Nine Big Tech Trends at CPA Firms

The all-digital firm comes into view.

The 2011 Association for Accounting Administration’s 2011 paperless benchmarking survey shows digitalization accelerating at CPA firms.

The survey, conducted biannually by CPA tech consultant Roman Kepczyk since 2003, this year included 196 firms, each averaging about 55 persons.

“The latest iteration of this survey expanded the number of questions to encompass evolving technologies in scanning and archival, as well as to identify changes in tools and applications impacting administrative workflows,” Kepczyk says. “While there was a stronger focus on tax and administrative topics, audit, practice management, communications, and technology topics were also addressed for their paperless impact.”

The survey shows at least nine big advances in:

  1. firm-wide document management programs
  2. firms instructing personnel to primarily utilize email for communicating with tax clients for additional information requests
  3. portals or FTP sites to deliver digital tax returns/information to clients
  4. organizing or bookmarking scanned client source documents into a standardized PDFs
  5. digital fax systems
  6. virtualized servers
  7. email invoices
  8. management dashboards
  9. dual monitors

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