Our product priorities, how these have shaped our recent developments and what we are working on for the future.

We’ve come a long way since we first opened our doors back in 2013. Silverfin now has 185+ employees who serve more than 700 customers worldwide. We’ve helped accounting firms embrace the future of connected accounting, making their work easier, more efficient, and more enjoyable. Oh, and we like to think that we’ve also played an important part in helping the profession transition towards becoming less compliance-orientated and more focused on advisory services.

At our recent ‘Fast Forward Studio’ event, we heard from An Maes, our Head of Product for Benelux. She spoke about our product priorities, how these have shaped our recent developments, and what we are working on for the future.

She was joined by Ken Bastiaensen, the founder of Boltzmann, a machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) leader that we recently acquired. He gave us his perspective on why we should all be so excited about the future of AI in accounting and explained how this technology will help take Silverfin to the next level.

So let’s dig into some of what they shared with event attendees.

The product pillars that define Silverfin (and where AI comes in)

1. Working with real-time client data
We believe every accountant should have access to their client’s real-time data, whether that’s from their bookkeeping software or other financial systems. This is no longer a nice-to-have — it’s a must. This is key for efficient and accurate reporting — accountants can’t provide valuable strategic advice if they lack reliable and up-to-date data. Only seeing a clients’ numbers once a year is a recipe for disaster.

Along with ensuring our platform synchronises data from leading systems used by accountants, we are also looking at how AI can help. In particular, the mapping of data when it is centralised in Silverfin. This is normally a very time and labour intensive task for accountants. Not to mention boring and repetitive. Not with Silverfin. By utilising AI, we’ve made the process of mapping real-time data to your chart of accounts as quick and easy as possible. With all client data in our platform, you don’t have to worry what system the client is using: no more manually transferring data from one system to another or logging in and out of different systems. What would have taken hours per client file in the past can now be completed in minutes and clicks. Plus once it’s done, it’s done. Future data is uploaded or automatically synchronised and mapped for you.

2. Analytics and reporting
Getting live data into Silverfin is just the first step. Once there, data automatically pre-populates not only your working papers and year-end accounts, but your management reports too. This means, in just a few clicks, you can build customised professional looking reports for your clients. We recently added charts to our reporting capabilities to help you produce even more impactful reports.

For firms expanding into advisory, Silverfin also lets you go even deeper into the data with our Insights module. Create powerful queries across the entire portfolio to benchmark your clients, track sector performance trends or spot opportunities to improve your client’s financial management.

All of these tools ultimately mean you now spend less time crunching numbers, and more face-to-face time with your clients.

3. Workflow automation
There are significant future opportunities to grasp from advisory. However, that doesn’t mean that compliance is no longer important or no longer necessary. Firms can only focus on advisory if they have accurate data and use standardised workflows to speed up the process of creating working papers, end-of-year accounts, quarterly reports, and so on.

That’s why we place such a huge emphasis on workflow automation. By automating mundane, data-heavy tasks, accountants can then use their time and expertise to dig into what the numbers mean — and to offer up their strategic advice. Automation of previously manual tasks also comes with the added benefit of accuracy as you reduce the possibility of errors. So we continue to improve (and add to) the key processes our platform automates and streamlines. Aside from ensuring they remain up-to-date with changes in legislation we continuously improve the best practice workflows at the heart of Silverfin.

We are also looking for ways that our platform can help here. Beyond simply streamlining and standardising this common work in firms, we want the platform to monitor and highlight to managers when it sees issues, missing or contradictory data, delays or deviations in process. Another place we expect our AI development to play a key role going forward.

4. Collaboration
As the proverb goes: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go with others”. Here at Silverfin, we believe that collaboration is the key to success. Colleagues need to be able to collaborate with one another on large, complex projects. They also need to be able to collaborate with their clients, getting questions answered, and walking them through their numbers or pinpointing areas for improvement going forward.

The best way to collaborate is to use a single source of truth. Keeping everything within one system — all projects, all data, and all back and forth in communication — this increases visibility and decreases the risk of mistakes or misunderstandings. It also means that everybody has the full context for all discussions. There’s no “which document are you referring to?” or digging around in endless emails. So this year we’ve also made improvements in our communications and collaboration tools built into Silverfin. Accountants get a single integrated inbox to see messages, to-dos and topics of interest across their entire client base – no need to log in and out of specific client files. Clients can collaborate on their file with the accounting team too. People work on files in Silverfin just as they work on shared Office or Google Docs with comments and messaging built right into the workflow. Got a question? Tag a colleague or client and get the answer (or additional) information you need. And importantly, save the communication with the client file as a clear paper trail should you need it in the future. No more email or portals to contend with.

5. Data syncs, APIs and developer tools
Accountants don’t typically work with just one financial system and neither does Silverfin. It’s therefore crucial that we play nicely with other tools. We place a huge focus on developing our APIs to ensure that Silverfin complements whatever other tools our customers might be using within their firm. It’s an area of continuous development. Finding new integrations. Updating existing ones to take advantage of any new developments at other companies. It may not be the most high profile change that happens to any product but it is foundational, particularly at a data level. It’s critical that whatever the data source an accountant needs to work with we have a way of supporting that within Silverfin. So we will continue to add new sources and improve our syncs.

Many of our customers also build their own workflows and reports on our platform – taking advantage of the client data and our core functionality to deliver new digital services to their clients. So here too we invest in improving our templating framework, Liquid, and we develop training and services to support the growing community of developer accountants.

Our recent product developments

We want to thank our product team for their tireless work over the past year. They’ve tackled a wide variety of projects, from small(ish) wins that are important but might go unnoticed, all the way through to glitzy large-scale product updates or releases.

Examples of the 100s of improvements to Silverfin this year were explained in our Fast Forward Studio event, but here are just a couple to give you a flavour of what our team have been working on.

On the smaller side of things, all draft messages are now auto-saved. This means that if you’re adding a note or a message within a client file and accidentally click off the pop-up, your message will still be saved. It might not be the most exciting update but it’s certainly made collaborating within Silverfin even more user-friendly than before.

And then there’s our new review screen. I’d be willing to bet that the vast majority of our customers have noticed this development. When speaking to Silverfin users, we were shocked to realise that many of them were reviewing workflows in our platform on paper! They found it difficult to conduct final reviews in Silverfin itself. So we’ve fixed that — saving trees and printer ink in the process. Thanks to our new review screen, you can compare two different periods (such as your clients’ 2019 and 2020 accounts) side by side and we even highlight the differences. So reviewing working papers is as easy as creating them in the first place in Silverfin.

So what’s coming up?

Ken and An talk a lot about what the future holds for Silverfin but the summary would be that aside from continuous improvement to the platform, we will be focusing on building out our AI roadmap so that we can provide even more value to our customers, giving them richer insights and saving even more time.

For instance, we’re currently working on a ‘smart’ forecasting functionality that will drastically speed up the process of creating a budget. We’re also looking to improve our benchmarking capabilities by making it easier for accountants to compare performance and common data points across all their clients.

More generally, Ken explained that our ultimate aim is to integrate AI even further into the platform. We want it to act as an invisible assistant, constantly analysing the data, providing autocomplete suggestions, and adding value at every stage of an accountant’s various workflows. It shouldn’t be its own feature as such, but it should be the guiding force shaping everything that our platform does (similar to the ways in which Gmail, Netflix and Spotify use AI).

If you’d like to learn more about anything that we’ve mentioned in this product update, watch Fast Forward Studio or get in touch to chat with a member of our team.