Mercia provides training, compliance and support services to accountants in practice in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Mercia operates as two separate companies with offices in Dublin and Newry. In addition to our team on the ground here, we have the support of our 160 UK colleagues, a resource that has proved invaluable during 2020, when we succeeded in moving most of our services onto virtual platforms within weeks.
Accountants in practice are inspected regularly to ensure they are in compliance with the quality standards expected of them. Our brief is to make sure they are delivering their services to the appropriate standard and our remit covers areas such as audit, accounting, anti-money laundering, insolvency and investment business.
We tell a practice how they are getting on and, if we identify a problem, we offer a solution to address the deficiencies. We also deliver training in partnership with ACCA, and on our own, to enable practitioners to achieve their CPD requirements for the year.
At the beginning of the year we initially saw a number of compliance and training assignments stalled until practices realised they could continue virtually. It was impressive how quickly practices adapted to the virtual setting.
Similarly, practices were impressed with how quickly we moved training services online and how effective it was. Some have said they would prefer virtual training going forward because of the greater range of events we can now offer. Others would still prefer face to face, but it’s clear that virtual interactive training will have a permanent place going forward.
Practices were impressed with how quickly training services moved online and how effective it was – some have said they would prefer virtual training going forwards
My current role centres on growing Mercia in both Northern Ireland and the Republic. In this most unusual year, we made changes in a few months that would have taken 18 months for us to roll out normally.
The move to virtual work has been a revelation to many practices and to ourselves. Even in situations where we formerly spent a number of days working in the offices of a practice, actual face-to-face interaction was often a very small part of this. It took the pandemic to make us all realise that.
Accountants, like everyone else, crave some certainty and, with a vaccine a real prospect, it is starting to look like 2021 can provide some. When the situation normalises, all services will have to be delivered in a more flexible way.
It is clear that practices are looking at paperless solutions to their needs as employees look for more flexibility with their locations. We are developing a number of new services to allow practices to facilitate this, and we expect to be introducing the first of these in early 2021.
I had always spent quite a bit of time working from home, but not as much as in 2020. I miss the personal interaction with practitioners. On the other hand, we have all learned to adapt to Teams and Zoom very quickly.
The most important business lesson I have learned in my career is to be straight with people. Don’t sanitise the message. If there are problems, people need to know about them, and quickly.
