Do you need to hire? Or are your accounting firm’s processes inefficient?
Andi Ancheta
SVP of Customer, Karbon
Picture this: your accounting team is swamped and completely overrun by projects and client requests. They’re putting in additional hours, just to keep up. This is a perfectly understandable scenario during tax season—accounting practices are busy businesses. Naturally, you’d consider hiring additional staff members to address this problem.
But what if your team was overrun not because there was too much work, but because they were performing common tasks inefficiently, simply because they don’t know any better? If that’s the case and you hire someone else, you’re not solving the problem—you’re feeding it.
What if, instead of throwing more bodies at the problem, you took a step back and assessed how your team performs their day-to-day tasks at a high level?
Doing so will help you uncover:
If your processes are being performed consistently, or differently depending on who is performing them and when
The reasons why they are being performed inconsistently
Bottlenecks and double ups that are resulting in delays and/ or confusion, causing your team to find hacky workaround solutions
If your tech is used incorrectly, inefficiently, or not at all
From this high-level assessment, chances are you will identify the need to refine, standardize and document your firm’s processes. That is, taking each workflow, task and procedure that your firm performs, refining it into consistent steps, and then documenting these steps in a way that makes sense to your team.
As a result of standardizing and documenting your processes, your firm (and clients) will benefit from leading-firm indicators, like
Increased productivity and efficiency
Boosted top line
Team alignment
Scalability
Visibility across processes
Consistent client experiences
Recommended reading: The difference between firms that focus on their processes vs. those that don't
And, perhaps most importantly, standardizing and documenting your processes provides you with a clearer understanding of your firm’s capacity.
With an increase in productivity and efficiency as a result of your refined processes, maybe you don’t need to hire that extra body after all.
For a complete step-by-step guide to assessing and then standardizing and documenting your processes, download The Process Playbook.
This guide explains all you need to know about better-understanding your recruitment strategy based on your team’s performance, all in a simple, digestible, and human way.