From shoe boxes to the cloud, Mark Copsey reflects on his 25 years at Allworths

Following on from the ‘How Allworths Began’ article, I was asked to reflect on my 25 years at Allworths and how the profession has changed.

When I arrived in Sydney in early 1995, the city had just won the bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games. This was a really pivotal event for Sydney, which soon underwent a transformation from being a sleepy town to one on the world stage.

At the time, the media was full of colourful characters like Alan “Bondy” Bond and other crooks like Christopher Skase, who was hiding out in Spain. But it wasn’t only businessmen who were rorting the system – the Royal Commission into corruption within the New South Wales Police Service had just begun.

I remember being at one of my first audits and having a bottle of VB thrust into my hands. I was told, “mate, Australians stop working at 4pm on a Friday.” Yes, it truly felt like the Wild West…

Despite all that, I was impressed by how modern office life felt in Australia.

I had just come from the UK where most of my jobs had involved either shoe boxes filled with receipts or dusty old ledgers and cash books. Accounts were still being typed and changes were being made with liquid paper.

Whereas at Allworths, everyone had a computer on their desk and all accounts were printed on the very modern dot matrix printer. I remember when the Internet connection was first introduced to the office, it was set up on one special computer for us all to share. Of course, none of us had any idea what it could do yet!

It was around this time when Microsoft Excel became the market leader in spreadsheets, knocking Lotus 123 off the shelf. And it wasn’t long after that when MYOB started to get noticed, which helped push us and our clients to move into the digital age.

As the year 2000 started to approach and we should have been getting excited about the Olympics, we instead became fixated on the deadly Y2K bug. It was said this would crash all the computers around the world and cause the end of civilisation. This never happened of course, but some people did profit from the hysteria it caused in the meantime.

The year 2000 also saw the largest shake up of our tax system in a long time, with the introduction of the GST on 1 July 2000. Additionally, it saw the introduction of the very inappropriately named ‘Simplified Tax System.’ These events were probably catalysts for most clients to complete the move to computerised accounting.

Through the 2000s, things seemed to be booming; sure the Dot Com bubble burst to temporarily slow things down, but life seemed to be good. Everyone was carrying around their new Nokia phones and we started to become really connected. It wasn’t until the end of the 2000s that the iPhone arrived in Australia to make our lives even easier and transformed what we imagined a phone could do.

I think it’s fair to say that, in the past 10 years, technology has exploded at a rate that seems impossible to keep up with. This March, after a two-year project, Allworths officially became a 100% cloud-based firm, which was incredibly timely with the COVID shut down.

At Allworths, we love technology and have always tried to stay ahead of the curve in implementing new systems. The current batch of products available to us is allowing us to provide more in-depth analysis for clients and their businesses, and provide live up-to-date reporting to them.

I believe that what is about to come with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will truly transform the accounting profession (as well as other industries). My advice to young professionals would be to learn about this new technology as doing so will help them stay relevant.

The world and how we interact with technology as we know it is only going to undergo more and more rapid transformation. There are certainly exciting times ahead!