Australian accounting firms are moving into cloud, automation, and outsourcing at an increasing pace. In 2012 Odyssey’s CEO presented at the IPA Conference on “Outsourcing: Out of the closet and into the Cloud”. Fast forward to today, and everyone knows about outsourcing, and it’s widely accepted amongst the Australian accounting community. Certainly Australian accounting and tax compliance outsourcing has come …
The future of Australian Tax Compliance… Why Gen Y find it hard to engage
With Automation likely to impact compliance in the near future, and offshoring impacting compliance now, this week we look at Gen Y’s engagement with the future of compliance. There has been plenty of discussion about offshoring and automation affecting compliance, and particularly where the new “Middle Managers” will be found in 3-5 years if graduates aren’t being engaged and recruited …
Why bringing your outsourced work back inhouse often isn’t seamless…
An ex client of Odyssey reached out to me last week, and wrote the following: Dear David, It has been some time since I have made contact. I was wondering if we could touch base. We used Odyssey for the majority for SMSF clients in the 2016 year, approximately 40-50 funds. Most of these were handled by our senior accountant …
Forecasting the future of Australian Compliance
Nassim Taleb was credited with the black swan theory and indicated that the black swan event depends on the observer. So in respect of the turkey and the butcher, the outcome is the same, but the event is not a black swan event to the butcher. The object then is not to become the turkey. A turkey is fed for 1,000 …
Is a black swan event just around the corner for Australian compliance?
With Mother’s Day just past there has been some interesting online discussion about the commoditisation of the florist industry. There are many similarities to the “Commoditisation of Compliance”. We are all familiar with Airbnb, Uber and the other connectors in the industry, and their margins are well known. Airbnb offers a more unique product while Uber offers a transport which …
Australian Accountants have big problems: Disruption hits hard in professional services.
We live in interesting times, but there is no denying disruption over the past 20 years since the internet and email burst onto the scene. Uber, Airbnb and Xero have been around for over a decade, and yet at the same time we still have rampant use of desktop bookkeeping and accounting software here in Australia. A little over a …
How accountants will survive automation
Remaining relevant suddenly takes on a sense of urgency with recent automation releases. It’s pretty obvious by now that clients aren’t going to pay for someone to regurgitate the tax code, when they have access to the same tax code online. Firms building their own compliance teams offshore are headed in the wrong direction. The push should be into automation, …
After the Compliance is gone… Empty nest syndrome for Accountants
We talk to a lot of accountants, and their big fear of Automation, Cloud and Outsourcing is what will I do when the Compliance work is gone, or at least reduced so much that they have spare time on their hands. Recently the discussions have centred around the fact that the world post Compliance is really a greenfield opportunity, and …
Goodbye to Compliance Jobs, but will Robots meet with your clients?
Goodbye and Good Riddance to Compliance. But just how far will robots and automation shave off the compliance workload. And will robots meet with your clients? In mid last year there was excitement on the release of robots which mimic human walking habits, with videos released of the humanoid Durus. Later last year a massive 4 metre Avatar like robot was built in South …
The future is online (and offshore) for Australian Compliance…
There was an interesting article in the Australian online news recently that a few years ago would have been scoffed at without further thought. The article was titled: “Is coding the blue collar job of the future?” and suggested that using the analogy of the building industry, we not only need architects and engineers and designers but also a lot of …
