Sydney to host inaugural accounting technology conference

Sydney is set to host the inaugural Australian Accountex conference with a range of experts presenting on the latest accounting technology.

Two of Australia’s leaders in driving innovation in the accounting sector will be appearing at next month’s Accountex conference in Sydney, which will explore the future of accounting and finance over two days.

Tanya Titman, chief digital and innovation partner at BDO, will kick off proceedings with a discussion on how firms innovate at scale, while BlueRock’s head of technology and innovation Inbal Rodnay is set to host a session on the subject of automation.

Running over the 15th and 16th of March at the Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre in Darling Harbour, the Accountex conference to be held in the Asia Pacific aims to build on its success in the United Kingdom, offering local industry leaders and practitioners a platform to discover the latest in finance technology and efficiencies. Together with exhibitors and workshops, the conference will feature a range of forums, company tech talks and special guest speakers.

Tanya Titman

Among those is Titman, who has served as BDO’s chief digital and innovation partner since the beginning of last year, having first joined the network via the acquisition of her Brisbane-founded cloud-based practice Consolid8 in 2019. In her present role, Titman is responsible for driving BDO’s digital transformation and innovation agenda by creating business opportunities that deliver continual improvement, diversification and new value propositions.

Scheduled for day one, Titman will present ‘How large firms innovate at scale’. In a discussion on encouraging accountants to innovate, she states: “The more I use the word ‘innovation’, the less momentum I get. If you talk about inefficient processes and finding waste, and give them the methodologies, all of a sudden we’re starting to get that incremental change. Innovation starts with taking small steps to continuously challenge and improve what is being done every day.”

Inbal Rodnay

Also set to appear on the main stage on the morning of day one, Rodnay will discuss the use of leveraging automation technology to increase capacity, drawing on her experience as Technology and Innovation head at Melbourne-based advisory BlueRock, which has now grown to a team of 300-plus since its inception and last year launched an office in New Zealand. In addition, Rodnay will host two CPD-accredited workshops during the conference.

Her presentation at Accountex, ‘Leveraging tech versus talent: useful automations to increase your capacity and lower hiring pressure’, notes for prospective attendees: “Capacity in every firm is under pressure. To reduce demand for scarce talent, firms can invest in technology to improve the output of existing staff. Every firm is sitting on enormously powerful automation tools in their productivity suite. Find out how to apply them and earn that innovation dividend.”

Rodnay will further explore technology in accounting in two limited-space workshops, the first on how to create an automation strategy for compliance and covers so-called low-code/no-code automation tools which can give accountants the ability to optimise their own workflows with minimal training.

Following that, she will be joined by Dear Watson Power BI principal consultant Greg Nash in a workshop on the rationale and considerations of building a data lake.