Implementing the right tax solutions can substantially boost your firm’s efficiency, but have you ever considered its broader implications? The impact of technology on work-life balance, workplace roles, and company image could also give your firm a much-needed edge in staff recruitment.
More tax professionals have retired or changed careers than entered the industry in recent years. This has left many firms struggling to hire quality talent in an increasingly scarce and competitive market. Employed staff have felt the effect as well, shouldering heavier workloads to the make up for the shrinking labor force.
Tax technology enables an easier, more productive work experience that can help your firm stand out to applicants. This blog post will examine how digital solutions can demonstrate that your tax practice offers a better work-life balance, elevated workplace roles, and a forward-thinking company culture.
How technology can help work-life balance
As the tax industry’s labor supply has dwindled, time-consuming manual work like data entry and workpaper organization have become even more burdensome for the average preparer. In many accounting jobs, increased workloads have made any semblance of work-life balance impossible during busy season.
But while staffing issues have worsened in recent years, tax automation has made tremendous advancements. Scan-and-populate technology can now automate data entry, indexing, and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) verification on far more documents compared to years prior. These breakthroughs have saved countless billable hours for tax firms and allowed accounting staff to regain their work-life balance.
A 2022 Deloitte survey of Millennial and Gen Z workers showed that good work-life balance was the number one reason respondents chose to work for their current organization. Let it be the reason why up-and-coming tax professionals want to work for you.
How technology can elevate the role of staff
Young, ambitious tax pros didn’t choose the accounting profession to spend endless hours manually inputting data and bookmarking source documents. They want to take on job duties that challenge them, use their expertise, and position them for career growth.
Did you know? Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now even neutralizing the strain of K-1 tax preparation. SurePrep’s SPbinder features AI-powered K-1 Reclass that makes it easy for preparers to organize supplemental info by pre-populating drop-down menus.
Automating time-consuming, manual work gives preparers more opportunities to contribute in elevated roles that prioritize softer skills. For your firm, automation makes better use of billable staff hours, potentially even allowing preparers to become first-line reviewers. For future applicants, it presents a more appealing job opportunity with clearer avenues for upward mobility.
How technology can enhance your firm’s image
Job interviews aren’t just an opportunity for you to assess candidates. Applicants also use them to envision how they could fit into their potential future workplace. And as generational work habits shift, firms that want to stay competitive will have to adapt accordingly.
Many Gen Z tax professionals have used smartphones and cloud sharing for as long as they can remember. Some may not want to work at a firm still clinging to paper-based processes. Implementing end-to-end digital workflows can help align your tax practice with how the incoming generation works.
Candidates also want assurance that their future employer has the right infrastructure and mindset to weather unforeseen challenges. The ability to advertise technological benefits demonstrates to applicants that your firm is ahead of the curve and prepared for the future.
Why SurePrep could be the ultimate recruiting tool for your firm
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to creating a modern, digital workplace. However, there are ways to quantify which automation solutions result in the greatest time savings.
SurePrep’s 1040SCAN automates data entry and workpaper organization on 4–7 times as many documents as alternatives. It’s also the only solution to auto-verify OCR data on 65% of scanned documents. The impact of SurePrep technology on work-life balance, staff roles, and firm optics make it a powerful differentiator for recruiting the next generation of tax professionals.
What [SurePrep] is solving is congruent with what the younger generation wants to do. No one went to college, studied accounting, and passed their CPA exam to copy a number from Box 3. This allows us to teach them what different values in Box 3 mean and what needs to be considered.
Steven Hart, Chief Information Officer, Janover LLC
But digital transformation is just one component of change management. Employee attitudes, values, and priorities are shifting in a manner that will require firms to evolve at a fundamental level. Our joint webinar with Boomer Consulting can help you prepare for the future of recruitment and employee relations. Listen to two industry veterans discuss how firms can attract top talent and stay competitive in a tight labor market.
5 talent trends in tax & accounting
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