As you improve the efficiency of your firm with an objective of growing your revenue, there's one key process you should be looking at above all others—client onboarding.

Your main objective should be to improve the processes that directly grow your top line—whether that leads to acquiring more clients and onboarding them quicker, or upselling to your current clients with greater success. If you can do this, you will see revenue faster.

If it currently takes you 45 days for client onboarding—to move a client from your first conversation to performing routine work—and you are acquiring 5 new clients a month on average, it means you will see revenue from none of these clients in the first month. By the end of the next month, 2 or 3 may have concluded their onboarding.

As this trend continues, the monthly recurring revenue (MRR) from your new client base will look something like this.

What if you could find a way to reduce the time it takes to onboard clients? Many progressive firms take less than 30 days, while the best in class are nearer to 15. If you can refine your process to onboard clients in this period of time, you will be serving the same number of clients, but realizing revenue from them much sooner. And your monthly recurring revenue would look quite different.

As shown in the two tables above, the difference in monthly recurring revenue is dramatic. If you are taking too long to onboard your clients, there is $27,900 in lost revenue. In reality, you are probably onboarding larger numbers of clients and have a much higher average revenue per client—meaning you could be missing out on significantly more growth to your top line than this example shows.

You do not make money onboarding clients, you make money on the recurring work and tax, so design your processes accordingly. The quicker you can move your clients through onboarding and into this ongoing work, the earlier you will realize revenue. You may want to consider how accounting client onboarding software