We had a very successful webinar partnering with the Digital Accountancy Show to showcase how our RPA portal product Practice Gateway is the go-to-solution for driving change and transformation in the accountancy sector.
Here is a list of questions we received during the webinar to help demonstrate the opportunity Practice Gateway can deliver to accountants and their clients.
What is Practice Gateway?
Practice Gateway provides a single portal for all client interactions in a secure way. It allows clients to:
We then take the information collected and using intelligent automation input the data into the relevant system. In the case of personal tax, it can automatically present your customer with the previous year’s personal tax information which they can then update without your team needing to chase them for information, or input the data into your systems.
How does your product differ from other Practice Management solutions such as Accountancy Manager or Karbon?
Practice Gateway is a single location for every interaction with practice and customer, for example document sharing & collaboration, which many other practice management solutions don’t possess.
How can we be sure that Practice Gateway is secure?
Practice Gateway is built on the Microsoft Stack, so it is hosted in Microsoft data centres, meaning it’s a fully cloud delivered service. Each element of Practice Gateway is delivered via Microsoft Azure which provides inherent security.
Do we get control of the document library for a client i.e. can we push out global communications (forms) for a subset of clients, for example?
This functionality is on our roadmap, so yes it will.
What happens to automation when the "shape" / "format" of documents changes?
Blue Prism technology, is very good with OCR. So, when a document changes shape, the technology will learn very quickly the new shape of the document.
What is the set-up time like? What support is in place for firms?
Set-up usually takes a month to get everything connected and configured. The biggest delay in this process tends to be practice’s ability to setup a VPN connection, which is a trivial task but seem to be delayed by suppliers.
As Practice Gateway is a SAAS solution, it requires no servers, just interconnectivity. We can fully manage and maintain the product for our clients.
It is very Important to nominate a few internal people who will champion the product, who really understand how this is going to work in detail, to work alongside the T-Tech team to support users.
Is Blue Prism controlled by T-Tech or the Accountancy practice?
T-Tech have full responsibility for configuration and management of the Robotic Process Automation platform.
Is there a risk to the robot breaking when CCH or other underlying system is updated?
As we have so many accountancy customers, we are aware when updates to common systems will be rolled out. Our development team will know what the updates will look like and will have updated the robot.
If the robot did “break”, this only means it pauses working. The data is still secure within system, and once running it simply starts the replication process again.
Do the forms pull through information already in HMRC using the digital tax account?
Yes – most personal tax systems like CCH do this, so we extract the data from there.
Do you integrate with Taxfiler?
This is part of our roadmap. As many of our customers are using Taxfiler, it is in our interest to bring this forward.
What licensing is needed for Practice Gateway?
T-Tech is responsible for Microsoft & RPA licensing as this is covered in our monthly license fee.
In terms of fees, there is a setup fee, and the license would be dependent on the number of customers on the platform.
If you are interested to find out how Practice Gateway can transform your practice, please sign up for a demo here.