2014 CPA Management and Technology Trends

One of the core responsibilities of CPA Managing Partners is to monitor and evaluate trends within our profession, looking for opportunities to enhance the future of the firm.  This past week, we were fortunate to attend the Future Trends Panel session at the Winning is Everything Conference in Las Vegas where Andy Armanino, Tom Hood, Gail Perry, and Katie Tolin shared their views on key future trends as moderated by Gary Shamis, Senior Managing Director of SS&G.  Below is our take on their key insights of technology, mobility and learning, along with our additions on information technology trends.

Andy Armanino: Managing Partner, Armanino: Andy stated that the future will be bright for the middle market consultancy practices that learn to rise above the traditional compliance work and are focused on higher level advisory services such as strategic planning and profit enhancement.  He believed that this was the key focus that will lead to more profitable firms in the future.  One of his firm’s changes was to re-tool their website towards a “client needs perspective” based on where that client was in their corporate life cycle instead of the traditional CPA firm website model that lists the menu of firm services offered by each department,  Armanino has integrated tools into their website to know what clients and prospects are looking at, rating those pages and scoring client viability, which can either automate an appropriate response or deliver that information to the appropriate person within the firm so they can respond to that client/prospect directly.

Tom Hood: CEO, Maryland Association of Accountants: Tom felt that the key to future CPA firm success was development of the right talent at the right time, which he referred to as “agile learning.”  Organizations that can promote learning and process improvements at a rate faster than the change going on around them will maintain a competitive advantage.  Tom also pointed out, that even though most CPAs are overwhelmed with email, texts and data, that the real problem is not information overflow, but is instead “filter failure” where there are too many resources coming at us concurrently.  The solution to this issue is selecting a few highly trusted resources for information.  This provides a great opportunity for CPAs to deliver concise accounting and business information to clients such that we are viewed as the trusted data filters for those clients and niches (which backs up Andy Armanino’s key trend).

Tom also referred to five major mental shifts that senior management will have to make if they want to attract and retain the next generation of personnel and continue to build their firms.  The future generation of personnel expect technology that allows them to work more effectively; they expect to work in ways that are more conducive to their personal work style and to not have to punch the time clock on the firm’s schedule, they expect to participate in leadership with a focus on collaboration, they expect the opportunity for continual learning, and they realize that their generation is different from senior management, but they are more technologically proficient and expect the owners to provide leadership and guidance so they can get the work done in their own way. This group, usually referred to a millennials, have very little patience for previous generations “wait your turn” attitude and will either need to be appeased or move to someplace else providing them a more significant and fast tracked career path.  Firms that cannot make these shifts will find that they will be unable to attract and retain this next generation workforce.  Andy Armanino pointed out that his firm made a conscientious effort to transition from traditional career paths to one of identifying entrepreneurial personnel with the potential to become partners and growing them by providing training and resources so they can thrive in their practice.

Gail Perry: Editor-In-Chief, CPA Practice Advisor:  Gail’s big trend was that mobile technology within firms (smartphones, tablets, phablets, and laptops) will continue to explode and dramatically change how people access information and work.  From a publisher’s perspective, this trend is causing a drastic change in the information dissemination processes.  End users now get news alerts all day long, in near real time as it happens because people today want to be “in the know” at their convenience. Unfortunately there is a blurring of lines between validated news and individual commentary, so reliability of data can become questionable and insight into stories or proper context is often missing.  Again, this provides accounting firms an opportunity to be a provider of reliable information that is valuable to the firm’s clients.

Katie Tolin:  Marketing Director, Rea & Associates:   Katie concurred with Gail Perry that the unstoppable trend in marketing is also focused around mobility.   She felt that firms must find a way to send messages such that they are intuitively easy for clients to digest and that websites must deliver information that is easy to find regardless of what device that person is using.  She pointed out that firms will implement automation tools that provide this digital assistance.  Katie also pointed out that successful future marketing teams will need a broader set of technical skills than most have in-house today.  Areas in which internal firm personnel are not proficient, such as website automation and mobile device optimization, will have to be outsourced to experts.

When asked how firms can get a better response from prospects either directly or virtually through the website, Katie stated a key success factor was being able to respond to these inquiries immediately, which is the client’s expectation today.  The trend for CPA prospect leads points to potential clients asking two or three firms over the web, and the first firm with a compelling response usually wins, so firms have to learn to collaborate on the fly to respond to these requests.  Andy Armanino backed this comment up stating that firm personnel are trained respond to client requests for business and taught how to effectively close such engagement proposals, which is part of the standard Armanino University curriculum all employees go through.

OUR VIEW-INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: Roman Kepczyk, Directory of Consulting, Xcentric, LLC: We definitely see that learning, collaboration, and mobility will be the major trends for successful firms in the future and the adoption of underlying information technologies being a requirement for their success.  The reality today is that information technology impacts every aspect of your practice so to add depth to the trends previously listed, we list our four key IT trends of cloud, workflow, collaboration, and curved screens, which we feel will impact your firm’s future success.

Cloud: Whether you use hosted cloud applications or make your firm’s applications accessible via your own private cloud, the key to mobility is that you must make all applications and data securely available anytime, anywhere, and on any device.

Workflow: Digital applications and data need digital workflows to manage processes.  Integrating digital workflow applications do more for optimizing production than any other storage or archival applications and they more they are integrated with your document management, portal, email, scheduling and practice management, the more effective your digital workflows will be.

Collaboration:  Collaboration seems to be this year’s buzzword and the reality is that not only does the next generation thrive when they collaborate digitally, the firm also profits.  Using real time tools that integrate email, instant messaging, video chat, and voice (such as Microsft LYNC) as well as having intranets and workflow tools that allow multiple personnel to simultaneously work on the same projects are the key technologies to promote collaboration.

Curved screens: Ok, I couldn’t keep out my inner geek. One of the coolest future gadgets we witnessed at the Consumer Electronics show this year was the advent of the curved Ultra High Definition display that will wrap around us and give us a perfect display environment allowing accountants to see every application they need in an optimized ergonomic layout.  This is a precursor to the high definition completely immersed display environment such as Oculus Rift’s HD prototype headsets.  This tool makes everywhere you look a high definition screen…it’s not gaming, it’s work!

About the Author

Roman H. Kepczyk, CPA.CITP, CGMA, and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt is Director of Consulting for Xcentric, LLC and works exclusively with accounting firms to optimize their IT infrastructure and internal production workflows within their tax, audit, client services and administrative areas. Roman also partners with firms considering mergers in evaluating the technology and applications of the two entities to identify the optimum composite firm moving ahead. Roman can be reached at roman@xcentric.com and 678-495-0508.