Bookkeeping has been on the backburner for quite some time.
A lot of accountants have been focused on the complexity of compliance, the cloud, digitization, and automation. At the same time, there’s been a battle in the SMSF arena as the competition heats up, and not just between accountants who have been outsourcing overseas, but also with newcomers in the form of financial planners moving into this space. These have been the big dollar battles with an average superfund’s compliance ranging from a thousand plus dollars up to several thousand dollars.
It seems the poor old bookkeeping has been left to the professional bookkeepers for several years. Partly to do with a lack of opportunity as the old desktop versions were a nightmare to manage .. yes, we all recall the year end adjusting journal entries to be sent back to the clients. But partly as the work was low value work.
But now with the impact of cloud, and the need for accountants to become involved “real-time” with their clients, and not looking back a year or more into the past, it seems that bookkeeping is gaining some traction.
Odyssey has had a bookkeeping division for over 7 years now. We first got serious enough about Cloud bookkeeping to form a separate bookkeeping division, with specialists in bookkeeping. If you follow the old argument put forward by bookkeepers, then bookkeepers are a special type of professional (and no, we’re not in any way going to get involved with the ongoing long running battle of accountant versus bookkeeper!).
If you recall the marketplace several years ago Xero was just moving into Australia as a serious cloud bookkeeping package, long before they released their cloud tax offering, and long before the other providers (Intuit, Reckon etc), and even Handisoft (strangely still absent from the cloud tax arena). This was the landscape that we forecast would have serious growth, and the landscape that existed when we created a separate bookkeeping division.
Is Desktop Dead? As of late 2017, we’ve seen more articles on bookkeeping and technology, and questions on whether value based pricing will continue for bookkeepers vis-à-vis the argument it will be commoditized, and growth areas for bookkeepers such as payroll processing i.e. diversification.
in the same way that accounting firms slow to move to cloud will be had pressed to compete with automated cloud firms the big opportunities for anyone wanting to enter this space are to move quickly into servicing their clients into the cloud, and finding an experienced outsourcing partner is going to be critical to ramping up this new service offering.
Talk to Odyssey today about our Outsourced bookkeeping offerings to assist with your client’s work.
January 2013 Newsletter – The Odyssey Rebel Motorbike trip and other Outsourced Accounting news
Peer-to-peer hits the real estate market
The Future of the “Per Seat” Resource Model
An Australian Accounting perspective on Outsourcing
Are fixed salaries and full-time workers soon to be a thing of the past?
The Top 9 reasons why your Accounting firm probably isn’t Outsourcing
