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About the Author: Katie Thomas, CPA, is a content creator, 2021 40 under 40 CPA Practice Advisor recipient, and the owner of Leaders Online, where they help accounting professionals increase their impact, influence, and income through thought leadership and digital marketing. Feel free to visit Leaders Online or connect with her on LinkedIn to get in touch with Katie.
Accounting departments must stay on top of new technologies that can help improve productivity and efficiency while also reducing operating expenses. In fact, surveys show that cloud-hosted software reduces operating expenses by a staggering 50%.
Technology needs to solve pain points, fit into the budget, benefit your employees, empower accountants to offer higher value-added services, and work with current tech stacks. There is a lot to juggle.
Clearly, learning how to choose new technology is an in-depth process, which requires the right approach to be viable for your business. The guide below can point you in the right direction.
When choosing new technology for your accounting department, consider the following:
Before you start exploring and comparing your options, take a step back to evaluate the organization’s current setup. By looking at what you’re doing now, you can determine what’s working and what’s not working. Define your current state thoroughly.
Look not only at the technologies being used currently, but also at the people and accounting workflow involved.
Consider the following:
Does the current setup allow for easy integrations? Is the solution easy to use, or are you and other team members frustrated by a complicated interface? Is it an all-in-one solution, or is the organization using multiple technologies for different processes? How quick is the time-to-value and post-implementation support (often under-rated considerations)?
Further, consider: does the solution save you time?
Once you have a solid understanding of the current state, its setup, the pros, and the cons, you can consider the next point: your needs.
Now that you’ve evaluated the organization’s current state, you know what isn’t working and the issues that still need to be addressed. So, what problems do you want the technology to solve?
Maybe you want to:
Create a list of these needs and the problems they solve.
Once you have a list of your needs, you can fine-tune and categorize them to help narrow down your options.
Label these needs as:
Categorizing your needs will help you better evaluate solutions and eliminate those that really won’t benefit your organization.
You’ve evaluated your organization’s needs and pain points, but it’s important to communicate with relevant stakeholders and team members why these changes are important.
Be sure your communication to these stakeholders demonstrates you've considered the time and resources for training and implementation around the new technology. More on this below.
Creating a plan is crucial when trying to justify and implement a change.
Choosing the right technology cannot be taken lightly, but it’s also not something to ignore because “things are working.” In fact, in one study, over 56% of survey respondents found that technology improved productivity.
Businesses of all sizes are looking for ways to become more efficient.
Once you have the idea to start using new technology and have evaluated your needs, it’s time to create a plan, which includes:
You’ve taken the time to create a plan, but you also need to know how to solve your pain points and problems.
You have a plan of action in place, but it’s now time to dive deeper into choosing the right technology. First, you need to find what options are available to solve your problems.
Finding the right technology solution can be difficult because you don’t know always know what’s available. So, what can you do? A few things:
Also, you can search through review sites that are well-known and trusted for having a wealth of software solutions that they review. Here are a few of the top review sites to browse through and find tech solutions:
Gather information on solutions available and determine which software option(s) you would like to evaluate and test.
Reviews and advice from experts can help you narrow down the existing software options, but it’s now time to begin the evaluation and testing process. A few ways to evaluate and test the technology are:
Testers should run quality assurance tests to ensure that the solutions work well with current tech stacks and workflow. Additionally, it’s crucial to learn how the technology helps solve problems more efficiently and effectively than the current solutions.
You’ve done all of the hard work, and now’s the time to make a decision on the technology that you’ll be using. The next step in the process will be implementation, and this is such an in-depth process that we’ll cover it in greater detail in a future blog post.