TGS Digested Week 23: Doing more with less

Monday 2021.6.7 

TGS Innovation and Technology Committee

The TGS innovation and technology committee keeps an eye on what’s happening in the business, accounting, advisory, and audit world. Following our participation in the Digital Accounting Forum last week we’ve started mapping our work processes in the TGS office with a view to automating and streamlining what we do. Improved efficiency is always good. 

Mapping your work processes is an excellent way to find out where you can save time as it’s easy to spot where you are duplicating tasks, where energy is wasted, or where things could be done more easily. We often miss these kinds of possible improvements when we work day-to-day because we are too close to see the bigger picture. 

After more than a year since of the start the pandemic, many of us wonder how we can add value to our firms, and more importantly how we can add value to our clients and the answer is Automation.

“Cash is the King” and that is right but don’t forget the Queen, and the Queen is Automation.

So if you want to know more about automation, watch Matias’ (TGS PGK in Argentina) webinar to get an in-depth explanation of how the technology works, and the types of use cases that it can support; also, find out the considerations businesses need to be mindful of as they embark on an automation journey, including pitfalls, lessons learned, and more importantly how you can bring these solutions to your clients.

Tuesday 2021.6.8 

Regional Development Day: monthly world tour 

The TGS Development Groups give us an opportunity to speak to all our members in one day, all over the world. It’s my favorite, most instructive, and most exhausting day of the month. We start with a 9 am meeting in the Asia Pacific, a 10 am meeting in Africa, an 11 am meeting in the Middle East, and so on until we end up in a 5 pm meeting in the Americas. Of course, it stays 9 am and morning coffee for everyone apart from us as we travel through global time differences. 

A quick summary of what we talked about today was: 

• Regional Event Feedback and November conference ideas: what’s happened in your firm in the last three months? Does the next TGS event have to be synchronous? How can we recreate the really interesting stuff behind the presentations during a normal conference: coffee breaks, eating, drinking, and informal conversation? 
• TGS Pipeline priorities. Focus on the USA and China. Lots of interesting conversations this month in Finland, Scotland, Austria, Hungary, Russia, and Vietnam. 
• TGS ‘Investing In’ webinars are steadily increasing in popularity. Watch out for the next editions in Italy (June 23rd, sign up here!), Scotland and Kenya. 
• Case Studies will be the focus of our next Young Leaders meeting. Making Success Stories and Case Studies is a good way to promote your firm. First, it shows potential clients how you successfully helped clients of yours, and then, shows your Young Leaders the steps you made to help your clients be successful in their projects. Great to have Peter with us who will be ‘taking names and kicking arses’ in the Case Study project. 

There was also a lot of interest to start an ‘Alcohol Group’ (many of our members have clients in the beverage industry), to start a Structured Finance Group, and to co-design the next TGS conference. We will do all these things in June. 

Wednesday 2021.6.9

TGS Live with Linkedin Success Systems

TGS Live was ‘recorded live’ this week and this is perhaps the best way to go about it. We spoke this week with our LinkedIn coach, Miles Duncan about his new course: 90 Day Assisted Accelerator Programme. This course is excellent for individuals and small teams that know they could use LinkedIn more effectively to get results but don’t know where to start. We’ve used it and we’re getting results. 

You can watch the TGS Live with Miles here 👉 https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6808648993984270338. 

You can download a short pdf description of the course here 👉 https://tgsglobal.fromsmash.com/qcqeVDAcK6-ct

Thursday 2021.6.10 

TGS Supervisory Board Meeting

As well as back-to-back Zoom meetings with accounting and audit firms in Scotland, Russia, Estonia, and Austria, I was also on a TGS Supervisory Board Zoom meeting with Marc Desjardins, Christian Fouchard, Sylvain Begenne, and Christophe Rondeau from TGS France.

It is always rewarding to see just how much progress we make as a network over 8 months and preparing a summary for a board meeting like this is a very useful exercise. Here is a quick rundown of the last 8 months of TGS in figures. 

• 70 members in 59 countries.
• 4350 staff in 262 offices.
• 220 individual firm Quality meetings.
• 50 webinars, workgroups, and committee meetings with 430 participants.
• 1 Communication on Progress with action on 10 Sustainable Development Goals.

I’m sure your firm was part of these statistics and thank you. If you were to give a recap of your last year in figures, what would it look like? 

Friday 2021.6.11

TGS Advisory

As I write this column, I am participating in the 2021 Mindshop Advisory forum, so more news about this next week. Suffice to say for now that “The next 2-3 years will have the most opportunities for advisors that I have seen in my long working life” Dr. Chris Mason said, Mindshop founder. Chris has been our coach in advisory for many years and those of you who were present with us at the TGS annual conference in Toronto would have met and will know the quality of advisory work here. Chris has often advised us on advisory. 

Over the next year, we will be continuing to add to the TGS Advisory Toolbox. You can look out for tools and webinars on the topics we have learned the most about over the last, business-as-unusual year. 

• Doing more with less and simplifying Complexity. 
• Streamlining and automating systems and processes.
• Leveraging technology.
• Learning from the best practice of other TGS firms.
• Looking ahead to build the future-proof capabilities.

On a final note, restaurants are reopening in France, and TGS France in Normandy is offering coffee today and tomorrow.  Find out more about this TGS-branded initiative here!