When you boil it down to the most essential level, an accounting firm—or any other service business, for that matter—is really just a batch of different processes carried out on a specific timeline in a specific way.
Obviously, a lot more goes into most service businesses (especially accounting), but strong workflows are the foundation of success for the type of excellent client service needed to sustain an accounting firm over the long haul.
Throughout my firm's years of talking to accounting firms and helping them better manage their processes, we have encountered several recurring problems that firms have trouble solving.
In no specific order, here are the most common workflow management mistakes we see from accounting firms.
This is a common issue when firms start their initial work on process mapping and don’t describe them in as much detail as they should.
Some accounting professionals have been performing these processes for decades. The individual steps they contain are second nature, which means it can take some concentration to truly outline all the parts of the process needed. Others may simply have blind spots that make it challenging to document every workflow element.
To avoid this mistake, try having someone who isn’t familiar with a workflow review the documentation to ensure there are no missing steps or unclear instructions.
If there are people at your accounting firm who already have spent a good deal of time with the workflows you want to improve, it makes sense to ask for their thoughts on how that particular process is managed within the team. It’s likely that they’ve developed opinions about it over time and can help leadership think about the workflows with a more insightful perspective.
You don’t have to get the opinion of every single person involved in a given workflow, but it may help to have casual conversations with team members to get their thoughts on the firm’s processes. If you want to get even more data on what your employees think about workflows and you have a large enough team, consider running a digital survey to gather a large amount of data simultaneously.
Many of the firms we work with have rock-solid processes for areas like client projects and onboarding but struggle with internal processes like payroll management, expense tracking, or internal project management. Others may excel at internal processes but struggle to find footing with external workflows beyond a few comfortable regulars.
Creating workflows for the processes you are comfortable with seems easy and straightforward, but that’s not the point of workflow management! You should be creating workflows for all aspects of your business that are repeatable and need to be completed regularly. If it’s challenging for you or your team to map out all the different steps of a process, it’s a sign you probably need to create a detailed workflow.
For people who learn and process information visually, it can be challenging to sit down with a document file or similar platform and write out each step of a process, even if it’s one they complete daily. On the other hand, if you allow them to use a more visual method to map out a workflow, they might be able to breeze through the task quickly.
The same concept applies to using more collaborative workflows. Some people just need another person to start the process, and then they can continue on their own once they get inspired.
It doesn’t matter what kind of processes you’re documenting or how your team best collaborates: you can find a software tool that will make the workflow management process much easier to carry out. Once you’ve been able to get the processes established and explained to relevant stakeholders, the software will make it easier to actually carry out those processes and fine-tune them in case there’s a need for improvement.
For example, suppose your team runs into a bottleneck with the approval phase of a process. In that case, the software will make it much easier for them to identify the areas they get stuck in and explain what is happening to impede their progress.
As accounting professionals, all of the individual tasks we complete on a day-to-day basis make up the fundamental identity of our business. As the poet Annie Dillard once wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” For accounting firms, how we handle our workflows is ultimately how we handle our business.
If you want to ensure that your workflows stay sharp and efficient, consider getting accounting practice management software like Mango set up in your firm. The right practice management software will let you tie together all kinds of process areas, from employee time tracking to engagement letters to payment collection, making workflow management much less of a challenge for a firm of any size.
Sponsored Content: This article is generously brought to you by one of our valued sponsors. Their support enables us to continue delivering expert insights and the latest industry trends to our dedicated community of accounting professionals.