Develop your digital practice
If you’ve been thinking about developing your digital offering but not yet dipped your toe in, you’re not alone. As we know, cloud accounting isn’t going anywhere, so how can we as accountants turn accounting apps to our advantage and use them to generate income? Matt Flanagan from BlueHub shares his tips.
With the rise of cloud accountancy, accountants are swiftly transitioning to more consultative roles. But there are also opportunities presented by the apps themselves. By recommending the right app to your clients, implementing it and then providing ongoing support you can open up new revenue streams and continue to provide essential business support and advice.
It is also critically important to integrate apps into your practice software ecosystem to automate data entry processes and evolve the book-keeping function in the practice to ‘review by exception’ from mundane keying-in. This in turn facilitates capacity to deliver trusted business advice to clients.
ICAEW member Matt Flanagan is a cloud business systems specialist and Managing Director at BlueHub. He works with accountants to support their transition to cloud accounting and developing their advisory services and he’s kindly agreed to share some of his insights.
App FAQs
Here Matt answers some of the questions he’s most often asked, from which apps he would recommend to how you can make an income from app advisory.
How to take your practice digital
Choose your apps
Matt believes the accountancy app ecosystem is so vast you’re never going to have 100% knowledge. There are over 800 on the market and each one will have been through hundreds of updates. He recommends using only using around 1% of these – BlueHub only use around 7 apps to make sure they know them well. The key to deciding which apps to use really lies with understanding what problems your clients are facing.
Start with a conversation
When introducing the idea of apps to clients, asking the right questions is an important start point. Identify their business problems then consider whether technology can help them solve these.
Decide which services to offer
There are two main services you can offer:
- For larger businesses you can offer implementation services to embed the software into their systems and provide ongoing support.
- For smaller companies you could offer to use apps to automate their book keeping and offer virtual credit control.
Explore your revenue streams
There are six key ways to generate fees through apps:
- Referral
- Consultancy
- Recommendation
- Implementation
- Training
- Support
Matt goes into more detail about these revenue streams and how to create a process for connecting your clients with the right apps in the video below.
