Using efficiency to grow your practice

There is more than one way to grow your practice—and efficiency is one of the most viable. The secret to running a more efficient accounting practice is constant process improvement. You need to explore every option to speed up the way every little task or job is executed. And never stop exploring and refining.

Aim for improvement in every small step, no matter how minor that improvement might initially seem. Think about the number of times each step will be repeated, each time the process it is part of is implemented—across different clients and periods. Even the smallest improvements, such as a few seconds eliminated from actioning each email, can add up to huge gains in overall efficiency. High frequency tasks with minor improvements will have dramatic increases.

Standardization is essential when you want to uncover where your processes are broken and what steps need to be optimized. When your team is following the same steps, you can compare and uncover where staff have innovated to make a process work for the client they are serving—perhaps that innovation can improve the process not only for that client, but across the whole practice.

When you have refined a process, look at technology options that provide additional improvements to that process. Don’t be afraid to look at any new app or to change your existing systems in order to improve your efficiency in the long run. Even if it takes two to three months for staff to get entirely comfortable with a new system, you need to consider the long-term benefit. Will the initial investment in cost and time onboarding and training be quickly overtaken by your long-term gains in efficiency?

Change is inevitable in this profession—if you embrace new solutions and manage that change effectively, you can give your efficiency the leg-up it needs. It is essential if you want to grow your accounting practice without increasing the size of your team.

Rewarding your efficiency gains

If you charge by the hour, you will gain a lot less from improving your efficiencies—in fact, you run the risk of being penalized. You need to justify to your client the time you spend on a project, so one hour you cut down from a process is one hour less that your client will pay you. Along with this, you need to spend valuable time writing down, chasing and communicating bills to your clients. This is an outdated model that isn’t suited to accounting today.