Internet-based client collaboration will help accountants strengthen their client relationships. 

It is surprising that although most accountants earn their livelihood by analyzing historical data, very few have learned an important fact of professional life that is evident from the history of the past five decades of the profession.

Accountants must adapt to a new and rewarding technology every decade.

It was electronic calculators in the Sixties, mainframe based tax service bureaus in the Seventies, PC's with DOS in the Eighties, and Windows in the Nineties. In this decade, it is the Internet.

The impact of the Internet will be more profound than most accountants think.

Most accountants may find it hard to believe that you can now use the unprecedented power of the Internet to enhance virtually every aspect of your practice:

      ·    Market the practice and acquire new clients,
      ·    Enhance client relationships and improve client services
      ·    Greatly increase productivity across the firm,
      ·    Minimize overhead, and
      ·    Ultimately, raise the bottom line.

In fact, no other technology has ever had such broad implications for accountants as the Internet. And that’s because the Internet gives accountants two crucial capabilities they have never had before:

      ·    The ability to work from anywhere, anytime and

      ·    The ability to interact with clients and work collaboratively with them, no matter where they are.

The power of the client collaboration

The power of the collaboration simply can not be ignored. Client collaboration will help accountants strengthen their client relationships in ways never before thought possible.  Working collaboratively with clients, accountants can create a very strong electronic bond that will be very hard for anyone to break. "There's a fundamental shift in power happening. Everywhere, people are getting together and, using the Internet, disrupting whatever activities they're involved in," states Pierre M. Omidyar, founder and chairman of eBay, the behemoth online marketplace.

Today, using a new breed of Internet-based Accountant-Centric solutions, accountants can collaborate with their clients on virtually all client engagements, including tax, accounting and payroll processing. Working collaboratively with their clients, many accountants are already realizing significant productivity boost for themselves while making life a little easier for their clients. It is not unrealistic to expect a whooping 50% or even bigger time-savings resulting from the solutions that let you work collaboratively with your clients in the next couple of years, as the technology advances even further.

Internet-based client collaboration made possible by Accountant-Centric solutions is the surest way for accountants to overcome the emerging threats to the accounting profession and make the practice of accounting more rewarding. The question remains, which accountants will seize the opportunity, and which will awaken like Rip Van Winkle after the world has changed?

What do you think? AccountantsWorld would like to know! Share your views with your peers and be part of the growing AccountantsWorld community.

Thank you.

Dr. Chandra Bhansali

Co-founder and President, AccountantsWorld