Process optimizations are inevitable in the fiduciary sector in order to achieve a sustainable increase in efficiency. The Swiss fiduciary software Accounto enables fiduciary professionals to digitalize and optimize their processes holistically. Which process optimizations can your fiduciary company realize with Accounto? Find out in this blog post.
“Efficiency” is an evaluation criterion that is used to check whether the selected measure also achieved the predefined goal. With efficiency, the company maximizes its own advantages,” can be read in the BWL-Lexikon under the entry on efficiency. Efficiency is therefore the most sensible use of available resources to achieve the company’s goals. In view of the shortage of skilled workers in the fiduciary sector, the weak economic forecast for the coming quarters, cost savings in many SMEs and the economic uncertainty in large parts of Europe, efficiency in the fiduciary sector has become an even more important competitive advantage.
With process optimization, fiduciary companies can eliminate inefficiencies, increase their productivity and deploy their resources in a more targeted manner. In countries with high labor costs, such as Switzerland, employee salaries are often one of the biggest cost items. Fiduciary companies should therefore make every effort to provide a productive working environment for their professionals and to make the most profitable use of the knowledge of their fiduciary professionals.
Reading tip: In this blog post you will find 5 reasons why your fiduciary company should start process optimization today.
The Swiss fiduciary software Accounto helps fiduciary companies to implement process optimizations. Below you will find an overview of which processes you can optimize with Accounto in 2023.
Making the exchange of documents with clients easier than ever before
The goal of process optimization is to increase efficiency and simplify existing work processes. Try to eliminate unnecessary intermediate steps and reduce the complexity of your work processes whenever possible. Document exchange offers great optimization potential in many fiduciary systems. In fact, instead of using a single solution to securely store all their data, hundreds of SMEs still use multiple tools to store the documents and data they need for accounting purposes. More than a few fiduciary companies have likely received receipts in shoeboxes or found relevant records only after time-consuming searches through paper folders, email inboxes and Dropbox accounts.
Does your annual or interim financial reporting team regularly have to chase down receipts, search for documents across platforms, or remind your clients that documents are missing? If so, this is an indication that your fiduciary’s document exchange process is not working properly, making you less efficient than you could be. Accounto allows your fiduciary company to greatly simplify the document exchange process with your clients. Your clients can upload all their documents to Accounto with just a few clicks, where they are automatically saved and your team can view them.
Fully automate document postings
In addition to document delivery, document posting is the second way fiduciary companies can save time and increase productivity without sacrificing quality. The fully automated fiduciary software Accounto completely eliminates the need for manual document processing, reducing the effort for you and your team to control tasks. With Accounto, you can store accounting rules and mandate-specific rules so that accounting is optimally tailored to your clients. The automation of routine activities means that you can use your qualified professionals more profitably than if they had to post receipts. This not only makes your fiduciary company more efficient, but also makes it a more attractive workplace for the fiduciaries of today and tomorrow.
Does automation mean that trustees will do away with themselves in the long term? No, but the work shifts. If you can outsource repetitive tasks such as document posting to stable and secure fiduciary software such as Accounto, you will have more time for personal consulting and your fiduciary company can focus more on the needs of existing, potential and new clients. With services that are geared to the needs of your clients, you score more points with SMEs than with the processing of routine tasks, especially in economically uncertain times. According to a study by Treuhand Suisse and Accounto, demand for consulting services from SME clients continues to rise.
Reduce the error rate and correct errors within seconds
If your employees have to process receipts manually and transfer all relevant figures to an accounting tool by hand, the error rate increases. Especially with a high workload, careless errors tend to occur during data transfer. As a rule, fully automated accounting software such as Accounto has the lowest error rate. If your team does make a mistake, you can fix it within seconds. With Accounto, you have the option of directly accessing the individual bookings via a control sheet and correcting them.
Communicate and collaborate more effectively with your customers
In fiduciary companies, there is sometimes a proliferation of communication: Client X wants to know via Whatsapp whether you can give feedback on her expense regulations and sends the regulations at the same time, Client Y communicates exclusively via e-mail and sends all receipts as e-mail attachments, while SME Z has invited you to a collaboration tool where your team can view current tasks and download documents. There are a variety of digital collaboration and communication solutions available today, all of which aim to simplify collaboration within teams or between companies and their customers. However, none of the most popular tools, such as Monday, Confluence or Trello, were developed for fiduciary companies, which is noticeable in everyday work. For example, during an exchange with your clients, you may have to switch apps or platforms at least once to download documents, consult with your contact person and finally post documents according to your clients’ requirements. With Accounto, you can avoid such time-consuming software disruptions and collaborate with your clients through a single platform.
Communicating and exchanging data over more than one channel not only costs time, but also makes it more likely that valuable data and files will be lost in the event of a hacker attack, system failure or loss of work equipment. With Accounto, however, data is kept in Switzerland and backed up in a Tier 3 data center. A Tier 3 data center has multiple paths for power and cooling, as well as systems for upgrades and maintenance that can be performed on the fly. The expected availability is 99.98 percent. Your data remains in Switzerland and is fully subject to Swiss data protection laws. As a software provider, Accounto takes care of cyber security as well as backups and creates an IT emergency plan (disaster recovery). This means that your fiduciary company will not lose any data even in the event of hacker attacks, floods and other IT disasters.
