Thomson Reuters Tax & Accounting previewed some of its upcoming products at a recent conference and unveiled some new partnerships, along with a delay of its Onvio cloud software.
The company’s Synergy conference in Nashville last month attracted attendees both in person and virtually after the conference had to be all virtual last year due to the pandemic.
“It was really exciting to be back together face to face,” said Elizabeth Beastrom, president of Thomson Reuters Tax & Accounting. “We’ve all been clamoring for more face to face. We had over 800 people in person, and then we had another 1,000 people that were online. You could choose how you wanted to attend this year. The overwhelming feedback I heard from people was they were glad to be together, to be able to have this time to collaborate and network. It was the first time that I got to meet a lot of our customers face to face, which was invaluable for me.”
The theme of the conference was “Shaping an informed tomorrow.”
“The first day out, I shared a little bit about my journey,” said Beastrom. “I am a CPA and started my career way back when, close to 30 years ago at Deloitte. Then we talked about some macro trends that we’re seeing in the industry focused on globalization, regulation and the change that it’s driving. That’s changing client expectations, which is a natural segue into advisory. Clients want a lot more than just compliance. They’re moving beyond that. How do we advise them as partners?”
Technology was a major focus, as many accounting firms have needed to shift in the past year to accommodate remote work. “Technology is always a big part of this, but I think the pandemic exacerbated that,” said Beastrom. “Finding new ways to communicate and collaborate, certainly the need for cloud-based solutions, talent development, getting the right people in, a change in skill sets.”
On the second day of the conference, Thomson Reuters executives discussed what the company is doing for its customers to address the mega trends in accounting and tax. Thomson Reuters co-COO Brian Peccarelli talked about improving the customer experience and what customers can expect to see. The head of product and the head of engineering described the product roadmap, including changes in features and functionality. Among the new products launched at the conference was the Determination Anywhere tax engine (
Thomson Reuters officials also announced three new partnerships with SurePrep, Verady and Practice Ignition. “The first, with, SurePrep, really helps with streamlining the gathering of data in the tax compliance process,” said Beastrom. “It automatically populates tax documents and reduces manual errors, so the SurePrep partnership had a lot of buzz around it. With Verady, one of the trends in the industry is that we’re seeing a lot of cryptocurrency, and tax laws need to change accordingly. Over 50 million people in the U.S. have crypto, and we need to be able to report on this in the right way. ... And then the third was Practice Ignition. It’s more of an onboarding experience for clients to help them collect payments faster, with proposal generation, billing and client tracking. This is really for small and midsized firms and will be a nice add-on to our advisory business to help them get their bottom line improved by getting their payments faster.”
Executives also discussed some of the new content and features in Thomson Reuters’ Checkpoint Edge research product, as well as a delay in the rollout of the Onvio cloud-based tax and accounting practice management software.
“We made the decision that we’re not launching Onvio at Synergy this year,” said Beastrom. “We’ve had a lot of conversations with clients on the focus of it, the technology, AI, machine learning, and really integrating all of our products into one place. That was a really good discussion area and had a lot of focus, with reiteration from our customer base that this remains the right vision for where they want to see their desktop products go. We continued to talk about the roadmap and where we are going with this. It’s more of a vision in line with the mega trends in technology, about having cloud-based solutions.”
Onvio will be combining many of Thomson Reuters’ desktop products and making them available and integrated through the cloud, including practice management software and the UltraTax compliance engine.
“The original timeline had it rolling out at this conference, and we made the decision to delay that,” Beastrom explained. “It was a decision that was hard to make, but it was based on the feedback from our customers. We’ve doubled down on the investment in Onvio, and that’s the main focus for 2022.”
