Back in June we ran a webinar on mental health. It attracted a surprising number of attendees and a lot of positive feedback. Although it’s not a topic many people feel comfortable talking about openly, mental health is clearly on our minds.

How are you feeling?

We didn’t make the decision to ask people about their mental health and illness lightly. However, not speaking about mental health only keeps it, and the people suffering, in the dark. Hearing that others feel the way you do, can also be a small comfort – knowing you’re not alone. The more mental health is talked about, the more people can understand their own feelings and those of others. 

“1 in 6 adults experiences a common mental health problem, such as anxiety or depression. 1 in 5 adults has considered taking their own life at some point.” 

– Mental Health Foundation (2016)

183 accountants and bookkeepers chose to take part in our survey, all anonymously. As the results show, mental health is a very real problem in the accountancy industry and that deserves all of our attention. 

93.5% of respondents have experienced higher than normal levels of stress this year

Have you experienced higher than normal levels of stress this year?

We all know accountants and bookkeepers have been under a lot of pressure this year, so the first two graphs won’t come as a surprise. That doesn’t make them any easier to see. A total of 93.5% of respondents have experienced higher than normal levels of stress this year, with 63.4% reporting a significant amount higher.  Continue reading...

We’ve recently been looking into the best way to donate to charity over the long term. This week, after an eye-opening call with Paul Dunn – Co-Founder of B1G1 – James signed up on the spot. 

Make a difference – just by doing what you do

In 2007, B1G1 (Buy1Give1) started with a simple idea: “What if every business could make a difference in their own way, just by doing what they normally do?” Today, over 2,500 businesses worldwide make a donation every time they welcome a new client, make a sale or reach a milestone.

Every cause on B1G1 supports one or more of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. These are blueprints to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. They address the global challenges we face, including poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice.

See how you can make a difference with B1G1

Our first cause: Bookkeeping skills for women in Zambia

Starting from December, we’ll donate every time a new practice joins AccountancyManager. Every quarter, we’ll channel the funds to a different cause. It’s a tough job to decide which program to support, but since we work with bookkeepers in the UK and Ireland, providing women in Zambia with bookkeeping skills felt fitting.

The program is run by Microloan Foundation Australia, an organisation that helps women in Malawi, Zimbabwe and Zambia lift their families from poverty and become self-supporting. Our donations will help fund courses for women business owners to develop their financial literacy and bookkeeping skills. Continue reading...

Over the past few months we’ve been chatting, one-on-one with many AccountancyManager users. They’ve said some lovely things about us, which is nice, but even more interesting has been learning about their journeys from employees to practice owners. 

Starting your own practice

It struck us that AccountancyManager has been a big part of building many new practices from scratch and veteran practice owners we speak to say they wish they’d had AM at the start. 

“…without AccountancyManager I’d be sobbing gently in the corner. I would’ve had to have stopped taking on clients much further back.”

Carolyn Cullen, Monton Green Accountancy

So why is practice management software not just a ‘nice to have’, but a crucial foundation for business success from the word go? We’ve brought together insights from ACCA, ICAEW and a few of our own accountant entrepreneurs. 

Planning is everything

Creating a business plan

No guide to launching a new business is complete without this initial step, which deserves an article of its own. The ACCA outlines the basics. “Draw up a solid business plan. Make sure it includes goals that are SMART: specific, measurable, appropriate, realistic and timely. It doesn’t guarantee you success, but it makes it more likely. It can give you a benchmark to measure your performance against and helps to keep you focused.” – ACCA, Six tips for starting your own business Continue reading...

We’re pleased to announce that our hotly anticipated integration with QuickBooks is now live. This will be music to the ears of many AM customers, who’ve been with us throughout the journey from requesting to testing the QuickBooks integration. Thank you for your suggestions and support – we genuinely appreciate it. 

Client information synced – in both directions

If you or your client makes a change to their details in their QuickBooks account, these changes will be reflected in the client’s file and portal on AccountancyManager. Thanks to the two-way sync, this works the other way around too. If you make a change in AM – or your client makes a change through the AM portal – the QuickBooks account will also update. 

Say goodbye to duplicate entry

The biggest benefit of synced client fields is the amount of time you and your team will save, not having to update multiple systems. Just make the change on one software.

New clients – added automatically

Once you have integrated, if you add a brand new client to AM, it will automatically be added to QuickBooks. If you add your brand new client to QuickBooks first, they will appear on your AM integration list and you can create the client in AM from there.

Coming soon: Invoices synced between AM and QuickBooks

We’ve decided to release our QuickBooks integration in two phases. The data sync integration is ready now, so you can save time on double entry while we finish up invoice integration. This means you can get all your clients connected, so when the invoice synchronisation is ready you can just turn it on and your invoices will sync across both programs for the connected clients. The invoicing function is currently in testing, but here are a couple of things you can expect: Continue reading...

Every business has a culture, whether it’s been purposefully cultivated or not (and we’re not talking about that thing in the office fridge). Summarised as ‘the way we do things around here’, your culture encapsulates how your practice runs, how your people act and what brings you all together.

We’ve pulled out the key considerations of building a strong culture – and looked at what part technology plays. Our sources include: Forbes, case studies with AM users and insights from a recent webinar by James Byrne, CEO of AccountancyManager, and Aynsley Damery, CEO of Clarity.

A for All together

Your culture impacts everyone and everything they do relating to your business. It’s not just Friday drinks or something you use to recruit and retain employees. Rather, it’s how the leaders lead, how each person makes daily decisions and the experience your clients have working with you. Each of these elements can be supported and optimised by technology.

“It’s always about the right combination of people, processes and technology – I’m not saying technology is the panacea – but it can certainly do the heavy lifting.”

Aynsley Damery, Clarity

B for Benefits and bonuses

How better to prove your commitment to employee happiness and show your appreciation – than through benefits and bonuses? AccountancyManager user, Johann Goree at JGBC, has crafted an especially tempting package. “My guys have unlimited holiday, they get a profit-based bonus every November and whenever we hit any mile markers… like when we hit 300 back in September of 300 live clients, they all got a £300 bonus.” Continue reading...

So you’ve decided to join the world of practice management software, but where do you start? We’ve combined our own experience of working with clients with some best practices in change management.

1. Bring your team on the journey

Your practice management software is the centre of your practice. Onboarding clients, managing work as it progresses and organising everything from client details, deadlines and emails – to your daily tasks. 

So it makes sense that everyone in your team needs to buy into the idea of A) using practice management software, and B) The software you choose. Here are a couple of change management tips that can help:

Communicate the big picture

Explain in practical terms how practice management software will help your whole organisation at an individual, team and practice level. And use your culture and goals to back you up. 

Using cloud software is a step forward, no matter what your business goals. Make that connection for your team. Are you doing it to empower junior staff? To provide an easier experience for your clients? To free up leadership? Then what? How will this drive your vision forward?

Create a team of ‘champions’

Just telling your team to use software that the leadership team has chosen is not the way to go. Make sure you’re solving problems for everyone by bringing together people from across your practice to research and choose the software with you.  Continue reading...

Every New Year hails the annual scramble to gather Self Assessment information. Millions of people, calculating their expenses, income, interest… for a tax year already fading into memory, as their bookkeepers and accountants send increasingly urgent requests. 

Yes, the 31st of January is three months away. Yes, you and your clients have quite enough on your plates right now. No, this is not like seeing Christmas decorations in July. 

This year, it’s even more important to get your Self Assessment ball rolling as early as possible. Then… forget about it and leave it to AccountancyManager.

What’s different this year?

More pressure on your – and your clients’ – time

This year, businesses have been turning to their accountants for more information, advice and support than ever before. With the impact of lockdown on businesses far from over, we’re facing a busy season like no other.

AccountancyManager users have been relying on tailored bulk emails to update clients on the ever-changing legislation throughout the coronavirus pandemic. Automating these messages alleviated more time to offer the personalised advice that clients value. As Self Assessment looms and your compliance tasks soar, automate as many parts of your process as possible and maintain your level of client support.

Deferred payments due on the same day as SA Continue reading...

App Stack, App Map, App Flow… call it what you like, combinations of integrated apps is a hot topic right now – and rightly so.

All the apps covered here save you time and make life easier for you and your clients. It’s when you combine them that the real magic happens. Powerful automation (within apps and between them) and an unbroken chain of real-time data flowing from your client’s business, through your practice.

We’ll show you our app stack, if you show us yours…

With 700+ apps available to accountants and bookkeepers, you’d be forgiven for being a bit confused. In fact, that’s exactly why Dan Cockerton founded the Digital Accountancy Show. We put this map together with Dan to show some of the best apps out there in 2020 and how they work together.

AccountancyManager

As a practice management software, AccountancyManager sits at the heart of your practice – and effectively your software ecosystem. AM was born out of a busy accountancy practice, designed to automate as much of your processes as possible and save considerable time.

Starting with onboarding, AM automates your proposals, letters of engagement, 64-8s, professional clearance, AML ID and credit checks and client chasing. Moving on to your clients’ accounts and returns, AM requests and reminds your clients to provide their records with automated emails and texts, generates task lists for everyone in your practice and offers time and profitability tracking. There’s a secure client portal where you can share documents with your clients and get e-signatures too. Finally, AM automates your invoices, which can be integrated with your accounting software. Continue reading...

This article was written by Nach Suphakawanich, our Marketing Intern. A graduate from the University of Birmingham, Nach begins his Master’s degree in Marketing this autumn and is originally from Thailand. 

A change of plans

In July 2020, I graduated from the University of Birmingham with a degree in English Literature. It almost happened without me realising – a few months before, I had just finished writing my 12,000-word dissertation. After many sleepless nights fuelled by instant coffee, my only plan post-graduation was to travel around before returning to England for my Master’s degree.

Then COVID-19 happened. 

All of a sudden, it became less likely that I would be doing much of anything in the coming months. But I was determined to not let my summer in the UK go to waste. I wanted to do something with my time. Something productive! 

Applying to AccountancyManager

Ultimately, I decided that the best thing for me was to look for more work experience. Having mainly worked in marketing roles for small arts organisations, I was ready for a new challenge. If I wanted to start my Master’s degree feeling refreshed and reinvigorated, I needed to test my current strengths and develop some new skills. So when I came across an internship advert from AccountancyManager on my university’s careers portal, I was immediately interested. Continue reading...

The number of different emails accountants and bookkeepers send to clients throughout the year is staggering. In fact, cutting out this repetition and wasted time was one of the main reasons James, AM’s co-founder and an accountant himself, created AccountancyManager. 

Coming full circle, this week’s article has been requested by Nevdish, a new recruit to the AM team. We recently covered Automated emails and Automated tax reminders, but at the heart of these features (probably saving you the most time of all) is Nevdish’s favourite feature: our bank of pre-written email templates.

“We have generic templates which can be tweaked and saved easily. There’s no need to spend time writing and rewriting them – just tweak, click save, job’s done! Accountants find writing these a pain and time-consuming. We completely eradicate that for them.”

Nevdish, AM sales team

Emails pre-written by a qualified accountant 

The name ‘template’ undersells them somewhat. Imagine the lengthiest emails you send, a registration or professional clearance email, perhaps. These are already written for you by an accountant in their entirety and include everything you’d expect to find. All you need to do is check them over and, if you like, make edits to the phrasing or content.

Highly personalise emails for each client 

AccountancyManager will automatically populate emails with any client-specific data you need to include, pulling it through from the client’s file. For example, the client’s name would appear as: %FIRSTNAME%. Or it will pull in ‘Preferred name’ if added. Name is just one ‘Client Variable’ from over 400 options and you can add any you like. Continue reading...