Practice Gateway told by Tech Mogul Daniel Teacher

What is it?

Practice Gateway is a single portal for clients and accountants to interact with, for all services provided. Traditionally clients don’t engage with the portal, or have multiple different places to go to access information from their accountant, for example:

• A payment portal
• Outsource services, e.g. Xero portal
• Document share portal
• Government portal

T-Tech have built a solution that integrates with different systems on the back end, so the client doesn’t need to know that their accountant is running different systems for different things.

Not only does the system collect information from the client, but it inputs all the information into the backend system, e.g. personal tax system, ready for a file review. It essentially provides both the client and the accountant with a single view – the client sees what’s important and relevant, the accountant sees the system going on in the background.

Why do I need it?

There are multiple reasons why Practice Gateway can deliver the things accountants and their clients have been longing for:

• To provide a single view of all information to the client
• To make it easy for the client to access information about themselves
• To make it easy for the client to submit information and books and records to the accountant in a consistent and single package format, i.e. not individual documents in separate emails
• To ensure that fee earning staff spend time engaging with the client on value added areas

This is different to the standard off the shelf portals you may have already seen – Practice Gateway is a simplified solution that allows the client to see their accountant through one pane of glass. It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.

Who’s a suitable user for the product?

Nothing like this exists – we would expect all accountants and their clients to use this. It is a unique solution that enables clients and accountants to effectively communicate and focus on higher valued advisory services. Things to consider in advance of this, which may help you to assess technology on a wider scale within your practice, is that there is no point in attempting to automate:

• Unless your IT systems are solid and stable
• You are running the process properly on top of your existing systems
• Data is standardised within your business and from your customers

How much will it cost my business?

The business case behind the portal is extremely strong, as in some cases we have seen WIP on certain jobs reduced by 50%. Not only does the system collect the data but it does the inputting – accountants reduce time spent on data entry.

Note that although the Portal plugs into a variety of software’s, it is not replacing these applications and nor are we trying to become experts in replacing software’s. We are bridging the gap between the client, the accountant, and the piece of software. For example, if your firm is running CCH, our portal will adapt to that software, pull the data from CCH, get data from last years personal tax return, the client will enter the figures from this year, and this will plug the data straight through to CCH, removing the accountant from entering any of the data altogether.

How does it benefit users?

For many reasons:

• The client has a better experience – it is easy and seamless
• The accountant doesn’t have to rekey information
• Time saving is a huge advantage, and it also really helps with seasonality, for example during tax season, if a client has only half completed their tax form, they will get a reminder email asking to supply the rest of the information
• Value adding, as it removes the low value error prone steps from the process

Sign up for your free demo on Practice Gateway.