We have written our own accounts production software. We can scan bank and credit card statements into the software using optical character recognition. When we get handwritten information, we type it in by the column, and we have a narrative prediction routine which can guess the rest of the narrative after a few entries, which is often much quicker. If the client provides information on a spreadsheet, we have a suite of programs to process it into standard form to transfer to our software.
Once we have captured accounting data, subsequent processing is all-electronic all the way through to the accounts, and our software automatically generates working papers as a by-product of its operation. Transactions are coded up automatically using last year’s mapping table plus a few incremental updates, which never takes long. If we tell our software, for example, that payments to David Porthouse & Co are to be classified as accountancy, then the software will remember this in all future years. In the first year we use a generic mapping table for a small business in Carlisle.
We can e-mail a draft profit and loss account to a client. We can e-mail an electronic payment notice to the client giving them the details they need to pay over the Internet, so we can be fast and precise in the payments we tell clients to make. The notices are colour-coded as green for VAT, blue for companies and corporation tax, orange for income tax and yellow for PAYE, and we use these colours for many of our other operations as well.
As well as our main website at Carlisle accountants, we also have a new and experimental AMP website to try out new ideas. This latter website is pitched at encouraging new businesses to get a URL as quickly as possible, this being the weak link in the chain. Apart from this and apart from promoting ourselves, we want to be in a position to be able to advise our clients about new technologies.
David Porthouse & Co 