5 Tips to Improve your Accountancy Practice

As an accountancy practice owner, improving efficiency and increasing revenue are your main goals. However, this can be quite a difficult task as there are daily hurdles you may face which can hamper performance.

In the day to day running of your business, you may have to juggle many tasks such as processing payroll, bookkeeping, preparing financial statements and taxation services, keeping on top of it all can be difficult. In this article, we look at payroll and how the process can be streamlined for accountants, allowing you more time to spend on other tasks.

1. Say goodbye to manual data entry

Traditionally, you would manually enter clients’ payroll data into your payroll software, each pay period. This can be a very tedious and time-consuming task, which is also prone to human error. Thanks to award winning payroll software, BrightPay, and it’s cloud extension, BrightPay Connect, you can say goodbye to manual data entry, and say hello to a more automated payroll workflow. Through BrightPay Connect’s online dashboard, clients can view a summary of their payroll information before the payroll is finalised. This allows your clients to check for any possible errors or send you information on any changes that should be made to the payroll for that period. This can all be done directly through BrightPay Connect’s online portal; improving your payroll accuracy and reducing the chance of payroll errors occurring.

2. Automatic cloud backup

In an era where cyberattacks and data breaches are on the increase, backing up and securing your data has never been more important. According to a 2022 survey by Censuswide, 95% of Irish SME’s were hit by cyberattacks in the past year. In light of this, it’s important that every Irish accounting firm has measures in place to protect their clients’ data. Payroll software, BrightPay, has a cloud extension, BrightPay Connect, which can help solve this problem.

With BrightPay Connect, you no longer need to worry about manually backing up your payroll data. BrightPay Connect will automatically back up your payroll data to the cloud every 15 minutes and once again whenever you close out of a payroll file. This ensures that your clients’ payroll data is safe and secure. BrightPay Connect uses one of the world's most trusted cloud servers, Microsoft Azure, to store data. Backups can be restored at any time, through BrightPay Connect’s online dashboard.

3. Employer dashboard

Reducing your workload and saving time for other tasks is a goal for most accountants. With BrightPay Connect’s, online employer dashboard, accountants can work more efficiently by sharing payslips with their clients automatically through the portal, once payslips have been finalised. This process removes the manual workload and saves you time each pay period. Additionally, through the employer dashboard, clients can run their own payroll reports, meaning they won’t have to come to you when they need that information.

4. Integration with accounting software

Reducing the time you spend on time-consuming tasks such as transferring data from one system to another is vital. There can be a lot of time wasted on the double entry of payroll figures, when you should only really have to enter this information once.

It’s important that you use payroll and bookkeeping software that communicates with one another to remove the workload that comes with manually entering data. BrightPay’s integration with accounting software, Surf Accounts, is a great example of this. By connecting BrightPay to Surf Accounts, you can automatically send your payroll journals to the general ledger in Surf Accounts. This reduces errors by eliminating the need to reenter employee payroll data into your accounting software.

5. Pay your clients faster

Ensuring your clients’ employees are paid on time every week or month is one of the most important aspects of your payroll services. If there are delays in employees getting their wages, you will have unhappy clients with unhappy employees. This could damage your practice’s reputation, and you could potentially lose valuable clients.

Traditionally, it would take 1-3 business days for payments to be processed when paying employees by credit transfer. However, thanks to BrightPay’s integration with payment platform, Modulr, this process can be sped up dramatically. Modulr’s easy-to-use service allows you to make same-day payments to employees, when processed before 2.00 pm, cutting time spent manually processing payments and keeping both you, your clients and your clients’ employees happy.

BrightPay and BrightPay Connect users have a wide variety of tools at their disposal to help improve their payroll services. Not only will these features help save you time, but they can open up an opportunity to offer new services to clients and a new stream of revenue for your practice.

Why not book a free demo of BrightPay Connect today and discover how you can improve your accountancy practice and not be left behind.

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