Acct1st Technology Group LLC, which began as a partnership between a Dallas CPA firm and a Seattle software development company, has forged a niche over the past four years as an accounting firm-centric vendor catering to CPAs and their clients. Through the unique management synergy and strategies of CPAs and software developers, Acct1st currently offers imaging, document management, tax workflow and client portals through internal or hosted systems. And its product suite, Acct1st EDRMS (an acronym for Electronic Document Records Management System) is designed to offer CPA firms a host of tax and document management products.
"We did a lot of analysis in the market, and at that time there was really a lack of good document management systems," said Andrew Harfield, chief strategic officer at Acct1st. "We had all the bells and whistles to be called document content management. What we didn't understand were the processes inside a CPA firm, between internal processes and between things that the CPA would interact with the client and how we needed to facilitate that. And there was really nobody at the time doing that."
SMALL FIRMS FOOTPRINT
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After initiating early alliances with a few CPA firms in Dallas and seeking feedback on how to build a quality paperless product that adhered to the processes and regulatory rules of what a CPA firm needed, the group came up with Acct1st EDRMS.
"I'd been thinking for some years that there had to be a better way to get a hold of processes," explained James Beach, CPA, CITP and one of the original accountants behind the formation of Acct1st. "But the tools hadn't been available, everything was just expensive. I was more interested in true records management than the early document management systems."
Initially targeting accounting firms with staffs of 10 or less, Acct1st knew that its business strategy had to be tighter with regard to market demographics - in its case, smaller CPA firms.
Hatfield said that his company subsequently geared their products to those smaller firms. "The small market needed the sophistication, the ability to manage tax documents, manage an overview of the process and deliver things to their client," Hatfield said. "So we decided that we were in a position to offer a hosted solution for a small company. For a small firm that's important, because they don't have IT on staff, time to really learn and have people make those kinds of decisions. It's affordable and effective."
Aside from eliminating "an awful lot of paper," Beach listed out-of-office support for his firm's auditors and staff, formalization of tax workflow processes, and compliance auditing of client records among the advantages of the Acct1st system. Other advantages he noted were security, retention, and the ability to integrate between the DMS and Acct1st's time and billing system, which, by not having to maintain a second database, helps to simplify administration and ensure that documents are properly indexed to the correct client.
