Intelligent Automation in action across accountancy

By Andrew Guy, CEO at FD Intelligence

In my previous posts, I explored the challenges facing Accountancy firms and explained why and how Intelligent Automation is a compelling growth catalyst.

Now, I’m highlighting specific areas of accountancy work that are being transformed by this capability, with a real-world case study showing its impact.

What areas of Accountancy work can now be enhanced?

Intelligent Automation is reshaping many aspects of accountancy work, bringing efficiency, accuracy, and speed to these time-consuming tasks:

1. Tax processing: accelerates processing times, delivers cost savings, and significantly augments tax teams.
2. Payroll: accelerates and enhances processing of salaries, taxes, deductions, and reporting.
3. Client onboarding: streamlines the onboarding process, including AML checks and letters of engagement, reducing time and improving accuracy.
4. Billing & invoicing: manages billing, invoicing, and reconciliations faster and with greater ease.
5. Financial reporting: generates financial reports seamlessly, integrating with existing accounting software.
6. Auditing: processes documents, reconciles numbers and ensures compliance with greater precision and speed.

Spotlight on tax returns

To sustain revenue for UK tax preparation service providers totalling £4.5 billion in 2023, intelligently automating tax returns is a particularly compelling proposition.

While an experienced accountant can prepare a basic return in around two hours, they spend up to 10 days gathering necessary data points and documentation from the customer. A recent Bloomberg BNA study reveals that 27% of accounting mistakes stem from incorrect data entry of tax information.

Intelligent Automation addresses these issues by automating data gathering and entry, significantly reducing processing time and minimising human error in data entry, improving accuracy and compliance.

Let’s see how leading accountancy firm MHA uses Intelligent Automation to transform their tax return process. MHA partnered with FD Intelligence to develop a personal tax robot capable of automating the tax return process.

1. The robot uses optical character recognition (OCR) and AI to understand documents and emails sent by customers.
2. It extracts relevant data and adds it to the tax return.
3. The robot can handle both structured (standardised tax forms) and unstructured (emails) information.
4. Accountants receive a tax return that’s 90% complete, leaving them to validate and finalise.

In the first year, the robot completed 5,000 tax returns on time with incredible accuracy. Time savings exceeded expectations: up to 3 hours saved per tax return (initial goal was 1 hour). When fully rolled out, MHA expects to save 45,000 hours of work each year.

Spotlight on Payroll

Processing monthly payroll runs is a major resource drain for Payroll Teams within accountancy firms. Monthly workload peaks are extremely difficult to resource and manage.

Intelligent Automation removes these monthly pressures by automating the majority of payroll processing tasks. It also provides Payroll teams with the granular oversight and control they need via a dashboard.

Significantly, the Dashboard redesigns the full end-to-end workflow of how payroll jobs are processed. It’s the ultimate ‘human-in-the-loop’ solution, taking extremely complex work and proving it can be automated with collaboration between payroll experts and robots.

The payroll robots are utilised in task such as employee onboarding, payroll imports, reporting, HMRC real time data requirements, pension auto-enrolment, payslip and PAYE form generation, BACS payments, billing and more.

What’s also in scope

While the immediate time and cost savings benefits of Intelligent Automation are clear, its potential goes far beyond. Faster service completion times lead to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.

By automating mundane tasks, accountants can also engage in more challenging and rewarding work, like providing strategic advising and consultancy services.

Looking ahead

Intelligent Automation is not just about removing tedious tasks; it’s about reimagining what’s possible for your accountancy firm. As we’ve seen from MHA’s experience, the benefits can be transformative.

In my final post of this series, I’ll explore how your firm can successfully implement Intelligent Automation, providing a roadmap for your journey. Stay tuned to learn the key success factors and best practices for bringing this capability into your accountancy practice.