I visited Accountex 2013 on Thursday at the Excel centre in London. This is a very quick post on my impressions, please don't take this as a comprehensive review.
The centre itself is a very pleasant environment, easy to get to from Waterloo via Jubilee line then DLR. It's very similar to the NEC in Birmingham, but probably better served for food outlets.
The show was professionally put together, with a good number of exhibitors. Partially as a result, it felt a little cramped - all the stalls very close to each other. Also, the "theatres" would have benefitted from being a bit bigger, as they frequently lacked sufficient seating and were very close to each other, so sound inevitably bled through.
As far as content goes, there wasn't a huge amount there for my interests. I found it heavily skewed towards accountants in practice; there were several companies performing document digitisation and management, and firms selling accounting packages aimed at the SME market (Sage, Xero and Intuit were there, but no sign of, for example, Oracle, SAP or IBM, or the many companies that support their finance systems). It was a similar story when it comes to tax and investment advice.
By contrast, there was very little for accountants like me who work in industry. That may explain why the CIMA-sponsored "Accountants in Business" theatre seemed to be standing-room-only for every session - aside from some of the keynote sessions it was the only venue that had talks I found relevant and interesting, and apparently I wasn't alone.
The most important thing at any conference - the freebies - was also a bit disappointing. Probably due to the current depressing state of the economy. I came away with a few biros, a book of accountant jokes, some mints and a lot of brochures, but not much else.
I don't want to sound too down on it, I think I'm just not the demographic they were targeting. If I was in practice, particularly if I ran my own small-but-growing practice, it probably would have been immensely valuable and interesting.
Will I go next year? Maybe, it depends what direction it develops in. Today I'm not sure why CIMA are involved as it's really not that relevant to their membership. However, accountants in business are a significant group, and the show is relatively young, so if they turn their attention in that direction I'm sure they will do it really well.
