Here’s how FYI is changing compliance through automation

The way we do business is changing, and process automation is quickly becoming the new normal. But what is it, and what does this mean for your practice? In this article, I’m going to outline where the next boost of productivity for our profession will come from, and how FYI, a process automation engine developed specifically for accountants, is going to shake things up for the better.

What is process automation?

Process automation is the new frontier for businesses across many industries. It is an emerging technology that enables the automation of repetitive and administrative processes. Basically, it saves you time and minimises the number of time-consuming tasks that you have to do. For an accounting practice, for example, instead of having your team manually retrieve, file, compare and then communicate tax assessments daily, automation can complete this entire process for you.

At FYI, we’ve seen the wide-reaching potential this has for accountants, and we think our industry will be one of the greatest beneficiaries of this technology. Imagine the time you’ll save, and the more valuable work you’ll do, when repetitive compliance and document management tasks are automated.

Our mission is to make that happen.

Accountants are uniquely placed to benefit from automation

Think about your daily compliance and administration tasks. To deliver these functions across your practice, your team undertakes a series of processes that can be best described as:

• Simple and short: Each process has a short number of steps and involves relatively simple actions such as capturing or creating documents, filing, naming, performing comparisons and notifications.
• Repetitive and time-consuming: Around 40 well-defined processes are used repetitively from period to period, across the vast majority of your clients. By our analysis, these processes make up almost 60% of your compliance and administration time cost.
• Highly predictable: Most of these processes follow a single course of action and reach their end successfully. They’re not complex, branched or collaborative processes; there is a high probability that each process achieves a specific outcome.

Such short, repetitive, linear processes are the perfect candidate for automation. Taking these tasks off your plate will free up your time to focus on higher-value interactions.

FYI is designed for accountants

The accounting industry has already witnessed incredible improvements in productivity in recent years. We’ve led the way in cloud-based technology for client accounting, tax preparation and practice management, resulting in a step change in both ease and efficiency. But with the average time taken to complete a job for a typical family group still at around 23 hours, we have to ask ourselves: where is this time going?

This infographic provides an overview of exactly how accounting practices spend their time on compliance work today. In it, we outline how different your day could be thanks to intelligent process automation, and show how FYI shaves minutes off daily tasks – saving you time and delivering a multitude of benefits across your practice.

The future is here – and it’s much more efficient

We believe the next frontier for increasing efficiency will come from rethinking the way we capture, file, and process source documents supporting accounting and tax. And that automation that is intuitive and intelligent can drastically increase the value that you and your practice can deliver.

FYI gets your practice ready for the future.

Streamlining the capture of client information and automating repetitive tasks means all your documents move effortlessly through the practice, supported by templates, electronic workflows and approvals. No more time spent chasing documents. Much less time filing. Much less room for error.

With processes streamlined for efficiency, automation achieves a level of consistency that’s much harder for humans to reach, enabling better and more accurate compliance practices. It frees your time from low-value, high-volume work, allowing you to be more efficient and spend more time working in an advisory capacity.

FYI’s core feature set is already generating proven time savings of up to 20% for our clients. And with our process automation engine, practices can take these productivity gains to another level entirely.

We won’t stop here. With great new features being released every few weeks and continued work with partners across the industry to broaden FYI’s scope, we are well on our way to achieving our mission. If you’d like to halve the time you spend on compliance work today, we’d love you to join us on our journey.