Week 9
A week in the life of a Digital Accountant
Monday
I started this week by reflecting on the fact I have been completing this diary for 9 weeks now. Has it achieved what I set out to do? What can I do better?
In terms of feedback, it hasn’t stimulated the amount of conversations I wanted to and I would love to hear if there are things I can improve on, or even if this is a useful tool that doesn’t need a debate about every week.
In terms of increasing my presence, it is working, all the stats show steady increases and I need to remind myself I am an accountant working in a small northern town, exponential growth won’t happen over night, or if ever.
In terms of digital work completed, I am finalising our first AI chatbots and would love some volunteers to help test the product. So please let me know if this is of interest.
Tuesday
This was meant to be sports day for my little lad in the morning, but in typical UK weather it rained it off, which freed up a few more hours for work.
I had my weekly meeting with our Digital Manager at NRB to keep on top of our current projects and look towards the next 3/6 months, which should be exciting times.
We have a few of the staff spending more time getting used to Power Automate, making sure that they ‘Automate the mundane’. I am sure they get bored of me saying that in the office.
As stated previously, we are automating CS01’s, we are looking to automate the uploading of financial statements after they have been technical reviewed and signed off by the partner. It is another mundane task that is takes anywhere between 30 mins to 60 mins per limited company. I estimate we have about 1,000 limited company accounts each year. So massive time saving to be had.
Wednesday
I spent the day working from home today, which I try to get in at least once a week. We are a predominantly an office based firm due to the level of training we provide to our junior members of staff, but people are free to work at home as and when it suits.
I love being in the office with all the staff, but find the one day a week allows me to get my head down and have some proper focus time. Today was spent on our monthly management accounts ahead of our board meeting tomorrow.
I did get an interesting email from our payroll team, a new client is looking to pay their staff, without their accounts staff being able to see net amounts on the bank. To complicate it, their bank won’t accept bacs files. I had had a demo off Comma a while ago and knew this is something they could handle, along with the fantastic Crezco. The only sticking point is whether their bank can handle batch payments, if it can we have a solution ready to go.
Thursday
Thursday morning was spent in a Senior Management Team meeting, just catching up with all the heads of the departments.
The last couple of hours in the day were spent getting Chat-GPT to write me a very basic website, so I can host out AI chatbots ready for testing, again please get in touch if you want to trial these.
Friday
The website domains were purchased and basic websites loaded on them ready to begin testing.
As part of our 75th birthday year we are undertaking lots of events throughout the year, today’s was to sponsor our local Professionals Networking event (www.professionalsof.co.uk) which is always fantastic to meet up with all the great professionals within Wigan.
I am hoping for lots of news to release next week as we have a few things coming to fruition.
Thanks for reading.
My Weekly Watches
I like to keep track of the latest new uses of AI. I find them and then add them as a new tab on my phones browser (currently on 18 tabs) and either share the good ones with the team or close the tab if I can’t think of a use case, here are my current open tabs:
Blackbox - Get an add-on for Microsoft Visual Code Studio which allows you to speak in plain text and the software writes your code for you. As with most of these they are either really expensive, or really cheap and great value. Blackbox is the latter.
Socra - Have some goals that you just don’t know where to start? You have the vision, but not the first step? Socra is an interactive chat bot that helps build a plan to turn your vision into a plan.
I want people to get as much out of these diary excerpts as they can, so if you feel I should go into more detail, cover other aspects or even produce a weekly/monthly tips and tricks, please do let me know.
If you have any questions or would like to discuss anything within my posts please do drop me an email at Jonathan.Mackie@nrb.co.uk. See you next week.