Bookkeeping and productivity are often not seen together in the same sentence. For many years the bookkeeping process relied on outdated systems and processes to move and process data. Cloud applications, including Receipt Bank, have changed that for the good.
Automating the accounts payable function was just the first step towards greater efficiency for thousands of accountants and bookkeepers around the world.
However, moving bookkeeping into the cloud has brought with it new challenges. The piles of paper, aka source documents, have disappeared, the work force wants to enjoy the flexibility that the cloud promises and managers and firm owners have lost key insight into their production and capacity. Alexis Prenn, Receipt Bank CEO and Co-Founder said, “When firms went digital they lost the piles of paper that gave them a sense of their workload. Practice Platform brings key production data to one central location allowing firms to really own the 9 am.”
Practice Platform focuses on 4 key areas of the bookkeeping process:
- Outstanding bookkeeping, which analyses the number of source documents being processed and transactions waiting to be reconciled, and provides a time estimate to help managers plan their daily production.
- Urgency, which helps prioritise production against looming deadlines and item age;
- Client efficiency, which for the first time puts emphasis on the client’s ability for bookkeepers to deliver on their agreed level of service; and
- Overall efficiency, which looks at how automated the client’s bookkeeping is and it’s ability to maximise the firm’s efficiency.
As Michael Wood, Receipt Bank co-founder said in a recent Accounting Today article, “New technology presents an opportunity for bookkeeping to thrive. But this requires a radical change in focus from a data entry function to data management function. With the data gathered from software, practices can look at the information they accumulate each month with a new approach: how can data give us an insight into processes? And how can this insight be used to improve productivity?”
The first release of Practice Platform brings a certain level of insight to the practice owner. However it’s the future of Practice Platform that is most exciting. Additional functionality, analysis and visibility for practice owners is core to the Practice Platform roadmap. Exception reporting, benchmarking, and integrated communications are just some on the horizon, as are integrations with fellow solution providers who share the productivity ethos.
At Receipt Bank, we’ve moved beyond document collection and data extraction and are laser focused on helping bookkeepers and accountants around the world increase their efficiency and productivity. To find out more - contact the Account Management Team in your region.
We’re pretty proud of Receipt Bank’s Practice Platform, but don’t just take our word for it…