Accountex is our opportunity to keep our finger on the pulse of developments in the accounting industry.  We visited this week and report our key take-aways.  

Setting the Scene 

It is worth setting the scene as it will make sense of some of what follows.  Accountex is held in the cavernous sheds that are the ExCeL centre.   The show consists of hundreds of stands jostling for the world weary accountant’s attention.  Some are small with low production values and some huge with little money spared, archways leading to juice bars, cafes, table football, seminar areas and of course screens everywhere and armies of young bright eyed account managers.

The biggest and shiniest of these stands all belong to software providers, but other service providers are there too, training organisations, advisers and industry bodies.  Around the periphery lectures are in full flow, accounting gurus articulating their formula for a better tomorrow.

The exhibitors’ job is to achieve maximum return on investment for their fee (a concept the accounting industry understands well), the first step is to get us to stop, hence the bowls of sweets and juice bars, but being seasoned visitors we are cautious because we know:

• All that glisters is not gold.  Products that have promised the earth have disappointed when you get into the nitty gritty.

• Our eyes must not get bigger than our stomachs.  Any new service and especially any new software we take on will take a huge investment from our side to set things up well and get engagement from our clients.

• Some of what we see will be a flash in the pan.  We signed up a partnership with Fluidly one year which no longer exists.  The larger software providers have a habit of buying up the smaller ones and then leaving them to wither away starved of investment.

That said, we do have objectives.  Our services is founded on bring the most up to date working practices to our clients, so we are focused on some goals:

• Making sure we are not missing something important to bring to clients

• Getting the horizon in focus, seeing what is coming and what we should be thinking about incorporating into the practice

• Keeping up to date with new functionality in the software we have.

• Resolving some of the questions we keep bumping against.

• Saying hi to some account managers.

First Impressions

The first thing that strikes me is that the biggest, shiniest and buzziest stand belongs to Sage.   This is interesting.  In years gone by that accolade would have gone to Xero.  This year Sage and Quickbooks are vying for top spot.  Investment is important in software.  Five years ago Xero had raised eye watering amounts of investment which were clearly on show, Sage and Quickbooks looked like yesterday’s technology.   This would need further investigation, although it would be a massive thing for us to move from Xero, it is important to never say never.

The other thing I notice is less of a surprise.  AI is the buzzword, it’s everywhere.

Working the Room

So we set off on our quest.  Quite quickly I come across something I am interested in for the horizon.

Personal Finance

Accountant’s work bleeds into Financial Advisor territory.  There is a tax angle, clients want advice but also we know that people’s business goals are inextricably linked to their personal goals.  People want to buy houses, retire, take care of their children’s futures.  It is important their businesses deliver these goals and we need to be involved.  

There were a few providers offering parts of the solution - All in Place and Auderli.  Discussions clarify for me that this is something we would love to engage with but we need a really strong partnership with an IFA because it is hard to see how we could make money at it plus it is going to stretch our competencies really thin.  We already have accountability for people’s financial IT systems, accounts, tax and business development.  That said it is one for the future.

Borrowing

The aforementioned Fluidly was our partner for advising clients on borrowing but ironically for a cash flow software designed to keep people afloat it sunk!  Since then we have been on the lookout for someone else to partner with.  I found two providers that look promising.  One was Swoop who act as brokers and independent advisors on a nicely broad range of finance options.  The other was Allica Bank who promise what all clients are looking for, a dedicated bank manager.   The only problem seemed to be that they are only interested in businesses with £50k+ in the bank.

Expense cards for Employees

We need it and so do many clients.  There are solutions on the market and in fact when we have to we recommend Pleo but we don’t like it.  The problem is that it messes with the record keeping and our workflows because we then have to deal with purchase records outside of Dext.

We have been pressing Dext for a solution but we know it is not coming imminently.  Starling were also showing and they have also been threatening a solution.  Sad to say, I drew a blank on that.

AI

My tour of stands confirmed something I have been banking on for a while, namely that I don’t need to get head around AI too much, the most powerful functionality will come to me via our existing software providers.  Xero has launched an AI assistant called JAX (Just Ask Xero).  We need to get our head around its uses fast.

CPD

We have CPD but it feels clunky compared to everything else.  I found what appeared to be an elegant and user friendly resource.  Sadly it turned out to be one of those that promised something it could not deliver when we got to the nitty gritty.  The promise was that we could take our CPD record straight from their system and delivering straight to our professional body.  The AAT were in the room so I went to check and it was clear it wouldn’t work.

HMRC

I visited HMRC’s stand in the hope of finding out what was happening with P11ds next year and found myself saddened and somewhat shocked at the contrast to the rest of the room.  The stand consisted of a very out of date looking monitor, some tatty looking banners and plastic chairs.  A motley assortment of officers were on hand in ill fitting clothes, lightyears away from the buffed and branded tech teams.

I asked my question to one of the people there.  Predictably he had no idea what I was talking about.  As we talked I looked down at his feet.  The soles of his shoes were falling off.  

The neglect of such an important institution in society was depressing. 

The Lay of the Land

An important part of Accountex is taking to our partners and getting the lay of the land with product development.  FathomHQ is a brilliant product which we are building our services around.  At Accountex I found it had been bought by the multinational Access Group to join their stable of business software.  We have to hope they know how to nurture their investments.

GoProposal which we use for Letters of Engagement was bought by Sage some years ago.  It still does a great job but the word on the street is that the platform is starting to glitch.  

As I went I was also taking the temperature of my question about the long term prospects for the three behemoths of the bookkeeping world - Sage, Quickbooks and Xero.

I asked people on the inside, the developers that worked with them all:  ‘If you were starting an accounting practice from scratch and choosing just one of Sage, Quickbooks or Xero, which would you choose’.  

There was praise for Sage’s new cloud offering but generally the answer always came back the same: Xero.  One such developer whose identity I will protect said something along the lines of:

‘Xero has the best team, the best API, the best app marketplace.  Quickbooks…I won’t go there, behind the scenes it feels like a patchwork, a bit of a mess.  Sage is a bit the same because it’s got such a legacy of desktop software’.

It’s good news.  It would be a huge job to jump ship.

Saving the best till last

Perhaps the best conversation of the day was my last one with the Chief Product Officer at Dext.  I wanted to collar him because the previous year I’d pressed the case for a Dext expense card and he’d said it was in development so I wanted to follow up.  

As I suspected he confirmed it was still a way off but he had a good explanation that ended up exciting me.  Basically he explained that the platform has a vision to replicate the approval and bank payment process that Apron has brought to market and with that under their belts they can do the expense card.  

Then he showed me what else they had been working on and in particular a browser extension called Dextension which interacts with Xero as you work on both platforms.  The details of the functionality of this extension are too many and various to go into (a dedicated email will follow) but let’s just say that everyone who has Dext and Xero must use this and I know how much my team will love it.  

But here is what impressed me most: he said they developed it by simply watching people at work doing bookkeeping on Xero and Dext.  Every time they saw a way to save time they tried to bring it into the software.   This product release grabbed none of the attention at Accountex, it is not sexy or headline grabbing work but it will make a huge difference to bookkeepers.  That kind of dedication to the details is so important, it is an example to us all.  

Final thoughts

I planned to go for a morning but I stayed all day, it is a fascinating window on the industry.

It’s an industry that is transformed.  The tech is consigning the boring accountant to history.  This world is cool and exciting, it’s attracting the brightest and best back to it.

We are incredibly privileged.  Our work touches on so many interesting areas, IT, business, tax, ethics and at the heart of it people’s lives.