Leading Scottish Accountancy Advisory Implements nFlow Digital Dictation

Top 60 UK accountancy firm French Duncan achieves better work management; benefits from enhanced remote working capability

nFlow, the leading supplier of digital dictation solutions to the accountancy sector, has announced that Scotland-based French Duncan LLP, ranked amongst the top 60 accountancy firms in the UK, has successfully deployed its Digital Dictation System (DDS) along with the nFlow Mobile for BlackBerry application. With the first phase of implementation complete in the firm’s Glasgow and Falkirk offices, French Duncan is seeing visible benefits of increased efficiency and productivity and improved work flow and work load management at these sites. Prior to this, French Duncan was using the traditional tape-based system for dictation.

The firm has plans to extend this implementation to its Edinburgh and Kirkintilloch offices shortly.

nFlow has facilitated better work management and greatly improved remote and mobile working at the firm. Fee-earners at French Duncan are now able to send dictations instantly from any geographical location with express guidance on type of document, priorities and urgency for transcription. Previously, secretarial staff received dictations on audio tapes, with no idea of how long the transcripts were. Also, quite often a single tape carried dictations pertaining to more than one client. This made work sharing difficult amongst administrative staff. Because the nFlow DDS is a workflow based solution, now digital dictations are automatically saved in the right place and accessible to the entire secretarial pool. This ensures that client work is executed in a timely manner even when the primary staff working on individual clients is away due to sickness or holidays.

Further, nFlow has customised the nFlow Mobile application for BlackBerry for French Duncan to deliver additional functionality. For instance, aside from just using their devices to record and send dictations, fee-earners are also able to send instructional messages (voice and email) to their respective offices such as requests for meeting room bookings or information of their whereabouts to arrange client meetings.

Robert Kerr, Managing Partner, French Duncan, said, “We are always on the lookout for technology that can help us become more efficient as an organisation, as efficiency positively impacts on the service we deliver to our customers. nFlow’s technology has delivered instant business benefits to us and we are very keen to extend the solution to our other sites.”
Rob Lancashire, Sales and Marketing Director at nFlow, added, “In fixed cost base organisations such as accountancy firms, operational efficiency can directly facilitate higher business margins. Especially in the current economic climate, and with increasing competitive pressure in the professional services sector, digital dictation technology can deliver significant operational cost savings. Some of our customers have seen productivity increases of up to 30% and reductions in operational costs of up to 10%. Here in lies the business case for digital dictation technology.”