Accountancy practices spend a lot of time collecting data from their clients. This especially applies to their personal tax clients who require a tax return. The accountant asks their clients to send data about their personal taxes – how much they’ve earned in interest, shares, other income etc. Upon receipt of this data, in whatever form the client chooses to supply it, the accountant must collate this and enter it into the tax return preparation application.
To reduce the time spent on manually entering this data, T-Tech have built a portal that enables clients to enter their data online. This is called Practice Gateway.
Practice Gateway is based around Microsoft Dynamics 365. Personal tax clients visit the portal and enter the details required for the preparation of their tax return. The point is that it’s not sent to the accountant via mail or in a spreadsheet – it’s all done online. The client can see the figures from the previous tax return for comparison purposes, and when they’ve entered all their information it is submitted for processing. And it can be done by the end user rather than a case worker or a clerk at the accountancy practice.
What happens then to the data they have entered?
This is where the robotics offering comes in. In the old world, when a client sends data for the tax return to their accountant, the accountant must transfer this data to the tax return preparation software such as Digita or CCH. This is a time consuming and manual task that’s prone to errors.
We can use a robot to do this. The robot can read the information that the client entered into the portal and type this into the tax return preparation software in much the same way that a user would do it. The robot can work 24x7, doesn’t make errors, and doesn’t get bored.
The objective is to remove the low value, error prone steps from the process and allow the accountant to concentrate on value-add services to their clients.