Does technology cause stress?
An article in Accountancy Age states: “Just fewer than half of UK finance professionals have reported increased stress levels“. The article goes on to suggest that technology is to blame, with “teams of people downloading data into spreadsheets, adding rules, and presenting it back to managers in an acceptable form”.
Although the article makes no clear link between the reported increase in stress and the use of technology, there’s little doubt that the flow of information we all have to deal with, be it in e-mails, systems, web sites, Twitter, or whatever, can cause stress.
In practical business terms, it can be labour intensive to manipulate a client’s financial data, especially if you have to clean it up in order to arrive at a true picture.
The vision of e-conomic’s co-founder, Jacob Wandt (himself a chartered accountant facing the usual pressures of dealing with SME clients), when he created e-conomic was:
- To enable companies of any size to have an affordable, easy-to-use and robust accounting system.
- To improve the cooperation between accountants and clients, leading to improved service and greater efficiency.
The second point is important to this discussion, because working with clients in e-conomic means that all data is gathered and integrated on one platform, including data capture, data processing and reporting. From intelligent scanning of invoices – where the system itself recognises the type of invoice and suggests the accounts in which to book the invoice lines, to additional modules like Report Designer which allows you to create tailor-made reports for different customers and purposes.
By exploiting the freedom and usability of the internet, there are new and better ways of working that can reduce the stress and workload, which has to be a good thing for both accountants and their clients.
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