Diligently downloading your digital dispatches to account take bites the latest news from the world of accounting technology in 5 minutes with me, Tom Herbert. Thanks for tuning in. It’s a bumper edition this week, so let’s get started.
HMRC does good things, shocker! So, they have rolled out two new services in an effort to alleviate some of the pressure on their phone helplines. Individual taxpayers can now view their National Insurance confirmation letter online via their personal tax account or their HMRC app, rather than having to phone up, wait on hold, and then wait 15 days for the letter. They can also decipher the tax code on their pay slip without having to log in to an existing account. Both of these are queries they spend a lot of time dealing with on the helpline.
Moving swiftly on, the world of anti-money laundering software got a little bit larger this week as GoProposal launched a new tool that offers firms a single place to manage client money laundering risk. Makes sense, giving their offering. If you’re interested in all things AML, then you might want to tune in to a webinar hosted by our esteemed editor, Richard Hatley, whose birthday it is on Monday. Happy birthday, Dicky! He has a power-packed panel of AML experts, including the one and only David Winch and Danielle Fiser from GoProposal, who I’ve seen in a few things and is an excellent communicator, and Samantha from Lily Iris Accounting, providing a practitioner’s perspective. Do tune in for that.
Speaking of a practitioner’s perspective, we had not one but two firm owners at Accounting Web Towers yesterday to record the podcast with Richard and me. Lucy Cohen from Zuma and Rachel Harris from Strive X and the Accountancy Community joined us to talk about growing their accountancy practices, stress as an accountant, brand building, and the life of a leader. It was a brilliant discussion, so do check that out wherever you get your podcasts by searching for Accounting Web.
Opinion time on the site, and I tried my best to answer the question, ‘Is technology actually helping accountants?’ A profession that’s busier than ever. Spoiler alert: it is, but perhaps not as fast as accountants need.
Let’s race through a few more things then. Over to the Silver Fin change log. They have a new streamlined insights service, improved access to your firm’s queries, fixed a flaw in the date selection, and speeded up things with background loading for saved queries.
If you use WordPress to host your sites, you can now get a hosting plan for just $38,000 once a month. Staying with the register, Dropbox has canned their unlimited plan, blaming cryptocurrency mining, resale to third parties, and unrelated individuals pooling storage.
The AI Gong is back! OpenAI has introduced us to ChatGPT Enterprise, offering enterprise-grade security and privacy, large-scale deployment, and unlimited access to GPT-4 for high-speed performance. Zero has produced an excellent AI guide for accountants and bookkeepers, looking at what it is and how to use it in your practice. FreeAgent has also gone down the AI road, explaining how they use AI in their product.
That’s it for this week. Thank you so much for watching. If you’re watching on the socials, please like, subscribe, follow, and I will see you all next week. Bye for now.
