet.

Fortunately, there are a number of fantastic choices for automating cash flow projections and providing more financial automation.

Both Xero and QuickBooks Online have entered the short-term cash flow forecasting game, with the ability to automatically generate cash flow forecasts for up to 90 days and give guidance when a cash shortage is anticipated.

12) Accounting Advisory

Advisory services, which provide guidance to customers, were traditionally reserved for partners and higher-level employees, making them difficult to scale.

However, in addition to automating transactional accounting processes, accountants and finance departments may deliver advisory services at practically any size using smart software and automated technologies.

13) Financial Modeling

When it comes to financial modeling, need to know about the following:

Information from previous financial reports
Salary levels and their splits by employee
Sales pipeline for the near future

It takes time to collect and put together all of this data in order to build a model.

Small organizations, on the other hand, may take use of some rather complex integrations through cloud accounting and management software to help create models much more rapidly.

14) Financial Risk Management

The benefit of AI, machine learning, and robotic process automation is that they can analyze and “understand” massive volumes of data to help in decision-making through data analytics scanning.

MindBridge has been assisting auditors in automating their job for years by scanning all of the data, rather than just a sample, to identify possible flaws.

The application may also be used to assist organizations to discover faults and hazards in the books, in addition to improving operational efficiency and reducing boring jobs in the audit profession.

15) Tax Planning

Another intriguing use of artificial intelligence in automated accounting is the ability to employ AI in accounting business operations to automate elements of tax planning, which might help accountants save time during the hectic season.

In Canada, for example, taxpayers are taxed differently depending on whether they are considered employees or contractors. And, while tax law and tax cases can provide some assistance, it’s difficult to predict what will happen in this scenario.