Compliance is NOT dead

We hear constantly that compliance is dying. "We need to move on". In my view, compliance is not dead, far from it. Compliance is thriving.

It's the bedrock and the foundation of everything that we do. If we don't have access to accurate books and records in real-time, then we cannot provide advisory. How can you provide advisory if the numbers are all over the place if the books aren't reconciled if everything is not impotent? It simply isn't possible.

Therefore compliance is thriving. And what I mean by that is that we as accountants actually need to step up and do what we were trained to do in the first place.

What is dying is the year-end model. That model where clients drop off records to us once a year, we do the accounts and tax return and then say "see you again next year", that model is dying. And those accountants that are still stuck to that model will lose out or be treated as a commodity going forward. You see a lot of accountants in the last couple of decades, got quite complacent with that model, that as long as they didn't make a complete pig's ear of something, the client would come back again next year.

But times have changed. Accountants are stepping up. Accountants are now doing a lot more to become the advisors that they were trained to be. Actually hand-holding a client, providing real-time management information, giving them peace of mind over their financial affairs, that's the things that we should be doing. And with software available to us at our fingertips, we can do that so much more efficiently and effectively than we ever could do before.

Watch the video below to find out more