Finance and accounting firms, like any professional services organizations, face a number of challenges when it comes to employee collaboration and information management.
Creating a digital workplace tailored to your firm’s needs is essential for employee productivity and managing the complexity of your processes and documents. A well-designed digital workplace helps to alleviate or eliminate these five big challenges for finance and accounting firms:
- Inaccessible content: The primary concern is to ensure that your employees have easy access to the content they need. Activities such as audits or tax preparation require significant amounts of content collection and tracking, so easy access to that content is essential to employee productivity.
- Fragmented content storage: The second big concern for finance and accounting firms is how to store this content. Many organizations have accumulated a number of data silos that make it difficult for employees to collaborate across the organization. Creating a SharePoint intranet with client and employee portals provides this centralized storage while supporting collaboration and securing confidential information.
- Complex manual processes: In the past, an accountant preparing a tax return would ask the client to provide a large amount of information. That content would then be transmitted and collected via fax, paper documents and email. None of these methods are very secure or efficient.Many accounting firms are looking to automate these processes. Implementing a digital workplace solution offers a variety of options for automating workflows. For a tax employee who needs to find and track 27 pieces of client information, for example, a customer extranet could help to automate some of that process.
- Lack of integrated systems: An accounting firm typically uses a variety of different systems, from content management platforms like SharePoint Online to line-of-business solutions. When you integrate these platforms within your digital workplace, your staff has better access to the data and documents they need, improving collaboration and productivity.
- Difficulty managing expertise within the firm: At medium and large accounting firms, employees need tools to quickly identify others with relevant expertise to help with a certain problem, and gain an understanding of firm experience, such as what work the firm has done for specific clients. Having that information readily available through your digital workplace improves employee productivity, allowing people to quickly share expertise and internal knowledge.
Whether you’re a small, medium or large organization, a digital workplace solution offers tangible benefits to any finance or accounting firm. The main benefit is that it improves your staff’s ability to collaborate with their peers. As more firms incorporate remote workers and distributed teams, the digital workplace provides tools that support new ways of collaborating. Unified communications tools like Lync help bring geographically dispersed team members together for effective online meetings. A visually oriented digital workplace makes it easy to find any project you’re working on and identify the activities related to that project.
Learn more about helping your organization leverage today’s digital workplace capabilities by contacting Portal Solutions.
