What a start to 2018, we have the MYOB purchase of APS to digest and understand, mandatory data breaches come into effect on the 22nd of February & the looming changes from the ATO with correspondence like NOA’s going digital. Yet most Practices I talk to don’t have a strategy around digital. Easy to say, but let me explain.
Let’s take the way we deliver our work to clients as the example. My first questions when I talk to a new Practice are “How do you deliver the end result of your work to your clients?” “How do you interact with your clients?” The answers are many and varied, but I nearly always find there is no strategy around security and any thought around what delivery method does my client really want and works for them.
We have developed 8 blocks around delivering a proper “Progressive Digital Practice” but in this article I wanted to focus on the “Client Delivery” block.
Emailing documents no longer cuts it for many reasons, but on a security front it does not meet the standard any more. So what do we do?
Most Practices we work with end up offer three key methods:-
- Postal delivery
- Portal
- Secure Practice Smartphone App
Let’s take processing an ATO NOA as an example of how a Progressive Digital Practice would approach this:-
Login to the Agent portal and drag and drop the NOA’s into “ATO SmartDoc” (a system we developed to automate ATO Document processing). Hit the process button and ATOSD will:-
- Identify the document type using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and rename the document
- Prepare the appropriate structure to file the NOA into your document management system
- Automatically check the Assessed amount against the Estimated amount.
Now, if the amount agrees ATOSD checks the client record in your Practice Management system for the nominated deliver method, which in this case is set to Smartphone App.
You client receives a push notification, email and text “Ron, we have check your assessment it agrees with the estimate we provided you, just click on the “MyDocs” icon in our Practice app to review the document.”
I picked this example because the whole process happens in under 8 seconds from beginning to end and it’s a great example of automation and artificial intelligence working together.
Becoming a “Progressive Digital Practice” is all about getting all the technology projects into the one plan and then start executing.
Ron Drost | General Manager | www.iPracticeApps.com | www.iPracticeHub.com
Contact Ron at ron@ddslive.biz
The pinnacle of Ron's achievements is the creation of ATO Smartdocs, a cutting-edge solution that epitomizes the culmination of his experience and expertise. ATO Smartdocs stands as a testament to Ron's vision of streamlining the handling of ATO documents through automation and secure delivery mechanisms. This platform has revolutionized the way accounting firms interact with ATO documents, making the process more efficient, secure, and reliable.
ATO SmartDocs helps firms all over Australia connect directly with the ATO servers and retrieve their ATO documents seamlessly with a 93% efficiency compared to manual processing. Secure delivery is achieved with 2FA/MFA on every ATO document, protecting the whole document, not just the TFN.
