We are excited to be launching the Practice Protect 2022 Accounting Cloud Apps Report. This report is back for its second edition after we received a lot of positive feedback from the accounting community around the 2021 edition. 

The goal of this report is to provide a definitive answer to the most popular apps among Australian accounting and bookkeeping firms. Readers can then use the report as a shortlist of battle-tested software that they can trial to improve processes at their firms. 

The backbone of the report is the quality of the source data which is aggregated and anonymised data from 1,300 Australian accounting and bookkeeping firms on the Practice Protect platform.

In order to turn the raw data into value insights, we broke accounting technology down into practical categories and then ranked apps in those categories and provided commentary on app development and category trends. Categories vary from expense management to proposal software, practice apps, reporting, practice management, electronic signing and many more. 

The benefit of publishing this report year on year is that we can track trend data between years, seeing where category growth and decline exists, and what innovations are having the fastest rate of adoption among accountants and bookkeepers. 

One big takeaway from this report is that in the past 12 months, Australian accounting and bookkeeping firms have increased their investment in technology to improve productivity. They have done the calculations and recognised that software can reduce time to complete jobs and increase throughput.

This increase in technology investment is clearly seen with several categories experiencing innovation and significant growth. Some of the fastest growing areas include proposal software, which increases the speed of onboarding and automates cash collection; electronic signature software, which has become far more widely accepted since the pandemic forced everyone to work remotely; and SMSF and corporate compliance, essential software if you’re trying to scale this service.

The two most interesting areas to watch in the next 12 months are practice management and practice tools. Both categories have a number of challengers bringing new ideas and innovations, and in the former there’s also a lot of M&A.

With accountants and bookkeepers presented with more cloud-based software choices than ever before, our hope is that firms can use the data driven insights from this report to drive change and process efficiencies in their firms.