Transcript:
Small firms have more technology available to them than I’ve ever seen in my 20-plus-year career in the tax profession, and there’s so many options out there now when you think of all the, you know, whether it would be an app or a program or some sort of cloud-based service. There’s so many that are available to small practices, and it’s actually overwhelming when you think about it. At the end of the day, what you don’t want to do is subscribe to a bunch of services and try to cobble them all together and make a system work so that you can run your practice. I mean the ultimate goal is to run your practice more efficiently, to make more money, and at the end of the day for just cobbling all this technology together. I mean that’s the biggest challenge for small firm owners.
When I look at my own firm, we try to test technology. We think about it, try to have a structured way of pulling the technology into our own current systems to see if it’s going to work, if it’s going to address our needs. Many times, we discover that this isn’t going to be a solution that is going to work for us today because we’re not where we should be with another type solution. But it’s so much more cost-effective now for us to have these various types of, whether it be practice management or data management or file management, all those types of services are available. My firm itself, we’re evaluating all of these services, we’re looking at what makes us sense from a cost standpoint. Then finally you need to find someone within the firm to champion it to make sure you have a successful implementation because if you don’t, then at the end of the day, you’re probably not going to end up using that service.
