Changing Traditional Practice to Digital Practice: In Conversation with Sujeet Karn, CEO Woodapple Software and Founder of ERPCA

Sujeet is a focused, technology driven IT entrepreneur with 17+ years of progressive experience in the various technologies, Project Management, Process Automation, Business growth & development.

Sujeet is a focused, technology driven IT entrepreneur with 17+ years of progressive experience in the various technologies, Project Management, Process Automation, Business growth & development.

He is the Founder of ERPCA – Comprehensive Practice Automation & Office Management Solution for CA and allied Tax Professionals. He has realised the technology gap & the need for practice automation for accounting firms. He has started with a desktop solution and later converted it to SaaS based solution, ERPCA, with the vision of providing best office management tool. With 400+ happy customer & 20000+ users across India, ERPCA is one of the most trusted & rapidly growing CA practice automation solution. Let’s hear his thoughts about the current digital transformation scenario in the accounting industry.

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Taxscan: How Digital Transformation is Crucial for Finance Professionals especially in post COVID era?

Sujeet: The COVID- 19 crisis has changed the way we communicate and collaborate with employees as well as the clients. CA organizations have also realized that digital overhaul at the workplaces has become very crucial to stay ahead of the competition.

To hold on to the clients and prospects, CA firms need to emphasise more on the digital acumen and business intelligence. A superlative CA Practice Management software like ERPCA will hasten the move towards digitisation and endorse careers that are cerebrally broadening and propelled by an improved sense of purpose.

Taxscan: How easy or difficult has it become for the Chartered Accountants to do Services in India post COVID?

Sujeet: COVID has posed unprecedented challenge for service professionals. Due to lockdown the team handling, data collection, payment collection, and many more such aspects of practice impacted badly.

But the COVID time also taught us the need & importance of the technology. CA’s & other service industry companies have understood the relevance of the technology for the flawless client service, remote team management, online payment collection, and most importantly the online data sharing / collection.

I didn’t see any major impact on ERPCA’s client because they have already become well versed with the best yet simple way of using the technology for the office management, virtually! Infact, we saw the surge in the enquiries as well as client acquisition since the lockdown being announced.

So now post COVID, Chartered Accountants who have adopted to the technology are bound to leap ahead of those who are still relying on the manual ways.

Taxscan: How Digital Transformation has helped accounting firms grow?

Sujeet: Digital transformation is the buzzword that has taken the financial industry by storm. With digitization, finance professionals have been able to take their skills to a whole new level. They can now provide a more personalized experience for their customers and are also able to provide more in-depth information on their products.

Some of the ways in which digital transformation has been helping the finance professionals are:

  1. Providing better customer service by deploying technology solutions to their business.
    1. Practice Management: ERPCA, CCH-iFirm, Canopy,Monday.com etc
    1. Document Management: Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc
    1. Payment Gateway for online collection: RazorPay, PayU, PayPal, etc
    1. Calendar: Google Calendar and Outlook calendar
    1. Email: Gmail, G-Suite, M365
  2. Providing better updates to customer through social media and chatbots.
  3. Providing more in-depth information on products through interactive apps, videos and blogs.

Taxscan: Wouldn’t it be difficult to always hop on different tools for various tasks calendar, payment collection, Email checking etc? Is it possible to manage all the applications using a single software

Sujeet: Very interesting Question! This is now where you have started aligning with my vision of digital transformation J

So, simple solution is to have a Practice Management tool which has the capability to be integrated with the applications which make your practice management easier, such as Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, RazorPay, PayU, MailChimp, Calendar, Gmail etc.

At ERPCA, we enable the integrations with all applications which are majorly used by our clients. Our goal is to provide a single workspace solution to the clients which would be connected with all other application. We are also helping our clients with on-demand integrations with any application they are using for smooth functioning of their business.

Taxscan: It seems that now a days, Technology Charges that were raised during Covid, have not come down. What is your view?

Sujeet: Technology was never cheap J. I believe, you can also understand as you made TAXSCAN portal and keeping it updated day to day so that your client would also get the best content from you. Charges were raised during COVID as some IT vendors may had tried to encash the situation. So, it’s up to subtle customer to take the best decision to shortlist the technology vendor considering budget and after-sale service track record of corresponding vendor.

We at ERPCA kept the same subscription price during COVID time as earlier. And even now, we haven’t raised the price much despite giving good hikes to team members and paying high infrastructure cost. We believe in providing the best in class service at affordable prices.

Taxscan: What will be the true impact, if the Professionals still follow the Traditional Practice? Will it actually benefit the common people in the long run when Technology is implemented in CA Practice?

Sujeet: Traditional practice won’t end but it will surely not allow the professionals to grow and scale their business. In traditional method of practice professionals will never be able to:

By digitization their business and process, professionals will have quicker reach to their customers. They can offer the mobile app to their customer for easy data collection, keep transparency on work progress, easy sharing of documents, sharing bills for services, and most critically, they can easily collect their payment online. We at ERPCA, helps our clients to achieve all the above-mentioned growth riders.

On a lighter note, you can recommend ERPCA to all your CA clients to experience the easiest ever office & practice management. J

Taxscan: Will it be possible to do 100% Digital Transformation for Finance Professional in next three years?

Sujeet: Being a Technology visionary, YES it is possible. But it truly depends on the professionals whether they want to scale by DIGITIZATION of their business or they want to remain in traditional practice. Our Government has already taken many initiatives to make people technology savvy. Success of UPI Payments has been supreme example of how Technology can be a boon.

Taxscan: As per survey, due to various reasons more than 40% task goes over budget or takes more time than estimated hrs. So how does ERPCA helps organization to control deviated task(s)?

Sujeet: ERPCA always keeps an eye on task which is getting deviated from the estimated cost or timelines. ERPCA sends automated updates to organization’s management team about deviated task(s). ERPCA also has an intuitive and more interactive module named “ACTIONABLE INSIGHT” which gives immense power to organization for damage controlling.

Taxscan: Major weakness of any practice is to collect fees and outstanding dues well with-in time to run business operation smoothly. What are the ERPCA offering to overcome this critical problem of collections?

Sujeet: Being into service industry since long, we can understand this pain and problem is collection of dues. In ERPCA we have made the provision to schedule the automated payment due reminders to customer. Using the reminder, CA organization can take automated follow-ups for fees and outstanding due.  

ERPCA has developed an online payment collection methodology where organization can accept the online payment in their bank account directly. This significantly reduces the hassles of collections and accounting updates.

Taxscan: How effective Practice Management tool helps Financial Professionals Tax Practice hassle free?

Sujeet: In this era of the digital transformation technology can do anything, but we can’t just rely on technology alone. We should also focus on our business processes. We need to monitor the things on regular basis to see the impact of technology on our business. It’s like give correct set of input to system to get the best out of it. We should make our people understand the benefits of using the technology.

So, the bottom line is, just buying the practice management tool will not help the business. It also needs to be monitored, correct input needs to be given, and processes needs to be deployed to do a hassle free practice / business.

Taxscan: While speaking to you I realized, what about data-security of professionals while they use the technology? 

Sujeet: Great question… now-a-days approx. 80%-90% of data resides on cloud. You can check the example of EMAIL ACCOUNTS. We use GMAIL’s or MICROSOFT’s email for not because it’s free to use but it solves the purpose of communication. and we trust the big names that they must have taken care all the security stuffs.

On similar lines, ERPCA keeps the best-in-class security in place. Like data encryption, strong firewall for server access, SSL certificates, auto backups of server, clustering of servers, etc.

Along with all the precaution taken by technology provider, we should also do the regular password updates, keep our devices updated with latest security patches, and do the regular backup of our data.

By being aware of the risks and taking precautions, professionals can use technology safely and securely. Also being aware of the risks associated with technology use, professionals can take steps to protect their data and themselves.

To know more about ERPCA, you can schedule the quick introduction call or demo by clicking on following link.

https://bit.ly/3zRvKhQ

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