For the past decade Australian accountants have been hearing of digital transformation, automation, data scraping and a dozen other terms that were on one hand labour saving, and on the other hand job threatening. For some, it’s been about as interesting as watching paint dry.
Even with Covid-19 forcing the shift to at-home work, the resulting innovation has not resulted in significant changes in the Australian compliance landscape. Most accountants are probably doing pretty much similar work as they were a couple of years ago, but with a raft of new legislation continuing to impact complexity of the compliance work.
There has been massive shifts in accounting firm clients:
- Many face-to-face businesses have gone digital. Whether it be telehealth consultations by doctors, online physios, online yoga, online gym workouts – there’s been a lot of movement to remote delivery of services
- Traditional firms quickly moved to setup secure systems outside office environments, with the result that many new firms have no offices. There will continue to be an increased concern at security with distributed workforces.
- Retailers worked on contactless delivery, pickups and hotlines to handle non-contact retail. There has been an increase in home delivery of just about everything
- Australian consumers have embraced ecommerce so much that Australia is in the top 5 countries with minimal cash usage. A boon for the Australian tax department who can now track every dollar moving through the economy, and gives rise to the potential automation of tax lodgements.
The ongoing skills shortage of Australian accountants
Australia continues to have a need for offshore teams to pick up the shortfall in an already stretched local market.
Remote working works, and many older traditional leaders have been forced into accepting working from home arrangements.
And with local teams already successfully working remotely, it’s not a stretch to consider using offshore resources to grow capacity – either ad-hoc temporarily or full time. Since once you’re remote anyway, location becomes less relevant.
Finding a quality outsourcing provider will be critical in this new agile world, since the requirement for agile workforce continues into the post covid environment. There continues to be peaks and troughs in tax work, and spikes in demand for staff.
At the same time that local talent is scarce, it is also expensive. There will be growing demand for quality offshore compliance teams to make up for local shortages.
It’s no wonder many say “When you do go offshore, it must be about quality first. “
If you need help with quality Australian compliance outsourcing drop us a line.
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