In a brilliant article titled ‘10 skills for digital leadership’, Daniel Hood, the editor-in-chief of Accounting Today, emphasized that “Leadership is the common denominator of the [accounting] firms that have great technology and [is] the single most important differentiator between the leading firms and the rest of the pack.” Effective leadership skills have always played an essential role in the success of some of the top accounting firms. The philosophy of successful leadership, when boiled down to its very essence, is about making decisions that position a firm for success; and one decision which often plays a crucial role in the success of tops firms is the choice of a trusted virtual data room provider.

Choosing the right Virtual Data Room (VDR) enables you to boost the productivity of your firm, increase the speed and quality of your communications, improve the client experience, while also ensuring the overall safety of your business-critical documents. In short, VDRs play a significant role in the success of some of the top accounting firms because they firmly reinforce at least 5 of the 10 key digital leadership skills: Communication, Simplification, Innovation, Technical Leadership, and Vision. All of these are mentioned by Daniel Hood in his article.

So let’s take a closer look at how virtual data rooms help accounting firms in establishing their digital leadership.

Ensuring Effective Communication: Request List Management

As Daniel Hood emphasized in his article, maintaining efficient communication channels is one of the biggest challenges faced by all firms. IT leaders have come to the natural conclusion that email is NOT the solution. The reason for this? Huge amounts of lost time in unproductive email conversations. A statistic from Gartner recently declared that professionals spend as much as 50% of their time searching for and gathering documents. What’s even more disturbing is the fact that a major part of this time loss consists of repetitive conversations involving the circulation and location of important documents. So, is there a solution to this problem? The simple answer is YES, Request List Management.

Request List Management (RLM) is a set of features provided by Vault Rooms along with virtual data rooms which allow a firm to significantly improve the quality and the efficacy of a firm’s communication with its clients. The following is a list of the key benefits provided by RLM:

• Improves document collection efficiency
• Reduces a lot of the back and forth
• Centralizes communication
• Helps get rid of ALL email related issues (ex: documents getting lost in spam folders, document sizes being too big, repetitive emails for the same thing, having a weak email password which exposes the firm to additional threats…)

Simplifying Communication

Another important and often overlooked aspect of digital leadership involves getting rid of systems and processes that do not support the final outcome – the success of the firm. The task of automating and replacing processes that add little or no value is quite similar to how the dead wood is burnt in a forest fire – it’s a great way of clearing out the clutter and restoring the productivity of your firm. This is another huge benefit that Request List Management (RLM) brings to the table – it centralizes and simplifies communication by automating the collection of documents and helps to clean out the clutter of inefficient communication processes.  

Embracing Disruption & Innovation

Companies are often at their strongest when their IT leaders have the liberty to take advantage of the latest technologies that disrupt traditional systems and processes. To an IT leader, choosing a virtual data room is all about moving away from the traditional ways of communication and document management towards an innovative platform that disrupts and streamlines the collection, organization, sharing and tracking of business-critical documents.

Technical Leadership

As Daniel Hood mentioned in his article, leaders in an organization do not “always have to know how to build the watch,” but with a Vault Room, that’s not a problem. When it comes to VDRs, the ease-of-use along with the access to technical skills means that leaders do not need advanced technical knowledge to effectively manage and monitor their business-critical documents. Time wasted in catching up and learning new technologies is eliminated. In essence, choosing the right virtual data room is about allowing leaders to do what they do best – lead.

Vision

Finally, as Daniel Hood said, “it is difficult, if not impossible, to succeed with a defined vision, strategic plan, and an IT strategy to support the vision and plan.” Successful accounting firms are choosing to use virtual data rooms as part of their long-term IT Strategy. Not only do VDRs allow these top firms to eliminate document and collection inefficiencies while also securing their business-critical documents, but they also serve as an important foundational component to support their vision and their success.

Choose Vault Rooms

For over a decade, Vault Rooms has been the SAFE, EASY-TO-USE and AFFORDABLE virtual data room provider of choice for accountants, investment bankers, private equity firms, M&A advisors, and many more! We specialize in providing bank-level security with the simplicity of use that allows you to take the hassle out of document collection and management.

To learn more about our virtual data rooms, get started here: www.vaultrooms.com