Why Accounting Needs a Better Metric for Success

I saw a post from an accountant recently that stopped me mid-scroll. “My team spent X hours helping clients this year.” It was intended as a win, a celebration, and a testament to dedication, sacrifice, and hard work. Yet, instead of feeling impressed, I felt uneasy. Not because the work didn’t matter or the clients weren’t helped, but I felt uneasy because the metric itself told a more troubling story.

It reminded me how deeply our profession still equates value with time spent. Hours worked were being offered as evidence of success. But to me, it sounded less like a victory and more like an admission that we’re still measuring ourselves by exhaustion.

In a field that’s already struggling with burnout, staffing shortages, and rising expectations, celebrating how much time we’ve poured out feels dangerously close to celebrating how much we’ve depleted ourselves.

The day I let go of the clock

Years ago, I made a decision that felt almost rebellious at the time. I stopped tracking my time. It wasn’t because I didn’t care about profitability, accountability, or delivering quality work. I cared deeply about all of those things, but time tracking had slowly shifted from being a tool to being a tether. It dictated how I thought about my work, my worth, and even my pace throughout the day.

Every task was filtered through questions I hadn’t consciously chosen. Is this billable? Is this worth the time? Am I spending too long on this?

What surprised me most was what happened next. When I stopped obsessing over the clock, I actually gained time. I had more mental space to think clearly, more energy to build better systems, and more capacity to solve problems at the root instead of repeatedly billing for the same symptoms.

Ironically, the work became more valuable when I stopped counting every minute.

The lie we’ve been taught about value

Somewhere along the way, accounting learned the wrong lesson about value. We were taught:

• If something took longer, it must have been harder.
• If it was harder, it must have been more valuable.
• If it was valuable, it must be billable.

That logic shaped everything from firm culture to pricing models to how accountants judge their own worth. But it’s deeply flawed. Hours worked are not a victory, but they’re a cost.

No client is hoping their accountant spent more time on their books. No business owner lies awake at night wishing their reconciliation took longer or their tax return was more complex. Clients want clarity, confidence and fewer surprises. They value problems solved quickly, systems that prevent errors and the gift of time back in their business and their life.

What we should be measuring instead

The metrics we celebrate matter. Metrics don’t just track performance; they teach behavior and signal what success looks like.

Imagine if, instead of bragging about hours logged, we talked about:

• hours saved
• automations that gave teams their evenings back
• standardized processes that reduced rework
• documentation that eliminated repeated questions
• clean systems that prevented recurring cleanup

Those are the stories that signal leadership and the outcomes that reflect mastery. They’re the metrics of a profession evolving beyond survival mode. Time spent is internal pain and time saved is an external value.

3 actions for better success metrics

This kind of change doesn’t require tearing everything down. It starts with small, intentional steps.

1. Replace just one hour-based metric with an outcome-based one.

Measure cycle time, error reduction, and how many manual touchpoints were eliminated. What you measure teaches your team what matters, even when you don’t say it out loud.

2. When something takes too long, resist the instinct to look for a person to blame.

Look for the process instead. Time loss almost always points to broken systems, unclear handoffs, or reliance on memory rather than documentation. Fixing processes creates capacity without burning people out.

3. Tell a different story publicly.

The way we talk about our work trains clients and peers how to value it. Lead with outcomes, efficiency, and time saved rather than effort expended. When we change the narrative, we change expectations.

The courage to redefine success

Tracking hours feels safe, and it’s familiar. It’s how many of us were trained, and it gives the illusion of control and fairness. However, safety and progress are not the same thing.

Standing up as a profession means questioning what we’ve normalized. It means admitting that burnout is not dedication and that being busy is not the same as being effective. Long hours are often a signal of broken systems and not heroic effort.

Redefining success takes courage because it asks us to let go of a metric that once protected us. But it also opens the door to something better.

The metric that matters now

When I stopped tracking time, I became intentional, not careless.

Intentional about systems, automation, outcomes, and most importantly, about what kind of professional and human I wanted to be.

Accounting doesn’t need to prove its value through exhaustion. We prove it by how much time we give back to our clients, our teams, and ourselves.

Let’s stop celebrating the hours we burn and start celebrating the time we save.