7 Accounting Practice Upgrades for 2022

We’re knee-deep into 2022, but are you still using technology from years or even decades ago? The time has finally come to get rid of the outdated practices that are robbing you of your productivity. In this article, we’ll share simple ways to upgrade your accounting practice for 2022 and beyond.

1. Level Up Your Email Security

As an accountant, you regularly share highly sensitive information with your clients. But one of the most dangerous things you or your clients can do is send emails through an unsecured server. That’s an open invitation for a malicious actor to steal your client’s data, which obviously is a situation you want to avoid.

When you upgrade your process to ImagineShare’s Secure Send, you and your clients can send emails seamlessly and securely through Microsoft Outlook, just like you’ve done before. However, you will enjoy bank-level security by routing your emails through our secure servers. The messages and attachments will be automatically uploaded and stored in 256-bit AES. By the way, you can upload and store an unlimited amount of files on our server. And because your files are kept in the cloud and backed up in real time, you won’t have to worry about them getting lost, displaced, or stolen.

2. Improve Your Client Communication

Client communication is a big struggle for many accounting practices. It’s easy to lose track of who you’ve contacted and when. You need software that allows you to manage all aspects of your client communication, from record keeping to envelope labeling.

With an accounting software like Mango, you can handle all of your client communication needs in one place. For example, you can:

• Create and customize envelopes to mail out to your clients (individual or bulk)
• Send engagement letters to different groups based on captured contact information
• Create and customize collection letters to send to clients with past due balances
• Use the custom label creator to quickly and conveniently package tax returns (individual or bulk)

In addition to the above, you can use ImagineTime’s Client Relationship Management module to send email newsletters out to your clients. An email newsletter is a great way to share valuable information with your client and stay at the top of their minds, which can ensure an ongoing relationship for many years in the future. With ImagineTime, you don’t need to use a third-party email service. Instead, you can create, schedule, and send emails through Microsoft Outlook.

3. Get a Better Handle on Your Invoicing

Invoicing plays a pivotal role in your accounting practice. However, the invoicing process can be frustrating and complicated if you’re not using the right tools. And you’re not the only one to suffer from inefficient invoicing – clients also feel the frustration. If you want to improve client satisfaction, focus on the way that you invoice. You can upgrade your accounting practice by simply implementing a software that allows your clients to view their invoices and access their entire payment history from one billing dashboard.

This one thing can eliminate client confusion and cut down on back-and-forth emails between you and your client. When they want to check or pay their balance or research an invoice, your client can simply login to their comprehensive billing dashboard. This elevates your client’s experience and provides clarity.

On your part, you can set up various types of invoices to meet different billing situations, including retainers, recurring payments, fixed, hourly, and others. In addition to processing the client’s payment automatically, the system can also automatically send out payment reminders and “thank you” messages. 

4. Enable Electronic Signatures

Are you using electronic signatures in your accounting practice? If not, you should. Here’s why: An electronic signature is a legal record of a person’s intent, approval, or consent. It’s also a virtual fingerprint used to identify the signer.

Mango offers a digital audit trail to validate the identity of a signer, which includes their IP address, geographic coordinates, and browser information.

While we’re all familiar with traditional ink signatures, electronic signatures are becoming more common and necessary in our post-pandemic world. The good news is that these signatures are legally binding and, if you use the right software, easy to capture and securely store. Plus, with an electronic signature option, your clients can sign documents right away without having to wait for a physical copy to be mailed to them. A document that would otherwise take days or weeks to complete can be done in mere seconds with an electronic signature.

5. Master Your Scheduling

Managing time and tasks can be a huge headache for any accounting practice. Not only do you need to schedule client meetings, you also need to ensure that you’re being efficient with your employees’ time.

With the right software, you can manage both appointments and tasks for your team from one dashboard. Mango keeps track of all client activity, including meeting start and end times. You can also use our accounting practice software to view the calendars for all of your employees, individually or combined. This will enable you to assign tasks and rearrange employee schedules to maximize productivity in your office.

6. Track Your Time More Efficiently

In addition to employee schedules and task management, you can use accounting practice software to keep an accurate track of the time you and your team spend on different activities. Using our time entry software lets your team record multiple activities at the same time. This makes it easy for you to create and send invoices to your clients with a correct time summary.

If you act as an administrator, you can view reports, set default rates, create templates, and control what information your employees have access to (such as client’s confidential information or your billing rate).

Employees can use the timer utility to track their activities throughout the day. They can start and stop timers at the click of a button, and can summarize time by work code or task. As soon as this information is saved, it can be added to invoices or used in reports and analysis immediately.

7. Manage Your Due Dates Better

Do you ever miss due dates? Not only is it unprofessional, but it could be costing you and your clients money in terms of late fees and other penalties.

With Mango Due Date Management, you’ll stay ahead of the deadlines. You won’t have to worry about mentally keeping track of important dates, including filings, extensions, payments, and more. Instead, our software does all of the remembering and will automatically notify you and your staff of upcoming deadlines and tasks.

This feature is especially important if you’re tracking a large or complicated project with multiple smaller sub-tasks. It can be easy to forget one small task, but doing so can derail the entire project.

With due date management, you can filter tasks to improve your workflow, update the task status as you go, and create workload reports for specific deadlines to ensure you meet your project objectives.

Our Due Date Management software was made for accountants and includes all of the standard IRS tax return due dates for 1040, 1041, 1065, 1120, 1120-S, 990, and 5500.

You can also track internal payroll deadlines and compliance projects. This includes financial statements, property and sales taxes, and SEC filings.

To reduce errors, our software will automatically carry over last year’s information.

Final Thoughts

To upgrade your accounting practice, upgrade the software you use to run your business. Click here to request a demo of our accounting practice software.