Workflows – a series of processes where work is passed through from beginning to completion. Whether it be an athlete training for a marathon, the delivery of an item you ordered online or submitted tax returns – we interact with workflows a lot in our daily lives. For accountants, your workflow should always strive to save time, improve accuracy, and leverage automation to its fullest. So, how can your accounting workflow be improved? Creating an end-to-end accounting solution is the perfect starting point.  

What is an end-to-end accounting solution?  

An end-to-end solution is really what it says on the tin – its creating an accounting workflow that starts from receiving paperwork from your clients - (like receipts and invoices), all the way to delivering their final year financial statements. Completing this process manually can waste a lot of time – manually extracting information, constant double entry, and continually splitting receipts? No thanks – talk about misplacing your precious time. With the capacity to leverage automation further, you can create a quicker and more accurate end-to-end accounting solution to help take your practice to the next level.  

How to build your end-to-end accounting solution 

To create a seamless workflow, choosing software for each stage is important. At the pre-accounting stage, a system such as Dext Prepare can automate your receipt collection. Your clients can scan and submit their paperwork easily through Dext Prepare’s mobile app, removing the daunting prospect of sorting through boxes of receipts before tax deadlines. All paperwork uploaded to the system is stored digitally and kept on the platform.  

By choosing Bright's accounting solution, you can conduct your bookkeeping and year-end tasks all from one platform. Bookkeeping software, BrightBooks, and cloud accounts production software, BrightAccountsProduction, hold a unique integration where they automatically share information between each other. You can complete all your bookkeeping duties in BrightBooks, and clients’ year-end accounts in BrightAccountsProduction.  

Now that we have the systems in place to create the perfect end-to-end solution, let’s look at the three easy steps to the workflow.  

3 simple steps involved in the end-to-end accounting solution

1. Automate the collection of data  

Use Dext Prepare at the pre-accounting stage for data capture and line entry creation. Your clients can access the Dext Prepare app to scan and submit their receipts, which you can then approve and store on the platform. Prepare has an industry leading 99% accuracy when capturing and extracting data and an average processing time of 30 seconds, giving you a quick and accurate workflow right from the start.  

2. Integrate with your accounting software  

You can then pull all items from Dext into your bookkeeping software, BrightBooks. In here, you can review transactions and if necessary, make edits. Once satisfied, you can complete the import. Your import will include all information, such as supplier, nominal code, invoice number and description. In BrightBooks, you can also link live bank feeds to complete bank reconciliation and run VAT returns for your clients.

3. Complete your clients’ year-end work 

Thanks to BrightBooks’ integration with BrightAccountsProduction, this data will then present in your accounts production software, for you to complete your clients’ year-end work. You can edit your financial statements directly, with an unrivalled 10 entity types to choose from, and an in-built e-signing tool. 

Creating an automated end-to-end accounting solution can help to save your practice time, improve accuracy, and open the door to many additional solutions when using the software mentioned. If you'd like to see this end-to-end solution in action, you can watch back our recent webinar or book a free demo of any of the products mentioned.