Firms Go Paperless, but are Slow to Automate Tax Docs
You may have participated in the recent CPA Technology Advisor survey – we received well over 1,000 responses to our readership survey. Based on your feedback, we are adjusting our content and many of our focuses to meet your needs.
Baby steps are better than no steps at all – and sometimes, we take great BIG steps when it comes to technology. It turns out that the vast majority of respondents – some 65 percent – indicated their firms and companies are either “Completely paperless and happy with their chosen solution,” or “Somewhat paperless and working with their existing solution.”
Sounds great, but bringing best-of-breed technologies to the accounting firm isn’t complete without also paying attention to automating all functions. Case in point: approximately 54 percent of respondents said they have either “done nothing” or “investigated, but have not implemented” tax document automation in terms of scanning and organizing, or scanning and populating their returns.
What do we need – more education and awareness on the capabilities of tax document automation? More visibility from vendors to help firms sort out the various options?
Whatever the answer is, I strongly encourage firms to do whatever they can to add these technologies to their paperless office. You’ll spend less time, less money and create huge efficiencies.
These are just two areas I thought were particularly interesting from the survey. As I report more of the results, please comment on how these statistics compare with your own experiences.
I’m not sure quite how this fits in to the discussion and not sure if I agree or disagree with your point regarding the urgency to move to these types of automated systems. However I have to ask the question…
Why must we take physical media (paper W-2’s, 1099’s etc) and convert them to digital media (OCR’d PDF’s) to then be extracted for tax prep software? Aren’t the majority of these returns already being submitted in digital format to governing bodies???
Its like sending somethign to the printer to then scan it and shred it?!
Seems like a real opportunity for at least our federal government to spare us the pain of going through this backwards conversion to save us some key strokes…which while useful is still flawed….
I realize I’m asking for something that isn’t widely available, there are a couple payroll providers doing downloadable W-2 info for the fly by night tax prep services, but I’ve got to imagine its in the works on a large scale somewhere?