Attending Accountex

Earlier this month I made the trek (and it really was…car, train, tube, AND two DLR trains!) to get to the Excel in London for my first visit to Accountex, an exhibition and conference dedicated to those in the accounting profession.

When I set up my practice last year I made the decision to concentrate solely on cloud software, so this was the perfect opportunity for me to catch up with some of the companies I use regularly, as well as learning more about new-to-me software and hearing from leading figures about the future of the industry.

The Xero stand was beautifully thought out, as always, and it was great to see the improvements they’ve made to the payroll side of their software. It was also good to be able to speak to the owner of MyDocSafeabout other ways I can use their software, having recently moved to them for electronic document signing and online forms.

I left with a list of software to investigate further, which I think will provide real benefit to my clients. This includes 9Spokes (free software bringing together information from all of your cloud apps into one business overview, once they bring Xero on board I’m sure this will be a must-have tool for me), Futrli for forecasting and reporting, and Arbitrue whose virtual accounting assistant was incredibly quick at reading and interpreting receipts.

Unfortunately the announcement of the upcoming general election meant that HMRC had to pull out of their planned talks, which is a shame as I was looking forward to hearing more of the detail of Making Tax Digital (if you haven’t heard of this, check out my previous post about the coming changes.)

It was a very informative day and I’m already looking forward to seeing what next year’s show brings!