Chennai: PKC Consulting has launched a tech product that it believes has reinvented the way the company offers tax and service. The Chennai-based financial consultancy claimed this is India’s first product which enables complete automation of an audit.
The firm has clients from across industries, including retail, manufacturing, real estate and construction, education, healthcare, trade and distribution and IT. PKC handles software implementation, audit and assurance, start-up consulting, tax advisory, business advisory, bank funding and accounting.
“There is no product that is able to automate audit, the way Fero (stands for Financial Hero) does,” Swetha Kochar, managing partner at PKC Consulting. “Any company of whatever size that is on the accounting platform, it runs all the audit checks for them, it gives them all the business insight that they need to run their business. All of it for a price which is very affordable and doesn’t require us to offer personalised service for each client.
ochar said that there is significant scope for the tech revolution in the financial space and that companies still work on Tally and that the reporting is still very poor.
She said Fero is looking to do something like what Clear Tax has managed to do with tax services in India but in a larger way for the audit services space. She went on to add that the product has managed to bring in cost savings for clients as human involvement reduces and hence the price too is less.
Kochar said that there is significant scope for the tech revolution in the financial space and that companies still work on Tally and that the reporting is still very poor.
She said Fero is looking to do something like what Clear Tax has managed to do with tax services in India but in a larger way for the audit services space. She went on to add that the product has managed to bring in cost savings for clients as human involvement reduces and hence the price too is less.
Kochar said that there is significant scope for the tech revolution in the financial space and that companies still work on Tally and that the reporting is still very poor.
She said Fero is looking to do something like what Clear Tax has managed to do with tax services in India but in a larger way for the audit services space. She went on to add that the product has managed to bring in cost savings for clients as human involvement reduces and hence the price too is less.
“We’ve already built out our audit platform entirely. We have finished pilots for the last six months. All of it has gone successfully. So now we’re at the phase where we want to scale it up. We have another segment of digital transformation that we’re awaiting on which is our tax segment. Once we finish the audit side, we want to redeploy our resources into automating tax,” Kochar said.
She said that so far the company has built the core audit automation part of the product. Going forward, it will focus on the customer acquisition aspect.
“We also want to integrate it with more products. Today, it’s integrated with SAP and Tally, which covers a majority of the market, but it is not integrated with products like Zoho, and QuickBooks. So that’s the next step. And from a client standpoint, in recent times our clients have gone up to around 1600. The idea is to be able to double this number year on year at the very minimum,” she said.
Plans are also afoot to take the product to international markets within the next two years. PKC is targeting the US and Canadian markets but will first have to incorporate the relevant laws of the different countries on their product. She said the rationale would remain the same wherein the product integrates with QuickBooks and does the audit check by itself thereby not requiring a professional or a lot of money to manage it.
Published on the ET Bureau | Aug 20, 2021 – View Here
