Project Terraform

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Issue: 3. How might the accounting sector better optimize manpower and/ or augmenting the existing workforce, to deal with varying levels of resources required during peak/ off-peak periods?

Inspiration

Firms often face challenges in human resource management, due to the seasonal variation in workforce demand in the accounting industry. To meet the demand during peak periods, Firms will employ more workers which will be left idle during off-peak periods. Thus, productive and allocative inefficiency persists throughout the year, which is of paramount significance for small-medium accounting firms with less diversified services and lower annual revenue.

What it does

Our platform addresses this issue by matching small and medium accounting firms to SMEs who are seeking available services such as consulting and internal auditing, by providing them an online portal to communicate and establish contracts. On one hand, this provides an opportunity for accounting firms to generate higher revenue during off-peak periods by working on other relevant fields apart from external auditing. In addition. such small-medium accounting firms will gain larger exposure to the market, build their reputation and hence drawing higher demand for their services.

On the other hand, the attrition rate is reduced as companies will be less inclined to hire the minimum number of employees during the peak periods to lower cost during non-peak periods. As a result, these measures increase the overall efficiency of the accounting industry as a whole, as SMEs are able to operate in more efficient accounting systems. This leads to greater benefits of the economy as a whole, as the burden of auditors during year-end audits will be reduced due to higher operational efficiency achieved by SMEs.

How we built it

We designed an online webpage to illustrate the fundamental structure of the platform, and we use javascript to allow users to interact with our online portal. On top of that, we made use of an on-demand ranking system to suggest to companies with services that meet their needs. Our business model works by connecting SMEs with Small to Medium Audit Firms, thus our main focus is to establish a diversified pool of companies such that businesses are able to choose from a greater variety of services offered by auditing companies. This requires us to acquire an online database and to remain functional through time. As we are still at the idea generation stage, we decided to create this website as a prototype to showcase our solution in tackling the inefficiency of the accounting industry.

Challenges we ran into

One of the difficulties is the limitation of time and money for us to create a digital online platform with data stored in the online database. Thus, for presentation purposes, we have utilized static information to replace the need for an online database on our website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of our idea as it is something that is totally new to Singapore's market and with high feasibility. Despite being the younger participants in the competition, we came out with new ideas to give our part towards improving the efficiency of the accounting industry, and this is really the greatest accomplishment for participating in this competition :)

What's next for Project Terraform

We are planning to carry on modifying our online platform and design a mobile application that is more convenient for users. After the introduction of an online database, our project will be effectively functional when transferred into an html server. This B2B platform could also be used in other industries if it goes out well!