Fall is a season of change, when temperatures drop and the calendar year begins winding down. For accounting firms who work with government or public sector clients (and their contractors), fall is when the fiscal year ends and budgets are reset. Many of these organizations also have to submit forms and reports during this time period.
Whether your firm’s clients tend to become a lot busier in the fall or it’s a slower season for those same clients, this part of the year is an excellent opportunity to revisit important areas of your operations. Planning in the fall gives you plenty of time for implementation without running into the holiday burnout that often happens during winter.
Use the checklist below as a foundation for a review of your operations. For best results, add additional steps or skip unnecessary ones.
Technology for accounting firm operations has come quite a long way in recent years. Powerful software tools allow accounting professionals to automate lots of different elements of their work, from requests for client meetings to generating invoices for project fees.
For more traditional firms, automation can feel like a burden to implement. It’s true that you’ll need to invest some time upfront for automation with software, but it will be well worth it.
For example, maybe it takes you a couple of hours to get your new software up and running, but on the backend you save 8 hours a week, thus the time you spend configuring software settings for automation will quickly get repaid in the ensuing weeks and months. Your clients will also appreciate it when automation takes tasks off their plate!
All accounting firms have metrics and reports they look at frequently. Unfortunately, too many organizations focus excessively on their clients’ numbers while letting their firm’s metrics slip. You’re probably already looking at major numbers like sales, overhead and payroll, but we encourage you to also consider more sophisticated analytics. A few examples:
Average revenue per client: When was the last time you broke down your firm’s revenue and examined it from client to client? You might find that you’re spending tons of time on an account that’s not giving you a worthwhile return.
Close rate and time to close: These two connected sales metrics can do a great job of identifying bottlenecks or issues with your sales cycle. If your deals are taking too long to close or you aren’t winning enough of them, you may want to spend extra time looking into your sales processes.
Return on ad/marketing spend (ROAS or ROMS): This is a great metric to help you determine the success of your marketing and advertising spend. While it’s important to give these metrics some context—ads may not be as successful in the early stages, for example—you still want to be sure that you’re seeing some return for the time and capital you’ve invested in marketing and advertising.
Every firm has their standard daily processes that happen so often that most of the parties involved don’t think closely about how efficient they are. Think about something like filling out a timesheet or generating a formthat needs a client’s signature. While you might go through these workflows frequently, when was the last time you stopped to think about how well they’re working?
This is an area where it usually helps to have an outsider’s perspective—the people who actually carry out the workflow on a day-to-day basis are sometimes too close to give helpful feedback. Think about having someone on the sales team look at accounting workflows, for example.
Speaking of an outsider perspective, your accounting firm's operations probably involve more than one or two people. Don’t just rely on a few opinions of the firm leadership. Get others involved so you have the most well-rounded possible set of data. Seeing the full picture will help you make the most efficient decisions about your firm’s operations, including the impact it has on your clients. If you can, it’s helpful to speak directly to one of your clients to get some candid feedback about your firm’s level of service.
As you know, there are many different aspects involved in your internal operations, let alone client-facing activities like marketing and project management. If you use a different application for each individual task, it can lead to a significant amount of time lost on switching between different programs, updating them, and consolidating records from one application to the next.
Instead of adding this additional strain onto your team, think about implementing an accounting practice management software suite to help you knock out critical tasks across every department of your business. From project management to billing to payroll, the right software suite will streamline your firm’s operations and keep your performance at a satisfactory level to achieve all the goals you set for the fall season and beyond.
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