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By Heinrich Swanepoel, PaySpace's Africa Business Development Manager

Your accounting and bookkeeping business serves several crucial roles for your customers. Many businesses do not have extensive in-house financial operations, and even larger enterprises prefer to outsource much of their accounting, bookkeeping, and payroll needs to specialist practices.

The functions you cover are vital for their success. No matter how well a business does, it can't afford to mess up its payroll or fall behind legislative changes. Yet these tasks are also often very laborious, manual and routine - not to mention technical and frequently meticulous in detail. Rather than spend enormous resources taking care of these areas themselves, they depend on professionals to do the job for them.

But that same reasoning also limits what accounting houses can offer. To remain competitive, you have to do more with less. If you aim to grow your revenue, you need to offer more services: continual payroll management, regular reporting, flagging suspicious activities, and integrating more closely with your customers' systems are all opportunities waiting in the wings. How do you realise those opportunities?

Software is the answer. But not just any kind of software - I'm talking about cloud software. Traditional accounting software is adequate for baseline services but not equipped to provide extra value through integration, automation and scale. For example, such software will not automatically update regional compliance changes. Older software needs expensive computer systems and cannot offer convenient self-service access for your clients. If you still rely on yesterday's accounting software suites, you are spending a lot of money without gaining any new benefits.

Cloud software turns all this on its ear. You never have to own the software through a licence or deploy costly hardware to run it: the software provider takes care of that, and you pay a minimal subscription fee to access the services. Since cloud software is intrinsically designed for integration and access across an internet connection, you and your clients  can reach it on any device and from any location. The opportunities to integrate and scale services with your and clients' systems are a given. And the scope for automation is staggering - let me just say that you could erase the last-week payroll rush and scale your operations to cover more clients without expanding your resources.

Sounds fantastic, right? I can talk all day about the benefits of using cloud software, referencing numerous top accounting houses and enterprises that use our cloud payroll software platform. But there is a catch: adopting such new software can be risky. Changing or expanding the software you use to run your accounting business cannot be done lightly.

Not only could it hamper your established practices, but you may still have other costs, such as licences for your incumbent software. You require training and guidance for your people, not to mention your clients who might use self-service features to manage some areas or contribute information towards processing. You're not a technologist - while cloud software sounds great, it also seems like a lot to take on.

PaySpace recognises that digitally upgrading your accounting practice is risky. But we also know that not doing so will ultimately work against you. So we developed and launched a programme aimed specifically at accountants and bookkeepers who want to advance into the cloud era. This programme provides access to the PaySpace platform and gives you the room to grasp and navigate your choices. You have access to a specialised portal where you can use self-paced learning courses, access account managers, and explore what the PaySpace platform brings to your business, even in tandem with established software packages.

It's not difficult to see why adopting cloud payroll and HR software is an enormous advantage for your practice's future. You can offer more services and serve more clients, growing your revenue while reducing your software costs. But the how is trickier—and where most companies get stuck. Can you afford to take the chance? The PaySpace Accountants and Bookkeepers Programme makes that choice much more straightforward.