Introduction
As an accountant, when you recommend a technology platform to your clients, you’re placing utmost trust in it and vouching for its effectiveness.
Any tech platforms you recommend have likely proven able to fill a gap at your practice, hopefully bringing new ways of working and delivering efficiencies.
Often there is a specific need not being met by software packages already in use, leaving room for a new platform. For example, Joiin solves the problem of how to consolidate multi-entity data, bringing a wealth of powerful features to ease this very specific, highly complex, time-consuming, and potentially error-prone task.
Any new technology is undoubtedly a big decision for you and the stakeholders at your accounting firm, which you want to get right.
But how do you get to a position where you’re comfortable recommending a new platform to your clients, safe in the knowledge that they’ll reap the benefits it can deliver? A wrong turn could mean your reputation and your practice are on the line.
“Any tech platforms you recommend have likely proven able to fill a gap at your practice, hopefully bringing new ways of working and delivering efficiencies.”
Data protection from the get-go
How you initially connect to a new technology platform is an excellent place to start.
Trusted platforms like Xero use something called Oauth2 to establish a highly secure link between their software and another – it is an industry-standard and something to look for in technology you can trust.
Our Joiin platform uses Oauth2 as it needs to first connect with your accounting software, such as Xero, to access and then consolidate your data.
With Joiin and Xero as an example: using the Oauth2 workflow, our platform would request access to your software and its data – the extent you would need to approve before anything goes further. The workflow involves authorisation via time-limited codes and would result in Joiin being able to access some of your Xero data.
One of our trust-building initiatives at Joiin is always to stress that our platform only requests ‘read only’ access, which means we only take the required amount of data to perform our consolidation task. We cannot change your data at its source.
Questions to consider:
How would any new platform establish a secure connection with our existing software, and what data access would it require?
What to look out for:
Standards like Oauth2 authorisation and ‘read only’ access.
Part 2 looks at best practice security measures.
About this blog series
This blog series provides a straightforward overview for accountants about what to look for when assessing a tech platform’s trustworthiness. We’ve broken the series into 5 posts, including this one on data protection, plus further posts on security measures, collaborative features, added-value reporting, and supplier ethos. The series aims to give you enough information about what to look for in technology platforms, so you can fulfil your role as a trusted advisor and confidently recommend these to your clients.
