Rain Allikvee, Uku’s co-founder and visionary, is the one person who can visualise what the future will bring for accountants. He’s confident that accounting communication will be revolutionised and never as mundane as today. Let’s see what he tells us about the future of accounting communication and client portals.
Uku’s Client Portal is now publicly available to all Uku members! Great! But what you can see and use today is just the beginning. This is the first step in improving accountant-client cooperation.
Uku’s vision is to become a hub – a central system for serving your clients (CRM, accounting communication, contracts) and financial data. The accountant wins in efficiency, and their clients, entrepreneurs, get answers to all their financial questions in one place.
What’s next for Uku?
Quality of Accounting Service
As we increasingly use the Client Portal, documents and communication are managed more efficiently, leading to faster, higher-quality service. We cannot read emails in our colleagues’ inboxes if they are ill. The whole team can, however, access tasks, client profiles, and the clients’ questions.
Even when a colleague is unavailable, critical information is always accessible in Uku.
It is a big win for the client when they see their agreements, expectations, and promises made to them. If you build the entire onboarding flow into Uku, the client will become familiar with Uku’s Client Portal during onboarding.
Chat and Modern Accounting Communication Channels
We’re introducing a chat channel in Uku to simplify communication and allow Uku members to choose other channels for notifications besides email, e.g., WhatsApp.
If the accountant gets sick or changes, you can ask artificial intelligence to give the new accountant a summary of the conversation’s history and the most critical agreements.
Offering More Accounting Services to Clients
Those using Uku’s automated billing have entered their services, products and price lists into Uku. We display them in Uku’s Client Portal so the client can see the valid agreements anytime.
In addition, we also show the services the firm does not provide to this client today in the Client Portal. This way, the client can find out what other options are available, and it is easier for the accountant to sell additional services by referring to the list of services on the portal, for example, introducing finance analysis services to the client.
Client Document Management
Today, you can set up the backup of your documents in your document management (Google Drive, OneDrive, etc.) in Uku.
Your client’s documents are easy to find and manage
This step towards better document management adds to the transparency and efficiency of your service.
Uku Insights is Your New Power BI
A highly desired functionality in Uku is business analytics or BI, or, as we call it, Uku Insights.
Uku integrates with many accounting software, and more to come. The software gets access to all accounting data, for example, entries, charts of accounts, and other financial data from your accounting software. You can also give Uku access to data analysis software, e.g., Power BI.
Uku’s client portal will start displaying Power BI reports.
As a first step, we offer a business analytics dashboard built on templates. In the future, we will give advanced Uku members more freedom to design their dashboards. We provide a tool to see different financial scenarios, increase or decrease numbers, and set goals.
Accountant as a Financial Advisor
We want to create a discussion around the numbers. Accountants are the entrepreneurs’ right hand, helping interpret the numbers and figure out how to realise the dream scenarios.
The accountant becomes both a financial analyst and a consultant. But, the analytics tool must be so simple that the accountant doesn’t have to provide a separate service to interpret it.
We want to help small and medium-sized entrepreneurs understand their company’s finances.
However, the accountant can offer their financial analyst service if questions arise and clients want to discuss their business strategies. CEOs with more than one company win thanks to Uku’s comprehensive overview of their firms’ financial data.
Artificial Intelligence as a Financial Analyst
We do plan to use AI to help accountants and entrepreneurs even more. Uku’s AI agent will assist in data collection and analysis, but the crucial decisions remain human-led. AI is used to collect data, analyse, and answer questions about the content and background of the numbers.
Communicating the numbers in a way that allows everyone to understand them is a big step forward.
However, artificial intelligence usually doesn’t know the context of the numbers. It can also help model different scenarios, but decision-making is still up to the person.
If you ask in which direction Uku’s client portal is going – Uku as a whole will be a hub of financial analytics and client consultation with the help of AI agents.
Why choose Uku? I could create a client portal myself.
Developing a modern Client Portal is challenging and expensive; you must consider at least 5-digit numbers. The basis of a client portal is CRM first, followed by all communication, document management, integrations with email services, etc., not to mention the inclusion of AI.
Uku has a public API, and we invite you to interface with our API if you already have your system. We will gladly make accountants’ working days more efficient together.
We don’t charge you if we help your team serve more clients.
On the other hand, adding new clients to Uku’s Client Portal costs nothing, unlike with our competitors. Uku will still bill only based on the number of your team members. However, we are constantly working to ensure your team has better tools.
Uku’s Client Portal vs Competitors Accounting Communication Tools
Uku’s portal offers more than just document exchange. Most work management software have created a Client Portal focused only on documents. We offer a complete product that is as simple as possible so you can work with clients in your workflow and use the same tasks.
Accountants’ work starts at the same place where it ends; there is no need for extra communication or tasks.
With Uku, you can add your branding to the portal at no additional cost. Many competitors do not offer this as part of the base package and charge extra. Your client’s experience is the basis of the Client Portal’s success.
That’s why the basic plan includes the option to add your branding, colours, logos, introduction and even a video greeting.
Uku is the Helper for Accountants and CEOs
Organised data is the base of good financial analysis and accounting. However, data often gets inaccurate before it reaches the accountant. How many accountants know-how companies have set up, for example, their warehouse management, online store, etc., applications?
When we help accountants automate their day-to-day work and CEOs better understand their financial results, both parties free up interest to examine other parts of the business. We have many places to optimise our processes, but only 24 hours a day.
Let’s automate what we can.
The Future of Accounting Work
We use AI and free up our resources to look into those corners we have yet to reach. Accountants usually have consulting skills and knowledge, which can significantly help smaller teams and companies.
We are talking about accountants innovating the company’s work.
The work of accountants will become even more enjoyable and interesting. Now, they won’t just see what is happening in the company in the numbers. They also get a say in organising their companies’ work and which technological solutions to select.
Uku Insights for Company CEOs
Entrepreneurship starts with courage: the courage to offer new services and products. How many people envision seeing the world change through their business? How do you retain money, how much, and under which recompense programs? Let us help visualise and understand it!
With Uku Insights, we provide transparency and give you the courage to act. Uku gives you automation!
We encourage entrepreneurs to do more today so they have the freedom to do less in the future.
The freedom to do less means doing fewer tasks to focus on the important. Don’t be a hamster on a wheel. Be smart and do less chores and more valuable tasks.
What Are the Next Steps for Uku?
Currently, we’re focusing on perfecting communication with document backup and new features like WhatsApp integration.
Document backup comes first. Accounting system archives are not the most popular places to back up documents—they are not trusted for this purpose. We allow people to access their document storage through Uku. It’s a step towards transparency and structure.
In addition, we plan to:
- Add deadlines to the checklist items in tasks;
- More interactions in the Client Portal task;
- Chat;
- WhatsApp integration as a replacement for email notifications;
- Meeting link generation in Uku;
- And many more minor improvements to make the communication part of the Client Portal impressive.
Want to see more of Uku? Book a personal demo or try Uku out for free.
