Julie Van der Mast took over the accounting firm Finezz Accountants more than two years ago and has since been using Bizzcontrol's budgeting tool extensively. “The firm itself has been around since 1988, and I started there as a freelancer in 2016. Shortly thereafter, I got the opportunity to come on board, and since 2020, I've been at the helm alone – (ironically) a fantastic year to take charge. Nevertheless, we have grown very strongly: the influx of new clients is enormous, but the bottleneck remains finding good people. I am convinced that new digital tools like Bizzcontrol help make the profession more attractive.”
“We deliberately opted for a slow transition to a digital office because changing an accounting package is a very big step. Octopus and Yuki as accounting packages, Silverfin for compliance activities, and eventually Bizzcontrol for our advisory services. So, in small steps each time, but now we are done, and our digital flow is completely in place. Our intention was to be fully digitized within five years, and we succeeded. With a push from the various lockdowns. But just because we are digitized doesn't mean we don't welcome our clients in our familiar heartfelt manner.”
Time for the essentials.
The benefits of digitalization seem obvious. For instance, real-time accounting offers substantial time savings due to much quicker insight into the numbers—time that can be spent in a more useful and valuable way towards the client. However, Julie Van der Mast would rather not hear that digitalization helps accountants to focus on the client. "As if we weren't already focusing on advisory before. What have we been doing all these years then? Look, I see digitalization mainly as a means to automate repetitive tasks that no one gets excited about—like entering bank statements—so more time is left for the essentials: being the entrepreneur's copilot. For example, we use Bizzcontrol's budgeting tool to do tasks we used to do manually—read: retyping things in Excel. By eliminating this manual work, more time is left for forecasts, and the chance of errors is much smaller."
“By eliminating a lot of manual work, we have more time for forecasts and the likelihood of errors is significantly reduced.”
"Please note, I am still surprised by the number of accountants who do not digitalize," she continues. "Because then it's only a matter of time before you price yourself out of the market. I also don't understand why you wouldn't want to as an accountant: it only brings you benefits, which then flow through to the entrepreneur. Especially since all these tools - such as Octopus and Yuki - have a business section where business owners can upload and track everything themselves. They no longer need to drop off or scan documents and send them themselves."
The future, not the past.
Can digitalization help to make the somewhat dusty, dry image of accountants more appealing? Or sexy, as Bizzcontrol seeks? “People generally have a wrong impression of the accountant profession,” says Julie Van der Mast. “How many times have I heard that I don't look like an accountant? I even made a LinkedIn post about it recently that reached 50,000 people. Apparently, there is still a very stereotypical image, that of an old grey man in a dusty office.”
“However, being an accountant is much more than the limited way it is usually presented: I definitely wouldn’t do it if it was only about entering invoices or preparing tax returns. This is exactly the part we want to automate and digitalize. The best part about being an accountant is sitting down with clients, creating a financial plan, and thinking about the future. Not dealing with everything related to the past, such as entering invoices. The human element will always remain at the forefront of the accountant's role, no matter how much digitalization progresses.”
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