by John Stokdyk
25 March 2010
To accompany its new FileCabinet paperless system, tax and practice developer Digita is rolling out a web portal to let accountants and their clients share documents online.
Now part of the international Thomson Reuters Group, Digita introduced the US-developed FileCabinet module at its user conference in Coventry last week. The paperless program imports and stores documents in a structured archive of client files. As well as taking scanned document images and client emails, FileCabinet integrates with Digita’s tax, accounts production and time & feels modules.
In his new role as managing director for Thomson Reuters’ UK tax and accounting division, Digita founder Jerry Rihll has a licence to explore and adapt technologies developed in other markets. FileCabinet, which already has 17,000 users in north America was an obvious candidate, he said.
“We already had document management on our roadmap because we felt the big systems weren’t appropriate for small accountancy firms,” Rihll explained. “FileCabinet was spot on for our needs and easy to localise.”
With pricing still to be finalised, Rihll said FileCabinet would be available in packs of four desktop licences priced at around £100 per user per year.
A demonstration of FileCabinet confirmed the extent of integration with both Digita’s software and Microsoft Outlook. On the left hand side of the main user screen is a Windows Explorer-like file tree, based on individual client files containing subsidiary folders for their tax, accounts, admin, correspondence, email and permanent data. The central area of the screen is given over to a data/document view and below that is an audit trail showing who last accessed which documents and when.
FileCabinet comes with a range of annotation, stamp and even drawing tools that can be applied to the stored files, with an option to leave them visible to clients or suppress the extra notations.
As part of the package, FileCabinet links to a NetClient, a web-based storage facility where documents can be saved for client review, or where they can upload supporting information for their tax and accounts work. Digita’s Ian Cooper explained that the portal got around the security and resource issues associated with emailing sensitive documents such as tax returns to and from clients.
With the Thomson Reuters secure web store, the client gets an email notification with a link to their online and a record is kept of who logs in and views the file. As well as improving client service and relationships, NetClient makes it easier for people at different locations in the same firm to refer to the client documents, Cooper said.
Secure web storage is an increasingly popular idea within accountancy, but by making it available as an integrated part of its practice and document management suite, Thomson Reuters is breaking new ground. Technology fans might be the only ones interested, but what the developer has done here is to introduce an element of Cloud computing into accountancy practice.
Get used to it is the message from Thomson Reuters tax and accounting general manager Tom Walsh. “We’re at the cusp of a couple of things that are going to change very dramatically: how firms use technology internally and the nature of accountancy firm clients,” he said.
“It’s no longer going to be about the 10am appointment. Clients will want to interact in a virtual manner – for example outside of office hours when they do their paperwork at home. They don’t have to be in the office to use the NetClient portal.”
From his perspective on trends in the US, Walsh added: “The concern over web computing is over. In excess of 90% of our practice software sales are web systems. Firms will buy nothing but web processes because of the flexibility they bring to applications, the multiple locations they can support and the lower total cost of ownership through not having an IT infrastructure.”
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