- Original Poster
- #1
Here is a theory to stimulate debate about the future of the profession, and most other professions at that.
As an armchair theorist I have made certain assumptions about running a quality practice but can't quite get my head around how much profit is left in the business when their is an economic downturn like this one. Surely some of you must be losing revenue as some clients close or leave their business's yet you still sit burdened with the sunk (or fixed costs) of the practice, no matter how good a quality service you give.
Now throw in some recent trends..... more homeworkers, skilled people without jobs, dispersement of geographical boundaries because of technological advances, cloud computing, social networking, wiki's, blogs, RSS feeds, and you can see where I am going with this....traditional business boundaries and heirarchies falling away as self-organised networks set themselves up and colloborative partnerships start taking hold.
So let's move on, now you get a good bookkeeper, an excellent tax accountant, and business consultant who decide to colloborate via one of the wiki's by setting themselves up without any having an interest in the others business except that someone fronts it to the client, gets paid and then disperses what's owed for the services they provide to the others.
This form (alliances, JV's, etc) has existed for ages but technology has made it easier,
Surely business's are going to gravitate towards this where a fancy high street presence is no longer a prerequisite, costs can be as low as what it costs to work from home, but good fees can still be leveraged??
What will a typical accounting practice look like in 10 years time?
As an armchair theorist I have made certain assumptions about running a quality practice but can't quite get my head around how much profit is left in the business when their is an economic downturn like this one. Surely some of you must be losing revenue as some clients close or leave their business's yet you still sit burdened with the sunk (or fixed costs) of the practice, no matter how good a quality service you give.
Now throw in some recent trends..... more homeworkers, skilled people without jobs, dispersement of geographical boundaries because of technological advances, cloud computing, social networking, wiki's, blogs, RSS feeds, and you can see where I am going with this....traditional business boundaries and heirarchies falling away as self-organised networks set themselves up and colloborative partnerships start taking hold.
So let's move on, now you get a good bookkeeper, an excellent tax accountant, and business consultant who decide to colloborate via one of the wiki's by setting themselves up without any having an interest in the others business except that someone fronts it to the client, gets paid and then disperses what's owed for the services they provide to the others.
This form (alliances, JV's, etc) has existed for ages but technology has made it easier,
Surely business's are going to gravitate towards this where a fancy high street presence is no longer a prerequisite, costs can be as low as what it costs to work from home, but good fees can still be leveraged??
What will a typical accounting practice look like in 10 years time?
